Teenagers and Chatroom Relationships: Trust Building & Maintenance (Draft Proposal) Lois Ann Scheidt L701 December 7, 2000 1. Introduction Many adolescents today cannot remember a time when the Internet was not a part of their world: at school or at home, for homework or for recreation. One part of that world includes synchronous on-line discussions, popularly known as Chatrooms. A search for “teen chatrooms” (Google, October 19, 2000), found 6,050 appropriate sites that identified themselves as being primarily or exclusively for adolescents. These sites range from general chat to specific topics such as eating disorders, religion, music, fashion, and celebrities. These sites allow teens to meet, become friends, seek information or receive reassurance, and even begin “on-line dating”. However, the study of adolescents in chatroom environments is lacking. 2. Statement of the Problem Rosson (1999), in her study of 133 stories of Web use contributed by users over a 40 months, points out that while the use of the WWW has expanded enormously over recent years we still know very little about what users wish to accomplish in this new medium. Even less is known about the goals and activities of adolescents on the WWW. Adolescents express themselves and meet new people at Chatropolis http://www.chatropolis.com , a major Internet chatroom site. Chatropolis is a frames based chatroom interface, which supports GMUKS (graphical multi-user konversations) (Suler, 1999). GMUKS create a unique graphical social environment, rather then being purely text-based as Donath, Karahalios, Viégas (1999) discuss in their review of the design of graphical interfaces. People are able to express their identity visually through graphics and movie clips, as well as with the written word. The multimedia characteristics add a visual dimension that allows users to create the illusion of movement, space, and individuality. The result is a whole new realm for self-expression and social interaction with subtleties and complexities not seen in text-only chatrooms (Suler, 1999). In Chatropolis, GMUKS technology is manifested by the optional use of multi-media avatars 1 and HTML postings 2 . 1 Multi-media avatars allow users to express their personalities through pictures using standard jpg/gif format or through animated gif files. Teen avatars are often pictures of 1 of 17