IMing in Teen Fiction

This book came out several years ago--the first young adult novel written entirely in Instant Messaging-style (IM)--and I didn't like it the first time I read it. It wasn't hard for me to read, since I've spent some time in chat rooms and know what most of the chat lingo means (e.g., "ttyl" means "talk to you later") (at least, I knew the lingo in this book). But I didn't like the story--3 teen girls are best friends and are starting their 10th grade year in high school together. They promise to always be friends and not let the pettiness of cliques and gossip and all the other crap that goes along with high school social dynamics get in the way of their friendship. But, as things tend to go, their friendship is tested in big ways.

Author Lauren Myracle writes at the end of the book that in TTYL she wanted to debunk the myth that high school friendships don't or can't last, and she does do that.

I guess I didn't like the story because it seemed so traditional considering the new medium in which it's couched. I figured if Myracle was going to push the boundaries of fiction (she says in a Cynsations interview that she really had to re-think conventional fiction to make the story work in this format), then p-u-s-h the boundaries and write a really radical story. One where, oh, I don't know, teenage girls think about things other than boys, what to wear, and what others think about them. With this (for me) cliched story, I felt like the IMing was just a gimmick, an appropriation of teen culture to tell a cliched teen story, to hook teens in with flash and flare only to give them fizzled-out fiction.

But I recently re-read the book because I'm teaching it in my summer "Digital YAL" class. One objective of the class is to get beginning English teachers to think about what teens' migration to the digital world means--why teens go online, what they do there--and how these technological changes effect how we understand communication (e.g., reading/writing, "texts") and today's teens.

Upon my 2nd reading of the book, I realized that TTYL really does comment on teens' (especially teen girls') uses of the Internet, specifically IM, and for this reason, it makes an interesting commentary on teen culture in the digital age. These are some things I'll highlight when we discuss the book in class:

• Many Internet & digital literacy scholars say that contrary to popular belief, teens go online to talk to people they already know. They also go online to maintain their friendships and social lives, create and negotiate identities, and police peer behavior. All of this happens in TTYL; it's why the girls go online. But teen girls have always done this, haven't they? Maybe this is Myracle's point--that just because the technology is new, teens are using it to do the same things they've always done. They now just have faster, more public tools to do it with.
• Cynthia Lewis and Bettina Fabos have researched adolescents' use of IM in their daily lives and say that these youths viewed their IM sessions not as individual, separate exchanges, but as "larger, entwined narratives." The IM dialogue relied on knowledge of and participation within an offline network of friends. Again, I think TTYL exemplifies this--the story told in the chat medium isn't the only story--the chat story comments on other things that happen in the girls' lives. It's a back-and-forth between f2f life where things happen and virtual life where the girls talk about what happened in f2f life--kind of like a de-briefing, or as Myracle says, "post-op." As Lewis & Fabos explain, we need to rethink the offline/online binary, as the techno-space and offline spaces are more entertwined than we think.
• Some technology gurus say the Internet has become the 21st century mall or arcade--the 21st century teen hang-out. They do "hang-out" online, but in the age of the Internet they can stay connected at all hours, even when the parents have said "go to bed," or "stay off the phone," etc. As I've read somewhere, teens are now the "overconnecteds." A good or bad thing? Who knows...
• Also obvious in the book is how linguistically versatile the girls are--they create new words and "play" with language in ways we don't typically see in school-related writing tasks. Also, they literally are bilingual in ways many adults aren't, as they know a sophisticated language (chat language) and its linguistic rules. And unlike what we tend to hear (especially from angry English teachers) they know the difference between chat language and Standard English. They know there are different audiences for different kinds of writing.
• Again, Lewis & Fabos encourage us as English teachers to celebrate the flexibility and versatility teens exhibit in their reading pracitices. Indeed, knowing how to read TTYL implies the reader is flexible and can read "across surfaces, genres, modes."
• Writing and speaking entertwined in IM medium--"voice" evoked through writing. Too easy distinctions between speech and writing break down in IM/chat medium.