Center. “Adults have to remember that this is how they communicate and that it’s thoroughly embedded. It’s like usand the telephone: blasé.”One intense parental issue — one suggesting a potential canyon as opposed to a gap — concerns what adults callrabid multitasking and children call normal life. In a recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 2,000 8- to 18-year-olds from across the nation answered questionnaires and kept media diaries. The study showed that, across theage spread, children spent an average of six-and-a-half leisure hours a day switching among computers, TV’s,movies, video games, books, iPods, cellphones and texting. Perhaps most significant, those 14 and older spentadditional hours on a social networking site, usually MySpace (crowded, wild, like a cyber spring break) or Facebook (graphically neater, mostly for students). These sites are like sprawling digital yearbooks, each pagecrammed with photos, text, videos and blogs. Only preapproved individuals (“friends”) are permitted to viewsomeone’s page and leave comments, as they might in a guest book. But it’s not instantaneously interactive.Instant messaging, the near synchronous backand- forth between computers, is still the fastest, most popular meansof communication. As AOL recently reported, 66 percent of Americans 13 to 21 now prefer it to e-mail.“Absolutely everyone, everywhere, I.M.’s,” 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. I.M. is the Main Thing. Really, Idon’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 3 a.m.”As parents drift off to the sound some quaintly call typing, their children are deep inside multiple conversationswith their “buddies,” pseudonymous pals listed vertically along one side of the screen. Pull a stealth P.O.S. (parentover 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 eachcharacter in “Peter and the Wolf” is represented by its own instrument.But over-40’s are unlikely to follow the speedfreak scroll of conversation. And as those online would argue, theywould 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 distinguishthemselves,” Mr. Abramson says. “We all know how impossible it is to get noticed in our society. It’s almost likeyou’ve got to graduate into life having a sponsor. So, think about it from, say, a middle-school perspective: to besuddenly 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 Ms. Fox: “You can talk to them without the problem of facial expressions. This is great withnew 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, evenif,” as she concedes, “that has a kind of questionable aspect, like you’re changing your personality and then whenyou see that person, uh, is it obvious you’ve been trying to impress them?”Ms. Cohen is quick to explain. “Of course you can be great in person. If we’re I.M.-ing with someone, then whenwe 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 bestronger and longer lasting than earlier bonds, it’s not too soon to assess the immediate impact of the digitalconnection.The good news first: The I.M. culture has given shy students who might ordinarily have spent four miserable yearsquasi-mute a chance to develop connections with classmates once deemed unapproachable. If friendships do not
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