It sounds like the name of a painting: Lone Adult Outside Teenager's Door, Knocking. Next to it let's hang a portrait of the other side: Teenager Sends Instant Messages Amid Aural Mess — the iTunes, the TV and the DVDs that form a wall of sound to camouflage whatever is being said into the mobile phone. In the film version, Teenager eventually opens door, stares at Adult. Then, with excruciating patience and a huge implied "duh!" Teenager explains that he/she is Talking. "To. My. Friends." From deep inside the room, an IM door, the sound effect signaling friends signing on or off, slams shut.
As they would explain if they had time, these teenagers, all members of Generation M (born circa 1980 to 2000), have hundreds more friends than you, the adult, had at their age, or ever. And without having to leave their rooms. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 87 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds, or 21 million children, are regularly online — 11 million at least once a day — and so the figures go for pages: 75 percent use instant messaging (82 percent of them by seventh grade) and 84 percent own mobile phones and iPods (in a hierarchy of cool colors) as well as laptops, BlackBerrys and other PDAs. Those who cannot afford them still manage to "get on" — at friends' houses, Internet cafes or libraries — and 78 percent use school computers to shop online or to check their e-mail.
For Gen M (that's "millennial," according to sociologists, not "media"), to be "on" with your friends is a birthright. Many first played with computers in preschool, installed (then explained) the family TiVo at age nine and opened AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM, accounts at 10. "It started in a baby way in second grade," explains Laurice Fox, 16, a junior at Brooklyn Friends, a private preparatory school. "We all e-mailed because that's when AOL first introduced AIM. Even if the computer was in the family room, and we were discussing play dates, we were there at the start!"
Bobby Abramson, a senior at the Dalton School on Manhattan's Upper East Side, recalls watching his father surf the Internet "way back in the early 1990s, long before anyone else, and so it had this kind of magical quality." He adds, "I still remember picking up the phone and trying to talk to the modem."
In touch yet out of touch
Now, as they move through high school, college and beyond, the generation's seemingly obsessive need to connect has inspired concern and debate among many adults. To summarize: What are the psychological implications of simultaneously talking to 50 of one's forever best friends, who are not actually present? Are teenagers likely to misinterpret the nature of these best-friendships? As Abramson, a 17-year-old who has "studied the societal implications of the Internet" since age 10, puts it: "There's the issue of removal. Online engagement is not a viable substitute for a functional in-person social life."
And then comes the somewhat hysterical litany of issues: stalkers, cyberbullies, iPod-induced deafness, alleged attention deficit disorder and the fact that these children really don't know anyone's phone number.
Nora Delighter, 14, a freshman at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, performs an exasperated eye roll, then, deadpan, says: "It's not like we're robot people who live in a fantasy world. Everyone, even us, has to leave their room. Because we go to school. Where we talk to other humans and get a sense of what they're really like."
To ask average 14- or even 20-year-olds about the nature of their online lives is to invite such sardonic comebacks, as if to confirm the emergence of an all-new generation gap, with most 40-pluses earnestly but hopelessly stuck on the far side.
"For these kids, IM is unquestionably their primary mode of social interaction," says Sandra Calvert, chairwoman of the psychology department at Georgetown University and director of the Children's Digital Media Center. "Adults have to remember that this is how they communicate and that it's thoroughly embedded. It's like us and the telephone: blase."
Instant messaging, the near synchronous back-and-forth between computers, is still the fastest, most popular means of communication. As AOL recently reported, 66 percent of Americans 13 to 21 now prefer it to e-mail. "Absolutely everyone, everywhere, IMs," says Julia Marani, 14, a freshman at Marymount School in Manhattan. "E-mail is slower, more the thing you'd use to write your parents or a teacher. IM is the Main Thing. Really, I don't see how you could avoid it, even if you wanted to. And it is addictive. You can mean to go on 15 minutes, look up and see it's 3am."
As parents drift off to the sound some quaintly call typing, their children are deep inside multiple conversations with their "buddies," pseudonymous pals listed vertically along one side of the screen. Pull a stealth POS (parent over shoulder) and you might catch a few screen alter egos — for instance, shebiscuit, kickflip10, latteladie, talkinghead88, Jesusraves, each with individualized sign-on sounds, audio cues reminiscent of the way each character in Peter and the Wolf is represented by its own instrument.
But over-40s are unlikely to follow the speed-freak scroll of conversation. And as those online would argue, they would also miss the point — miss just what it means to keep up with all those friends, all at once.
Beyond the mundane — homework help, gossip, plan making, "Please sign my petition!" — instant messaging "provides precisely what it is teens need most: constant affirmation, lots of attention and the desire to distinguish themselves," Abramson says. "We all know how impossible it is to get noticed in our society. It's almost like you've got to graduate into life having a sponsor. So, think about it from, say, a middle-school perspective: to be suddenly talking to eight people at once — that's a huge psychological boost!"
Jessica Cohen, a sophomore at Bay Shore Senior High School on Long Island, sums up the exponential rewards: "You talk to everyone you know from school and camp and then their friends, and so you're going beyond your core group to cross-pollinate and suddenly you are talking to, like, 200 people!"
Most important, says Fox: "You can talk to them without the problem of facial expressions. This is great with new girls who might judge your appearance. It also covers those gaps with boys. You can be so much bolder online, and I don't have to worry about being so witty or unique. It's controllable; you have time to craft an answer, even if," as she concedes, "that has a kind of questionable aspect, like you're changing your personality and then when you see that person, uh, is it obvious you've been trying to impress them?"
Cohen is quick to explain. "Of course you can be great in person. If we're IM-ing with someone, then when we see them, the contact's enhanced, not stilted. We're stronger socially. It's not like you've forgotten how to speak English; you've just spoken very carefully selected English."
While it's about a decade too soon to know with certainty how these friendships will evolve, whether they will be stronger and longer lasting than earlier bonds, it's not too soon to assess the immediate impact of the digital connection.
All day and all of the night
The good news first: The IM culture has given shy students who might ordinarily have spent four miserable years quasi-mute a chance to develop connections with classmates once deemed unapproachable. If friendships do not follow, at least there's the basis for a hello in the hallway. "Even if there's still the social hierarchy," Marani says, "at least it's more flexible. IM, MySpace, that's where our friendships start, and who knows how they'll develop." Cohen adds, "Think about on a college campus, where it's thousands of kids, you know that could be pretty powerful."
The list of more practical advantages runs as long as the average buddy list. 1) Online, you can meet and swap photos with your camp bunkmates or prospective college roommates. 2) You no longer veg out watching TV, instead TiVo-ing the few things you might want in the background while doing homework. 3) If someone seems to be in trouble, there are no longer just one or two good friends to the rescue but hundreds who send support via e-mail messages, instant messages and text messages. 4) Students study together online. Then the day of the test, those who take it earlier pass the topics covered — if not the answers — to those who take the class later. (All this via texting from a bathroom stall.)
All of this leads to yet another question: Where do they get the time? Many students these days get home from school only after club meetings, sports events and play rehearsals. Factoring in dinner and unavoidable discussion with parents, that would seemingly leave time only for homework. Most, though, claim to spend upward of three hours online, pausing to do homework or doing both simultaneously. None of the students interviewed for this article said their grades had dropped because of their computer habits, and they could not think of anybody else's that had, either.
Some New York City teachers report a renewed rigor in study hall, where students work against the clock to finish their night's assignments. Students say they use every possible minute to chip away at extra work. (A small sign of the times: Some lockers are not decorated as intensely as in years past. There's no time, and many students save their best design impulses for MySpace or Facebook pages.)
Still, there is a lot of work to be done at home, and often it is done after midnight. Members of Generation M do not seem to sleep as much as their boomer parents did. If some of those parents once carried Visine to hide telltale marijuana eyes, their offspring use it to suggest they were not, in fact, up at 4am resolving 12 best-friend conflicts and 10 geometric proofs (at the same time).
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