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My Dinner with Daniele

 As the last days of summer wound down, I was not seeing much of my
daughter Daniele. After some years of languishing socially, she
suddenly found herself at the center of a moveable feast of friends.
They seemed to spend every day with one another, biking and hiking
around the city, catching matinees, sleeping over at one another's
houses, and talking on the phone.

And laughing. I have never heard so much laughing in my whole life.

So the two of us were out celebrating her 14th birthday, and I asked
her why this summer was the summer of a lifetime.

She shrugged. "It was the chat room."

"The chat room?" I knew her class had a place online where they met
and gabbed, but I never thought of it as pivotal. 

A chat room, in case you're not a kid, is a Web-based bulletin board
system that allows you to trade one-liners with others who know about
the board. They can answer you in real time, or later, when they log
on and see your remarks. 

They seem like very silly places, to outsiders. But to regulars, they
are very fun and highly addictive.

"Sure. People I didn't think I maybe had much in common with during
the school year, online we found we had lots in common."

I asked her why she supposed that was. She said she didn't know.

Then I remembered my own BBSing. I have been logging onto the same two
mom 'n' pop bulletin boards for upwards of thirteen years. I know
exactly how much fun it is to communicate online, with neither a body
nor a face -- just mind to mind. You quickly achieve a level of
comfort that in some ways surpasses relationships in the regular
world. People don't judge you by your color or accent or hairdo or
number of tattoos. You're -- you.

Daniele, a certified nonconformist -- or is that an oxymoron? -- was
able to find a group of likeminded girls because of the freedom and
fun of online chat.

This information is especially valuable to me, because my son Jon, 10,
has just discovered he will not be sharing homeroom with some of his
favorite friends, as hoped. So his school year looms as a time of
prospective misery. 

If you don't have a kid in school these days, you need to know that
many kids go through the system tethered to best friends. Perhaps to
provide a measure of security in our fast-changing world, kids form
long-term friendships that are almost like marriages. Then they lean
on those relationships until they wear them out. Why? Because they
seem safe, and other kids seem sort of scary.

But this chat room idea has the potential to bypass the scariness.
That's what Daniele found, and maybe the same thing will work for Jon.
So I visited a Web site called BeSeen, at
http://www.beseen.com/chat/freechat.html, and within five minutes
created a chat room just for Jon's fifth grade class. It's a vehicle
for G-rated banner advertisements, but it's free.

My idea is to have Jon pass out a note to all the fifth graders at his
school inviting them to use the chat room as a kind of electronic
homeroom: a place to meet online, away from school and away from
parents, and chew the fat. Or whatever kids today call that.

Chat rooms have their downside. Being 24-hour affairs, they are
unsupervisable. If a bully, vulgarian, or other category of lamer
decides to camp out on it, you pretty much have to tolerate him, or
her. And they mop of hours of time. Many nights this summer, Daniele
was up till the wee-wee hours, gossiping. 

But it's so much fun, and the extreme alternative is going through
school feeling to shy to peep. 

I asked her what she thought about the coming explosion of bandwidth,
that will allow online videoconferencing. Everyone will be able to see
your hair, your braces, the pimple on your nose. 

She didn't like that. We both agreed that what drives the chat rooms
is anonymity. Your friends quickly figure out who you are behind your
phony handle, but the handle is still critical. It's a mask that,
paradoxically, enables you to be yourself.

As bandwidth expands, look for new ways to be anonymous. Kids with
naturally curly hair may opt for the video image of themselves. Others
will create animations and video disguises to maintain the power of
the mask.

So all you parents out there who are worrying how your kids will do
socially this school year, check out BeSeen and create a chat area for
your kids' class. Or let your kid do it. It's easy, it's free, it's
reasonably safe, and it goes a long way to loosen the social
strictures that lead to loneliness, crummy self-esteem, depression and
worse.  

I'm not kidding -- do it.

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free
gift for visitors to http://www.skypoint.com/~mfinley. 

by Michael Finley
Copyright � 1998 by Michael Finley

For more stories about dogs, visit my website at:
 
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