By Max Van Kleek
"By Students, and FOR the students", shouts the About page
of technoteen.studentcenter.org. This web site, part of the larger
Student Center Network at www.studentcenter.org, tries to serve as
a portal to everything an American teenager would want; a chat service,
online games, a matchmaking service, forums for advice, jokes, sports,
poetry, movie and music reviews, and links to external resources for
advice on everything from homework to health. This site is not small-scale;
it features 40 sections linking off the mainpage, and hosts a a registered
user base of over 5,000 and a daily hit rate of several hundred users
per day. Yet despite the tremendous user base, and the potentially
tremendous influence this site might have on American teenagers, there
is not much intellectually stimulating content; instead, there are
endless resources on stereotypical teen issues, chat and advice forums.
By being made by teens and for teens, the site guarantees to its
audience that it will portray only teen viewpoints, and address only
teen interests. This site accomplishes the former well; its numerous
open, uncensored, unmoderated forums are bustling with contributions
and social activity. Unfortunately, though, in selecting topics for
features on the site, it seems to reach only the "least common
denominator" of teens' interests, rather than diversifying to
a variety of user interests, or trying to introduce teens to topics
or interests. As a result, the site is overly concentrated on "teen
themes", such as dating, sexuality, idols, gaming, and making
"cyberpals", but not much of anything else.
An exception are two of the most interesting parts of the site that
involve creative, personal expression: "Teen Diary" and
"Teen Poetry". The former allows users to pseudonymously
enter personal thoughts or problems that they wish to share with the
teen community. Each diary entry is accompanied with an uploadable
image, and a face indicating the writer's mood. While technically
not very different from a from a newsgroup-format, the diary-metaphor
seems to effectively encourage people to open up their lives to the
readers, who then act as counselors or critics. Even more rich is
the "Teen Poetry" section, where many users submit their
composed poetic pieces to a public bulletin board. The quality of
the submitted material is frequently higher than anything else on
the site, since most of the entries are actually in verse or composed
offline, and are less "chatty" than the diary entries. It
is a pity that more of the site is not of this quality.
Overall, the greatest weakness with the site is the lack of intellectually
or aesthetically stimulating, motivating, or entertaining content.
First, there are no interesting challenges, questions, or facts that
pique readers' curiosity. The "quizzes" and "questions
of the day" are irrelevant wastes of time. What is also interesting
is that for being a Teen hangout, the visual appearance of the whole
site is surprisingly humble -- not particularly cool. Most of the
forums -- except the diary and poetry ones discussed above --, are
unmoderated and fall into unfantastic conversations and many spiral
into mindless chat. At its current level, it is difficult to imagine
that any of the users would get anything out of most of the features
of the service, besides the passing companionship