Instant Messaging Creates Generation Gap
Teenagers text message, email and instant message like they were born to, which many were. Meanwhile some boomer’s don’t even realize that it exists.
Rome, 17, a high school senior in Morristown, N.J., spends more than two hours each day sending and receiving more than 100 instant messages — or “IM-ing.”
“I use it to ask questions about homework, make plans with people, keep up with my best friend in Texas and my sister in Connecticut,” she said. “It has all the advantages.”
The 51-year-old Wilson, a mechanic in Kutztown, Pa., prefers using e-mail and the telephone.
Instant messaging “is the worst of both worlds,” he said. “It manages to combine all the things I don’t like about each. I’m more or less a dinosaur. I use the Internet for things like buying car parts, reading celebrity gossip.”