October 31, 1997

By JASON CHERVOKAS & TOM WATSON

A Wired Generation
Comes of Age on the Net

y the time Clint Noble was born, the microprocessor was already a decade old and IBM had just launched its personal computer. By the time Clint was 10, Windows 3.0 was poised to take over the computing world and Tim Berners-Lee had just created the HTML code system that would make the World Wide Web possible.

It shouldn’t be surprising then, that at 16, Noble is a Web publisher — creator of HauntFox’s Home Page, a simple but deeply personal expression of Noble’s likes and dislikes, built around the metaphor of a family home (you can visit Clint’s room or the playroom or the attic, for example).

For teen-agers, the Net can fulfill a deep-seated psychological need. At a time in their lives when they’re trying to establish their own identities, the Net allows teen-agers to reinvent themselves, and Web publishing allows adolescents to broadcast their self-made identities to the world.

But what’s staggering about the explosion of teen-age activity on the Net is not that the Web is a great platform for adolescent angst but that an entire new generation of Americans is coming of age online. A generation of children who are utterly at home with computers and the networked universe is growing up now, and they don’t need metaphors like the virtual desktop to be able to deal with cyberspace.

This new generation has matter-of-factly embraced an entirely new set of social relationships.

What’s more, this new generation has matter-of-factly embraced an entirely new set of social relationships -- virtual ones that obliterate traditional social boundaries. It’s an internetworked generation that sometimes has closer relationships with distant friends than with those who are geographically close by.

“I’ve met quite a few people online,” said Noble, who added that most of his friends in his hometown, Maple Grove, Minn., aren’t as active on the Net as he is. Maple Grove Senior High School has Internet access, the 11th grader said, but students are only allowed to use it for school research. No serendipitous Webfinds for these teen-agers.

Even so, Clint’s home page includes a link to the page of a teen-age girl in Ontario whom Noble calls “my best friend,” a girl he met on the Net but has never met in person.

Of course, accidental Net meetings among teen-agers are just the tip of the iceberg for the internetworked generation. Pen-pal clubs, link sharing among the sites of virtual friends, Web rings and regularly scheduled get-togethers in chat rooms, particularly on the Webchat Broadcasting Service, are the norm.

This month FIND/SVP, an upstate New York research firm, released a report about children online. According to the report, title “Children on the Internet,” nearly 10 million teen-agers under 18 were active on the Internet and in the online universe this past summer. The actual figure cited in the report, 9.8 million, represents 14 percent of the total population of children in the United States. The study also found that 2.2 million children use America Online to access the Internet.

But the study remains suspect because it is based on interviews with the parents of more than 700 children, not with the children themselves. Naturally, the parents reported that the youngsters used the Net primarily for schoolwork. Yet surfing Web sites, lurking on teen chat sessions, and trading e-mail with teen-age surfers and Web publishers may in fact provide an anecdotal counterbalance to the official version of what children are up to on the Net. And the picture is fascinating.

Want a measure of how connected these teen-agers are? Check out the home page of Nikki Ann, a 13-year-old New Hampshire girl who withholds much of her personal data out of fear about predators prowling cyberspace.

At the bottom of her site, Nikki lists the following ways to reach or identify her: three e-mail addresses at two differnet ISPs, a Web pager address and chat identities for four different chat systems. Nikki has been a Web publisher, at her own initiative, since she was 10, first relying on templates and space provided by Kids Universe, later migrating to America Online, learning more complicated HTML coding tricks as part of an independent study science project for school. Although a regular chatroom visitor, she’s very careful about where she chats.

“I rarely go in chats at Yahoo, WBS and AOL due to the fact that I’ve found numorous creeps in these rooms,” Nikki said. “I've met some really interesting people from countries such as the Philippines, Canada, Colombia, Australia and lots more. I may have never met these people otherwise.”

Nikki is also a member of 14 Internet community clubs, informal groupings of like-minded children and adults who assemble at predetermined points in cyberspace to chat, to trade links and often to publish information like book reviews and essays of interest to the community.

Typical of these communities is GIRL, which stands for Girls Internationally wRiting Letters. A self-described “international penpal club for girls ages 8-14,” GIRL is a combination discussion group and Web publishing community founded informally by Monika Bough, then a 12-year-old Web self-publisher.

The amount of money flowing into sites and online areas for children is increasing.

Members participate in the listserv discussion, contribute to a monthly newsletter and generally have a place to feel connected. The organization is run by a board of directors of young, teen-age girls but is supported, at least in part, by the World Kids Network, a nonprofit corporation in Washington State that has set up a volunteer program to provide Web tools and access to children.

In fact, the amount of educational and commercial money flowing into sites and online areas for children is increasing, as is the number of companies that provide free Web hosting and e-mail for youngsters who join the community spaces on which these publishers sell advertising.

But the true revolution among children on the Internet is coming not from the top down but from the bottom up — from children publishing for themselves and assembling their own communities.

Still, teen-agers sometimes have to convince their parents it’s a good idea.

Clint Noble says he spends a lot of time on Fridays working on his site — a fact that causes his parents anxiety. “They don’t like me spending too much time on it,” he admits.

DIGITAL NATION is published weekly, on Fridays. Click here for a list of links to other columns in the series.

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Related Sites
Following are links to the external Web sites mentioned in this article. These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability. When you have finished visiting any of these sites, you will be able to return to this page by clicking on your Web browser’s "Back" button or icon until this page reappears.

• Clint Noble’s Homepage

• Nikki’s World on the Web

• Kids of the Web

• GIRL

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Jason Chervokas & Tom Watson at nation@nytimes.com welcome your comments and suggestions.

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