Generation Raised With Internet Grows Up "

"Generation Raised With Internet Grows Up "

Young people are now the savviest of the tech-savvy, as likely to demand a speedy broadband connection as to download music onto an iPod, or upload digital photos to their Web logs.

The Internet has shaped the way they work, relax and even date. It's created a different notion of community for them and new avenues for expression that are, at best, liberating and fun - but that also can become a forum for pettiness and, occasionally, criminal exploitation.

More than any previous generation, today's young people are plugged in - all the time - with a world of communication and information at their fingertips.

Take Suhas Sridharan, whose introduction to the Web came as a sixth-grader in South Carolina. In those days, she regularly visited the Disney Web site to play games; by high school, she was researching assignments online and checking her e-mail daily.

"Now I think even my 'senior self' in high school would be surprised how much I use the Internet," says Sridharan, a 17-year-old freshman at Emory University in Atlanta, where the Web is woven into the framework of students' lives via a system called LearnLink.

Assignments are dispersed online. Students are much more likely to do research online than use the library. And even the proverbial class handout has gone the way of the Web, posted on electronic bulletin boards for downloading after class.

So when Emory's computer server went down for a few hours one evening this fall, you would've thought the world had come to an end. "A lot of people were at loose ends," Sridharan says. "They couldn't do their homework."

Of course, there is a dark side to having such broad access: It gives identity thieves and sexual predators a new place to look for victims.

Perhaps more common than those well-publicized dangers are the everyday dramas caused by online rumor-spreading. And it can get ugly, particularly when people post comments on their online profiles and Web logs, commonly known as blogs.

Jennifer Anello recalls the time a friend got drunk one Saturday night, called her ex-boyfriend and ended up arguing with him.
'The following Monday his profile had something to the effect of 'Can someone tell (my ex-girlfriend) how to hold her liquor and get her a shrink?'' says Anello, who's 24 and lives in Stamford, Conn.

Online rumors and innuendo cause angst among teens, too. 'Parents say, 'We never knew it would take on this velocity and ferocity,'' says Amanda Lenhart, another Pew researcher.
Andreea Johnson, a student at Central Michigan University and a regular Web user, says those bad experiences make some people, including the grandmother who raised her, wary of the Internet.
'Are you kidding? She would never get an e-mail account,' Johnson says, laughing. 'I think some older people still think of it as the devil - like it's kind of evil.