rough draft 1 (about 600 words)
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007A young boy, still not mature enough to be fully self-aware, sits behind his computer screen flirting with the idea that he’ll be able to find himself by talking with strangers in an online world, a world so unfamiliar than the one he’s been forced to live in by his parents. In his home life, he was never allowed to talk about his sexual feelings because they were not accepted as normal in his community, his church, and household. But with this new freedom, he was able to show his true colors and explore the possibilities and experiences that he’d been missing out on.
As he stretches his fingertips to the keyboard and signs into a chatroom, a message pops up. “Hi, my name’s dave. What’s yours?” Strangely excited by this interaction with this stranger, he types back. The boy and Dave start to have a conversation, but the conversation soon gets serious and quickly turns onto adult issues. The boy, struggling with his sexuality finds comfort in talking to this man about his sexuality, like he’s the only one who would understand what he’s going through. The time passes in what seems like minutes, but it’s really been 4 hours.
The boy signs off, but as soon as he gets a chance the next day he logs on. Dave’s there waiting for him, like he knew he was going to be there. Dave and the boy talked for 3 days straight about sexual things the boy would not be able to talk about with his friends and family. The two decide to meet. But the sad part of the story is that Dave just didn’t find an interest in just this one boy, he was a serial online predator, waiting for his next victim to come along.
Stories like this happen everyday. But what makes teens and adolescents, who know about the dangers of online sexual predators, decide to talk to and confide in strangers online and how are teens using the Internet to talk to these people.
There seem to be many different reasons why teens would talk to strangers online and not in their everyday lives. For instance a teen might be too shy to talk to someone in person, but they are comfortable enough to talk to him or her behind the safety of their computer screen. It seems that the top two motivations teems have for talking to strangers are to meet people with common interests and find someone who is willing to accept them for who they are.
It’s true that society has become more accepting of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals over the years, but a lot of homosexual people are logging on to chatrooms to find and meet people of the same sexual orientation. Over the past 10 years more and more homosexual teens are finding it easier to come out. They have found a space so come together over the Internet, one in particular called the “Queer Global Village.” This specific site, other sites, and chatrooms of the same type, are becoming a safe haven for teens in the gay community and more popular everyday. Here, homosexual teens and those coming to terms with their sexuality can come together in one place and talk about issues that they cannot seem to talk about with their friends and family members. It wasn’t until recently, in the past decade or so, that teens wouldn’t have to wait until they were old enough to go out to gay clubs to meet other homosexual and bisexual people. Now they can converge and converse with people with the same orientation without even leaving their bedrooms (Silberman).