The influence of chat rooms on teenagers

It could have been blamed on the Internet, when 12-year-old Shevaun Pennington disappeared from her home in England, to be with her 31-year-old ex-mariner, Internet online friend. This is one of the many instances when people who "meet" in the chat room, get persuaded to turn online friendships to meeting in real world, leading to possibly terrifying consequences. While the girl is safely back home with her parents now, it has become increasingly important, say technology analysts that parents are aware of what their children are doing online.

Internet is a system architecture that has revolutionized communications and method of commerce by allowing various computer networks around the world to interconnect. Sometimes referred to as a "network of networks", the Internet emerged in the United States in the 1970s but did not become visible to the general public until the early 1990s. By the beginning of 21st century approximately 360 million people, or roughly 6 per cent of the world’s population, estimated to have access to the Internet. It is widely assumed that at least half of the world’s population will have some form of Internet access by 2010 and that wireless access will play a growing role.

Some important development relating to Internet can be listed as below:

- In 1971, US computer engineer Ray Tomlinson created an e-mail program and modified it for ARPANET in 1972.

- In 1973, PLANET, ARPANET’s first chat system was created.

- In 1974, Bob Kahn and Vinton Cerf collaborated on a paper that first described a protocol and system architecture, the transmission control protocol (TCP).

- In 1982-87, Bob Kahn and Vinton Cerf helped to create TCP/IP, the common language of all Internet computers. The loose collection of networks that made up ARPANET was seen as "internet"

- In 1988, the corporation for National Research Initiatives received approval to conduct an experiment linking commercial e-mail services (MCI Mail) to the internet. In the same year Jarkko Oikarinen developed Internet relay chat (IRC).

- In 1993, American Federal legislation allowed national science foundation (NSF) to open the NSFNET backbone to commercial users.

And now at this start of 21st century here we are with increasing concern over adverse influence of chat rooms.

The internet provides a capability so powerful and general that it can be used for almost any purpose that depends on information, and it is accessible by every individual who connects to one of its constituent networks. It supports human communication via electronic mail (e-mail), "chat rooms", news groups and audio and video transmission and allows people to work collaboratively at many different locations. Many experts believe that the Internet will dramatically transform business as well as society.