It Takes a Lot of Patience and a Little Moxie to Navigate the Net : Computers: Going on-line can be like hacking your way through the jungle. But if you find the right guide, it can be an interesting trek.

I just got E-mail from someone named Moxie. He writes that he can’t pull up my .plan file. (A .plan file is kind of like a business card that anyone should be able to read on the Internet.)

One solution, he writes, is to “simply type: chmond ug+r $HOME/.plan” in the command line.

Simply?

Clearly Moxie, whoever he is, has a different view of complexity than me, and I am impressed. While I’m contemplating that, Moxie, who happens to be on-line on the same system I’m on, beeps me--indicating that he wants to “chat.” (“Chatting,” on-line, usually takes the form of two people typing at each other, in real time.)

We chat. Moxie is pleasant and articulate, which you can’t help but notice in a world that’s jammed full of science/engineer/don’t-read-literature types. Eventually, he helps me remove an electronic pebble from my virtual shoe. (The last line of text always gets cut off on my PowerBook when I’m reading news in Usenet. “Why, Moxie, why?” I type. He tells me to check the configuration file of my communications program. Of course!)

Moxie, clearly, is a valuable find. Sensing the opportunity to bag another brain for my source collection, I type, “What do you do for a living?”

“Are you sure you want to know?” Moxie types back.

“Of course I want to know,” I reply, thinking, what can be so bad? Is he a lawyer? A dentist?

“Well,” types Moxie, “I’m 13 years old and go to junior high school” on Long Island.

Thunk. That’s me passing out.

I feel like that guy in “The Crying Game.” All this time, I’ve been chatting with--no, getting educated by--a 13-year-old!

*

Now, I’m no age bigot or anything. I know teen-agers are important to . . . um . . . the economy, because they buy all those baggy, way-long shorts that droop below their knees. And, if it weren’t for 13-year-olds, there’d be no “Beavis and Butt-head,” no bar mitzvahs either. But still, I never imagined I’d be having a chat with one who was intellectually stimulating.

It was kind of an epiphany. It shouldn’t have been. It makes perfect sense that Moxie, whose real name is Mark Mentovai, is 13:

The Internet belongs to 13-year-olds; cyberspace is as much their world as mine. When you’re 13, life itself is still new, surprising and yet tough to navigate. Just like the Internet. A 13-year-old gets on-line and finds out he needs to learn a little Unix to get around the Net. Fine, he learns Unix. What else is he going to do? His taxes?

Just to be sure Moxie isn’t really, say, a 58-year-old legal secretary giving me the business, I do a little database work, finding out his real name, running his family’s name through a list of registered voters on Long Island. I find a telephone number for the family and call. A kid picks up the phone on the first ring. When he says, “Hello,” his voice cracks, and I think: (a) He really is 13 and (b) It’s great to be 37. Compared to 13, 37 is like being Cary Grant.

Moxie tells me he got his first computer for Christmas, four years ago. The modem came later, “for graduation from sixth grade last year.” Moxie explains his technique for getting the modem: “I bugged my parents. I had to bug them for a year. You know, every now and then, ‘Mom, can I have a modem?’ Or, ‘Dad, can you go out and ask Mom to get me a modem? Kevin’s getting one. . . .’ ” Kevin is Moxie’s friend. I don’t think he has a modem yet.

Moxie gets his modem, naturally; no parent could withstand his scorched-earth attack and he also gets an account on CompuServe, so he can correspond with an uncle in Connecticut. “We were both E-mailing each other and telling cool places we found.” It only whetted Moxie’s appetite. His mother, already worn down by the Modem War, launched a preemptive strike:

“For my 13th birthday this year, my mom made this booklet that said ‘Internet!’ on every single page, 20 pages of it. Finally, on the last page it said that I could research the local providers and find out which one would be cost-efficient, and subscribe,” Moxie says. “I like researching that stuff.” Moxie shocker.

*

At first, his parents showed the usual concern any parent might have about opening up their child to 25 million people. “My parents would look over my shoulder a lot, especially when I read E-mail. After a while, they got bored with it,” he says, noting that occasionally now, when they do angle in for a shoulder surf, he blocks their view. “Some stuff I don’t let them read because they shouldn’t read it,” he says.

“Like what?” I ask.

“Well, you probably shouldn’t know either,” he says.

Now, I know there’s lots of stuff on the Net that a 13-year-old kid shouldn’t be exposed to, at least until he’s say, 14, and, I’m all too aware of the hapless hysteria emanating from television news magazines about cyberperverts and all the rest, so I ask Moxie how he handles it.

“I don’t get into that stuff,” he says, referring to the many news groups that provide forums for adult discussions. He also practices safe computing. “My mom and dad warned me about 10,000 times: I never give out information about myself to people. My name is my limit.”

We talk about what it’s like being 13 years old on the Internet and how it’s fun to talk to adults who don’t have any preconceived notions of who you are (hmmmm, maybe they’re not really adults either?) and Moxie said that there are a lot of people out there like him. Thirteen years old, that is. In fact, he points me to a little-known Usenet group, called K12.chat.junior that exists solely for sixth- through eighth-graders.

*

Well, I’ve gone this far.

I check into the Usenet group to see what sixth- through eighth-graders talk about on-line. It was not a pretty sight.

“I’M BORED,” says one message’s subject line. “Key pal wanted!!!!!” say lots of others.

“Nothing happened today,” writes a person named Lisa. “A stupid grade-eight loser took my seat on the bus and of course the bus driver is too dumb to make a seating plan.”

“Hey dudes and dudettes! How’s it going? Just wanted to say hi,” someone else writes.

“I am in grade seven and turning 12 November 14th. I live in Alberta, Canada. I have a few fish, two dogs (Maltise Poodl), two turtles, one cat and one iguana,” writes a third.

I’m starting to get dizzy from the correspondence. There are more than 700 posts from the past week. One thing you see immediately is, the hype about how computers are geared for boys is ridiculous: Most of the people here are girls.

Someone named Fern, who apparently just got back from a vacation in Canada, asks: “One thing I did wonder (never stopped to see) is if McDonalds has Quarter Pounders or like .5 kilogrammers. Any Canadians know?”

A Canadian eighth-grader responds: “We have Quarter Pounders. . . . What’s a .5 kilogrammer??”

I can’t take any more of this. I need to talk to an adult. Wonder what Moxie’s up to.