Instant Messaging

Instant messaging, also known as IM, is an instantaneous textual communication technology that is free to anyone who has an Internet account and is able to download it. Primarily offered through large Internet service providers and computer conglomerates such as AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google, the instant messaging tool appears on a computer monitor looking like a box with a list of log-in names (a “buddy list”) and an indication of whether the person who uses the log-in is online and available to chat at the moment. Often, adolescents will hold several conversations with several different people at the same time.

With Internet usage growing steadily among the general population, adolescents in particular have seized upon the medium to play games, conduct research for homework, download music, shop, read news, and especially to socialize with other teens, both close friends and strangers, often controlling and managing an entire social world in doing so. Nearly nine out of ten American teens are now online, and 72% do so primarily to use instant messaging. The AOL/DMS study confirms that, if teens had to choose to give up one thing in their lives forever, 25% said they would miss instant messaging or emailing with friends and family the most.

Children and adolescents who use instant messaging often appear to employ a language of their own when conversing with one another. These may include simple abbreviations (gtg for “got to go,” brb for “be right back”) but also include playfulness with the language (holding down keys for emphasis, as in “pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease!”), reliance on visuals and multimedia (inserting photos of actresses, links to fun websites, or audio clips into their conversations) and often with adolescents, profanity (general swearing but also abbreviations such as wtf for “what the f—”). Adults who read IM conversations between children and adolescents often complain that they need a glossary to understand them, which, according to some teens and tweens, is the point. They view instant messaging as a space where they can carry on conversations and experiment with adult tones without parents and teachers actually hearing them.

Past computer-mediated communication research indicates that adults often “play” with identity, sometimes taking on a different gender or a more fantastical nature. However, most research on children and adolescents in instant messaging demonstrates that users often maintain an identity consistent with their real-world identities. Although they experimented with different tones, voices, and subject content among the different persons with whom they communicated, they generally adhered to a consistent presentation of self to acquaintances.

Online identity construction and negotiation appear to be major considerations in this communication process among adolescents. Negotiation is often located directly through the discourse of online communication—specifically, through language use, social networking, and power negotiation among peers, as well as general surveillance of the social online landscape. Identity may be articulated in various ways within instant messaging, including through the choice of a log-in name (such as sexysexygrrl or vball22) and the way users describe themselves in their public profile that is associated with their log-in names, but it also is constructed through the words and symbols users type and insert in any conversation. Often, instant messaging is a space where aggression is easy to act out without consequence—for example, bullying classmates or [Page 417]fighting with others with a barrage of mean messages, swearing—so an adolescent may construct him- or herself as tougher than in real life. It is also a space in which many experiment with sexuality, from small acts of flirting to planning and discussing actual sexual encounters with others. Sexual harassment also has found another venue within instant messaging. And even though those using IM are doing so without the trappings of a body and the preconceived notions of gender, patriarchal discourses that often pigeonhole boys into conversing in ways that they perceive as masculine and girls into taking on feminized roles in the conversation still seep into the online landscape.

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