“Teen Chat Decoder” – Come on!

Every once in a while I like to pick up a newspaper, and see what’s going on in the world, without the aid of the remote control our the mouse. Everything is ok, until I start to read some articles, written probably just to fill some more space. Those articles are, among others, the ones that go like “Find out what your children are typing on the Internet!” or “Secret codes of teenagers”. Those kind of articles are, in my opinion, beyond weak. They’re probably written by people who have nothing in common with chat environments (if they had, they’d know that chat programs aren’t used by teenagers alone).

This brings us to our story at hand. While browsing the other day, I stumbled upon this website. I swear, for a few minutes I couldn’t believe it was real. Its intentions are, no doubt, good, but the whole idea is wrong. Teenagers are seen there like a weird sect of some sort, and parents are advised, more or less, to keep their children away from chat rooms, to spy on them at all times and not let them have any privacy whatsoever. Also, there’s an “Acronym Dictionary” there, that lists many abbreviations which are said to be used by teenagers. But, after reading a bit and finding out that, for the millionth time somebody is explaining what ASL and LOL mean, I’ve found many acronyms that I’ve never heard of before, such as ASL (no, not the old ASL, but rather Assistant section leader), ASOP (Assistant system operator), ? (which means “Huh?”, but I seriously doubt that there are people who wouldn’t understand this), OK (this is, according to them, an “abbreviation of oll korrect (all correct)”. Come on. OK? Doesn’t everybody use this? – By the way, for your information guys, OK does not stand for Oll Korrect, I’ve heard several theories that are far more plausible than this. You could do better).

While I was done browsing through these “acronyms”, I went back to the homepage, to see a link. What was this link about? To quote their own add, “Does your child have a MySpace account? Want their password?” I only agree to this as far as parents ask the passwords directly from the children. But the link doesn’t go to an article advising parents to do so. No, it directs people to the download page of a program which logs all PC activity (as far as I know, these are called key-loggers).

From what I’ve seen on the rest of the website, it’s filled with articles such as “The dangers lurking in Internet chat rooms”, “MySpace.com dangers and what you can do as a parent”, “Teen Acronyms – a starter set”, and many others. I understand that some parents might be concerned, but this just takes it a bit far, from concerned to down right paranoid.

As a conclusion, I’d like to add a few things: I’m not at all saying that parents should let children do whatever they like, or that children don’t need any kind of supervision. All I’m saying is that parents should give their children some intimacy, and not be all that agressive in wanting to know everything a kid does. Because this will only lead to children not wanting to communicate with their parents, and the ‘so-called’ codes will spread (I’m talking here about the ones like “PAW – parents are watching”). The “codes” shown on the website are nothing but abbreviations, to make us type easier (and by ‘us’, I mean people from 13 to 80 years old), and not at all have our own language and try to be a secret society. Personally, I think that with good, open communication, parents will understand their children better and cheaper (as you don’t have to spend money on programs to monitor your child). Also, the website I’ve seen says that MySpace is a real danger to children. I’ve seen this when a deranged dude walked into a Canadian school carrying a gun, and people were outraged that he had an account to a website similar to MySpace, instead of being outraged that he had the guns!

I’m not at all against all cases of monitoring. If the child in question is not a teenager (younger than twelve, that is), then he shouldn’t be allowed to enter chat pages. This was the one thing I agreed. About the rest, come on, if the kid is up to something, you should know it from his behavior, not his PC.

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Posted in Internet by Andrei Maguleanu