Platform : Teens on the ‘Net: No Bombs, But Sometimes a Tidy Profit

Last week, three 13-year-olds in a Syracuse, N.Y., suburb were detained after their peers told police the trio planned to detonate a homemade bomb at their school using information they found on the Internet. We asked Southern California teens how easy it is to find this type of information on-line and how they spend time on the Web.

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BRIAN GOLDFARB

14, freshman, Canyon High School, Anaheim Hills

All the information those kids used from the Internet is available in public documents; it just takes people with a certain mentality to find it. You always run across things my parents might not like me to see, but you just leave. It’s not interesting.

At school, I am using the Internet to research the Russian Revolution for a history project. I just looked up Marxism using the Yahoo and Lycos search engines and found exactly what I needed. For fun, I use it for games. I used to use the Internet to talk to people, but that got old kind of quick. It’s also fun teaching my dad, who’s a lawyer, about the Internet because we spend time together and it’s nice to see him learn something new.

I am one of three lead members developing Canyon’s home page on the World Wide Web. It went on-line in September and has a calendar of events and team schedules, pictures and profiles. We’re also designing the Orange County Department of Education home page. And for the last three months, I’ve been an employee of Delta Services designing Web pages for businesses, which often means translating what they have in print to on-line. I’m self-taught; after working with professionals, it’s amazing how much I don’t know.

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CANDICE KIM

16, junior, Marlborough School for girls, Hancock Park

There is stuff like pornography and drug recipes and information about bombs on the Internet. It’s part of freedom of speech and you really can’t do anything about it. I think censorship is a greater evil. I’m more interested in how people create Web pages so I’m learning [programming languages] HTML, Java and Vrml.

At the library, you may go through a stack of books and not find what you need. But on the Internet, you always find what you need because of the keyword functions. Plus there’s the speed of it.

I use it to research Earth First, the radical environmental group, because it’s hard to find to find a lot of published material about them. One of the greatest things about the Internet is that you can actually e-mail the person who wrote the article and talk to them. It’s also really helpful for finding poetry and reviews. Every good band has its page and a lot of my friends like looking at pages of movie stars and their favorite TV shows.

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TERRY DAVIS

14, freshman, Inglewood High School

I’m not surprised those kids found information like that on the Internet because it’s easy to. There should be some kind of restrictions to make it harder for just anybody to push a couple buttons and get there. At school, I use a Pentium to work on the Small Satellite Technology Initiative,a NASA project that is letting my school build a computer map of our community with all the emergency services and preparedness information on it to give to police and fire departments in case of natural disaster. Once when we were at TRW as part of the project, I got on a chat room at Rutgers College; I’m from Jersey so it was like being home because they talk like I do.

On my lunch time or after school, I sometimes sign on and go to the Smithsonian. I call up sports pages, especially ESPN. I also like to download games; “Doom” is the big one now.

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KATHERINE KIDDE

13, eighth-grade, Polytechnic School, Pasadena

I’m good at surfing the Internet, but my parents trust me and know I wouldn’t go after objectionable information.

I just spent about an hour on-line researching the Harlem Renaissance for a history report. It’s a lot faster than using books and you get more specific information. l do computer art so I download a lot of painting programs. I also do games, especially “Doom.”

I love being able to talk to people across the country on e-mail, especially a couple people I met at Stanford swim camp. I go to chat rooms when I want to talk to a big group. I’ll go into a room, say for poets, and ask if there’s anyone there my age. The only thing that bugs me is that people lie on the Internet: You can see them change their story when they talk to different people in the chat rooms. It makes me still like to be with my [flesh and blood] friends.

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LETICIA VALLEJO

16, junior, Inglewood High School

We use e-mail to communicate with the two other schools in the NASA Small Satellite Technology Initiative project. I also like the Internet because you can travel without wasting money. My friend and I are studying French so we went on-line and visited the French embassy and Paris and all its monuments and even a rain forest. During lunch, we visit the home page of our favorite TV shows; mine is “The X Files.” I like getting a preview of the next show.

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ELI SELKIN

16, junior, Polytechnic School, Pasadena

I think objectionable information has diminished on the Internet in the last year. There used to be a lot of people who had those kinds things on the Internet but now I don’t see that much. It’s much harder to find so you really have to be looking for it.

I use the Internet to keep in touch with friends who are in college already in Chicago, Colorado and New York. There’s an Internet tool that lets you create a sound file so when people call up your message they can hear you talking. For fun, I visit my brother’s Web page at Amherst College in Massachusetts to keep up with what he’s doing. There are also game shows like “Chaos,” which is kind of similar to “Jeopardy” in that it asks you to name as many answers to a topic as you can think of in a certain amount of time and earn points. For school, there are Web sites that have encyclopedias, which are great for research. Internet relay chat allows me to find French history and practice my French.