Do teens really use IM to communicate or to hide?

An Associated Press survey recently revealed the real and perceived value of instant messaging, especially among teens.

The survey, conducted online from October 25 - November 5 showed why folks are really using Instant Messaging. Of 410 teens age 13-16 surveyed, 200 use instant messaging as a communications tool. But of the 836 adults surveyed, only about 167 say they use instant messaging. Adults were shown to prefer e-mail over IM. But what purpose does IM serve to teenagers that adults would not also need?

According to the study, it's not school work.

Forty-three percent of teens participating in the survey said they use instant messages to say things they would not say to each other in person. This may mean asking out prospective dates, breaking off relationships, or just generally voicing opinions that may be too awkward to say in person.

It can be said that the average teenager has more awkwardness to deal with on a daily basis than the average adult, so it may be no wonder that a communication tool capable of reducing the risk of embarrassment is popular among them. The visual cues that take place in ordinary communication are missing. Some are replaced with "emoticons," but little winking semicolons and right-carets can't take the place of rolling eyes, nervous ticks, body language, the look of excitement...the look of boredom.

And maybe because the bandwidth of communication is narrowed somewhat, that makes it easier for teens to say what's on their minds, if not what's always in their hearts.

Chronemics - the linguistic use of timing - is one of the qualities of language that instant messaging has altered. A face-to-face conversation is paced much faster than one over instant messaging, where "awkward silences" have all but disappeared. A witty IM'er could take as much as thirty seconds to flesh out the perfect reply. If this were done in a live conversation, "witty" would not be the appropriate adjective.

The removal of this non-verbal cue allows users to engage in several simultaneous conversations. This practice was shown to be more common among teens than adults.

This also may explain the minuscule number of people using streaming video and audio chat - only one fifth of total IM users polled said they utilize these functions. Audio and video chats simply allow too much non-verbal communication to take place, rendering it undesirable.

E-mail lacks these qualities as well, according to the study Straight Talk: Delivering Bad News through Electronic Communication. It states that people tend toward honesty and frankness in e-mail more so than in spoken conversation, just like IM. But the actual reasons for adults' preference of this medium lacks sufficient data with which to draw any conclusions.

Perhaps e-mail is just not something special to kids, many of whom began sending those old-style messages in elementary school. Adults who remember the days of rotary phones may just have more of an identity attached to their e-mail address.