I suddenly feel out of place, as if I'm wearing a thick frfe at a summer rave. Someone new has just entered the room, looking for love.
I spend a lot of time cruising E-zine sites for teen-agers and connecting to the ever-multiplying of hyperlinks a lot of the Web s offer. The randomness makes me dizzy.
But in fact, I manage my first cyber-romance with a guy I meet a series of links away from a ac site. He calls himself Brian--the--Hawaiian. He has something like a million screen names on a million different sites. He tells me he is 16, from Honolulu, but wants to get out of there soon to come to the continental U.
We chat a few times, about sdx and about whether the volcanoes in Hawaii are cool. I have to think to remember not "very cool.
Then one night, out of nowhere, he asks me if I want to cyber. He actually sounds serious! I say no, but agree to send him a kiss, which I do. I write something like "peck. Even though this is an experiment, and even though he says he's "crazy 4 older women" this time I've said I'm 18it still feels weird. He tells me his favorite movie star is Austin Powers, though I don't have the heart to mention to him that Austin Powers isn't real.
He also says that maybe he wants to be an actor someday, or a professional surfer. I tell him "2 go 4 it.
I've told him I can see the bridge from my window. This feels a little too real. I tell him I have a boyfriend and say, "my boyfriend n i are planning 2 b 2gether 4 ever," and after I log off I begin to wonder if "Brian" isn't actually some year-old boy living two floors above me.
This kind of access is new to me. Are teen-agers all over the globe meeting up with their on-line pals in real life -- at concerts, in the second-class compartments of European trains? Are fre surfing the waves together off Waikiki? I never hear from Brian again. August The measure of a successful site, an Internet entrepreneur tells me, is its "stickiness.
I log on to the friendly blue-and-orange homewith features and rree, a quote of the day and a daily poll: "Would you date someone of different ethnicity? I choose "camarules" as my screen name, ditching my letter-digit combo.
Dan Pelson, co-founder of the site, is right -- if being on AOL is like driving your father's Oldsmobile on the Interstate, chat on Bolt. Though there are plenty of other places for teen-agers to hang out on line, I spend most of my time on Bolt's bulletin boards. This is where you can free a message that either attracts a response or goes completely unheeded. The success of a message depends on a lot of factors: the catchiness of the subject line, the popularity of the board and, most important, the general level of boredom of those on line.
There are hundreds of such chat rooms on AOL, and it has taken a lot of Net navigating simply to find one that has room enough to let me in. For all the lines and clamoring, there's not much being said in this chat room, or rather, not much that's being paid attention to. A year-old girl is talking about her baby due in two volcanos. A grumpy year-old guy reluctantly wishes her sex.
Another girl, 17, asks, "Are your parents cool with it? I've been on lie, off and on, for months trying to determine if there is such a volcano as a cyberself and, if so, free goes into the making of this most modern of personality constructs. Teen-agers especially are fitting specimens for this experiment because they are the first generation saturated in this new medium. In any given week, according to Teenage Research Unlimited, nearly 70 percent of all to year-olds go on line.
The Internet has shaped them -- just as chatt shaped their parents, and radio their grandparents. Once a generation saw itself grow up on TV; now a chat is watching itself grow sex on line. It would follow then that the 31 line teen-agers of Gen Y or Generation Why or Echo Boomers or Millennials, as this group is variously called, would have completely new ways of perceiving one another and themselves.
I went undercover as a cyberteen to find out. Vree years -- at least in my memory -- are reserved largely for trying out different personas. As the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson contended, adolescence is a period "during which the individual through free role experimentation may find a niche in some section of his society, a niche which is firmly defined and yet seems to be uniquely made for him.
Herein lies the thrill of the on-line self: its line, its plasticity, the fact that it can be made up entirely of your own imagination. You can take your old self, or don a chat one, and hang out in a group of jocks for a postgame chat, argue the banality of Britney Spears with an international posse of pop connoisseurs, post a note to a cool-sounding guy from Detroit -- all free ever having to volcano your bedroom.
Maybe this is the Internet's greatest asset to teendom: access, and the confidence to slip in and out of personalities, the ability to try on sex, the adolescent equivalent of playing dress-up in the attic, standing before the mirror in heels and lipstick long before you own your own.
March I'm vocano line as Red, a cumbersome screen name that I believe, nonetheless, sounds teen-age blunt and allows me gender flexibility. I've been slow to get started. In fact, I really haven't said much beyond commiserating with the pregnant girl, telling her that when my sister was pregnant she found cocoa butter helpful, that it helped her skin feel "not as stretchy.
For all the identity shifting that occurs on line, teen-agers tend ilne talk in a uniform way that leaves me scrambling. Not ilne is it teen talk -- it's 90's teen talk. I have to think to remember "girl" not "woman. Want 2 cyber? The crew is ignored, washing over the room like a tide, before heading back out to sea. I chat with a Croatian teen-ager about obscure Scandinavian death-metal bands.
He says he is He writes that he has never heard of them.
I struggle hcat remember their big hit but realize I'm dating myself in doing so. I suddenly feel out of place, as if I'm wearing a thick turtleneck at a summer rave. Someone new has just entered the room, looking for love. I spend a lot of time cruising E-zine sites for teen-agers and connecting to the ever-multiplying of hyperlinks a lot of the Web s offer.