Wired-weary youth seek face time

Of course, these forms of communication continue to dominate. In the October issue of the journal Pediatrics, for instance, researchers at Stanford University released findings from an ongoing study of students at an upper-middle income high school in the San Francisco area. One written survey found that the large majority of students were members of at least one social networking site — 81 percent of them on MySpace. They also found that 89 percent of those students had cell phones, most of them with text and Web surfing capabilities.

They are more wired than ever — but they're also getting warier.

Increasingly, they've had to deal with online bullies, who are posting anything from unflattering photos to online threats.

Privacy issues also are hitting home, most recently when students discovered that personal updates on their Facebook pages were being automatically forwarded to contacts they didn't necessarily want to have the information. Facebook was forced to let users turn off the data stream after they rebelled.

Increasingly, young people also are realizing that things they post on their profiles can come back to haunt them when applying for school or jobs.

"Maybe everything we thought was so great wasn't as great as we thought," says Tina Wells, the 20-something CEO of Buzz Marketing, a New York-based firm with young advisers all over the world.

She is among those who wonder if, sometimes, simple face-to-face communication might work better.

In many instances, says 27-year-old Veronica Gross, it does.

"By and large, I would say most of my very geeky social circle prefers face-to-face interaction to mere Internet communication," says Gross, an avid online gamer who is also a doctoral student studying neuroscience at Boston University.

She sees faceless communication as a supplement to everyday interactions, not a replacement. This sentiment also was the conclusion of a study done by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The study, released earlier this year, found that Internet users tend to have a larger network of close and significant contacts — a median of 37 compared with 30 for nonusers.

Indeed, Steve Miller, a sophomore at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., says social networking can be an "extremely effective" way to publicize events to large groups — and even to help build a sense of community on campus.

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