Latest generation gap is huge: Instant messaging
By Will Lester
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Teenager Michelle Rome can't imagine life without instant messaging. Baby boomer Steve Wilson doesn't care that it even exists.
They're part of an "instant messaging gap" between teens and adults. And the chasm is wide, says an AP-AOL survey on how Americans use or snub those Internet bursts of gossip, happy date-making and teen tragedies that young people exchange by the hour while supposedly doing homework.
Rome, 17, a high school senior in Morristown, N.J., spends more than two hours a day sending and receiving more than 100 instant messages — or "IM-ing."
"I use it to ask questions about homework, make plans with people, keep up with my best friend in Texas and my sister in Connecticut," she said. "It has all the advantages."
The 51-year-old Wilson, a mechanic in Kutztown, Pa., prefers using e-mail and the telephone.
Instant messaging "is the worst of both worlds," he said. "It manages to combine all the things I don't like about each. I'm more or less a dinosaur. I use the Internet for things like buying car parts, reading celebrity gossip."
Almost half of teens, 48 percent of those ages 13 to 18, use instant messaging, according to the poll. That's more than twice the percentage of adults who use it.
According to the AP-AOL poll:
The bug can be contagious at any age.
Faith Laichter, a 50-year old elementary school teacher from Las Vegas, says she started using instant messaging after watching her children.
"I do it more now," she said, boasting: "Sometimes I do two conversations at once."
That's nothing for young people who check their e-mail, download music and perform other tasks at the same time.
"It's kind of remarkable to watch," said Steve Jones, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "They can keep half a dozen conversations or more going at the same time."
But that can be more of a distraction than an accomplishment, says Naomi Baron, an American University linguistics professor.
"If you have 15 conversations going simultaneously," she said, "sometimes you're just throwing things out there and then dashing off to the next customer."
A bow to the traditional: When sharing serious or confidential news, both teens and adults prefer to use the phone, the poll said.
Instant messaging technology has been available to the general public for about a decade. Time AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN are the major IM operators.
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