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In the coming weeks, the first wave in a generation of teens unlike any
other will graduate from Silicon Valley high schools: The vast majority of
them will remember an adolescence lived to an astonishing degree on the
Internet.
These teens, some of whom have been online nearly a decade, are among
the Internet's first natives, at home in the wired world to a degree their
parents may never wholly understand.
A survey of more than 800 Silicon Valley children ages 10 to 17 and
their parents, conducted by the Mercury News in partnership with the Kaiser
Family Foundation, finds that the Net is a powerful and often ubiquitous
presence in school, at home and in the social lives of almost all. The
telephone survey, supplemented by interviews with more than five dozen
children and parents, paints a deep and multifaceted picture of a
generation growing up in a digital culture.
While the rest of the United States has made great strides to match the
valley's embrace of the Net, after 50 years of computer innovation, the
region remains a unique incubator for technology and its impact on society.
What these teens and preteens are doing today may play itself out in
classrooms and living rooms across the country in years to come.
Among the survey's key findings:
¬… Skills that just a few years ago were considered the
exclusive province of hard-core technophiles, such as building a Web site,
have become common and unremarkable for this generation.
¬… Instant messaging and chat rooms are staples of teen
communication, with half of all kids using IM or a chat room at least once
a week. At the extreme, one in four online said they rely on chat, instant
messaging or e-mail as the primary way to keep in touch with friends.
¬… Significant disparities in Net access and use persist
when it comes to the valley's poorest, least-educated and Latino
households, but those gaps have narrowed dramatically. This wired
generation has all but erased some of the most glaring imbalances.
¬… School has been the crucial factor in closing the
so-called ''digital divide.'' But while basic Net access at school has
become nearly universal, schools have not been able to deliver the quality
of access found at home -- and the advantages that go with it. Broad
disparities persist between those who have a computer at home and those who
can log on only at school.
NEW BREED OF GEEK
The tech-savvy enjoy
range of social activities
The image of the computer geek with a pocket protector hasn't entirely
vanished, but the survey found it's being eroded by ordinary kids who have
Internet smarts plus well-rounded lives outside the computer lab.
Sateja Parulekar, 16, a junior at San Jose's Presentation High School,
is part of this new breed of digital sophisticate. She is literate in
programming languages and applications. This summer, she will work in the
information-technology department at National Semiconductor, her father's
employer. She has switched her intended college major to computer science
from pre-law.
Fueled by the confidence that comes from being 16 and deeply
accomplished in tech, she said: ''If I still want to pursue law, I can
always go to law school after. I could always work for a software company,
maybe as a patent lawyer.''
Technology will be her future, but it is not the entirety of her present.
This summer she is going for her second-degree black belt in tae kwon do.
And there's piano. And hip-hop dance. And classical Indian music.
Right behind those like Sateja are the average Silicon Valley teens and
preteens who would never identify themselves as part of a tech elite, but
who have skills that would mark them as power users in any region where
digital culture is not so all-consuming.
Among those surveyed who said they had gone online (96 percent), nearly
half said they had created a Web page, written a computer program or
assembled a home computer network. Three in five had helped adults set up
or repair computers.
If there are lingering stereotypes attached to technical skill, the news
hasn't reached them. In the past few years, 17-year-old John Vu of Santa
Clara High has gotten progressively deeper into desktop publishing. As part
of a class project, he recently redesigned a course catalog for the
district's two high schools, adding photos and graphics.
To John, technology is just one unremarkable element within his
environment, where companies such as Intel and Sun Microsystems dominate
the hometown landscape. ''When you live in Santa Clara, tech is all around
you,'' he said. ''You can't help but pick it up.''
And younger boys and girls are embracing hand-to-mouse life earlier than
their older brothers and sisters. While just one in six kids ages 14 to 17
said they had gone online before age 10, one in two ages 10 to 13 said they
had.
Ten-year-old Esbeydy Corral, a fourth-grader at San Jose's Dahl
Elementary School, enjoys the Net but admits being ''freaked out'' by scary
stories of kids being abducted by people they met online.
Technology, Esbeydy said, is a regular part of the school scene, but
Internet access is another story. ''We have computers in our classroom and
in our lab, but our teacher doesn't let us go on the Internet,'' she said.
Her working knowledge of the Net has come mostly from family.
A SOCIAL COMMODITY
Many using the Net
to connect with friends
For many Silicon Valley teens and preteens, the Net's true value is
measured in social currency. The hours in front of the screen are spent
communicating with family and friends -- and some strangers.
With its urgency, fleeting nature and capacity to accommodate multiple
conversations simultaneously, instant messaging is the hot social
application for kids. Two-thirds of those online use it, the survey found,
while just 40 percent spend time in chat rooms or post to message boards.
Together, these social tools are ever present in the lives of many young
people.
Sixty-nine percent of those surveyed said they go online to use chat or
IM, and of those, one in four said they use them every day. Among the 38
percent who said they use chat or IM at least a few times a week,
two-thirds said they spent one to three hours per session. A few reported
spending more than 10 hours a day chatting.
While juggling multiple streams of IM conversation consumes hours for
many kids, it hasn't taken the place of the telephone or face-to-face
communication. Aside from in-person contact, 71 percent of online teens
said they preferred the phone for keeping in touch. Instant messaging was
the preferred medium for 18 percent, while just 7 percent said e-mail.
Girls are slightly more likely to use IM than boys are.
Monica Newman, a freshman at Branham High School in San Jose, is
maxed-out on IM. When the 14-year-old boots up the computer in her bedroom,
she usually finds dozens of her buddies logged onto IM. Her ''buddy list''
is at 200 screen names. ''That's the most you can have on a buddy list,''
Monica said. ''It's how I talk to my friends.''
There's a fair chance that at least a few of the people these kids chat
with aren't familiar faces at home. One in three teens and preteens
surveyed said they know some friends only online. One in four of those
surveyed said they have met someone online whom they wouldn't have
otherwise known.
Among Silicon Valley teens and preteens, there exists a hard-core 10
percent whose lives online revolve around the social networks they've built
there. These hypercommunicators use the Net from home, log on to chat every
day and rely on chat, IM or e-mail as the primary methods to keep in touch
with friends and family. They are predominantly high school students (71
percent are ages 14 to 17) from middle- to upper-income households.
Four in 10 of the hypercommunicators have met an online friend
face-to-face, compared with 10 percent of others who use e-mail, IM or
chat.
SHIFTING DIVIDE?
Quality could become
new access benchmark
The rest of the United States has caught up to Silicon Valley on key
measures such as home Internet access. But when it comes to the quality of
those home connections, the valley remains a separate reality.
Fifty-nine percent of those surveyed said they have multiple computers
at home, compared with 24 percent of households nationwide.
Nearly three in 10 said they have three or more computers, compared with
one in 10 nationally.
Those multiple machines and multiple users demand big, fast connections
to the Net. Almost half of the valley families with children 10 to 17 who
have a Net connection at home have DSL or cable modems, well ahead of the
31 percent of connected U.S. households with high-speed access.
The ability to do everything from downloading music to playing online
games to viewing full-motion video is increasingly predicated on high-speed
access, so concerns about a so-called ''digital divide'' may shift from the
question of basic access to discussions about the quality of that access.
The survey found that in valley households with Internet access, 62
percent of families earning $100,000 or more have broadband, but only 40
percent of families earning $50,000 to $100,000 do. White and Asian
households with Internet access were more than twice as likely as Hispanic
households to have a cable modem or DSL link.
LIVING UNPLUGGED
Children leading way
for poorer households
The belief that the Internet will play an important role in their
children's education and success later in life was widespread among parents
of all income levels, the survey found; 96 percent said the Net is
important to their children's education, and 94 percent believed it will be
important later in their lives.
''Right now, a lot of things are driven by computers, and in the future,
everything will be computers,'' said Danelia Lara, whose daughters, Danelia
and Nereyda, are using computers to work on biotechnology projects at
Andrew Hill High School in San Jose. ''It's all about advanced technology
for these kids.''
But household income and a parent's educational attainment are still
strong predictors of who is online at home.
The survey found that the poorest households in Silicon Valley remain
out of the loop in significant numbers.
Among families with children ages 10 to 17 and annual incomes of $30,000
to $49,999, one in three lacked Internet access. Among families earning
less than $30,000, nearly four in five lacked Internet access.
That sharp drop-off has been found across the country in households with
incomes under $30,000 and among people with less than a high school
diploma, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
''What you are seeing in the Silicon Valley, we are seeing throughout
the nation,'' said Jeff Cole, director of the Center for Communication Policy
at the University of California-Los Angeles. ''In five years the people
offline will be those who do not want it, and the very poor. Regarding that
hard-core 10 or 15 percent not online, some will never go online, and that
will change with the passing of generations.''
The Mercury News/Kaiser Family Foundation survey shows dramatically how
the children of poorer families have all but closed the gap in Net usage.
Far more parents with household incomes more than $100,000 use the Net than
do parents with incomes less than $50,000 (98 percent to 53 percent). But
among their children, the gap narrows dramatically (99 percent to 90
percent).
The same trend can be seen in another group that has lagged in Internet
access: Hispanics. The survey found more than nine in 10 Asian and white
parents are online, while 45 percent of Hispanic parents are. (The number
of blacks in the survey was too small to make comparisons.) But again,
among children, 84 percent of Hispanics were online, just 14 percentage
points behind whites and 16 points behind Asians.
''My mom really wants to learn,'' said Danelia Lara, 18. ''I tried to
teach her how to use Microsoft Word and send e-mails, but she doesn't get
how you put information on the Internet.''
On the few occasions her mother has ventured online with help from her
children, it was to download recipes from Univision.com and read up on her
novelas, Spanish-language soap operas.
SCHOOLS SERVE AS PORTALS
Students make most
of limited Net access
The Clinton-era crusades to put schools online have been a resounding
success. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 99
percent of public schools have Internet access, up from 35 percent in 1994,
making them the provider of universal Net access for the nation's children.
The survey shows how schools in Silicon Valley serve as a crucial bridge
to the virtual world for Hispanic children and those from less-affluent
families. Yet access at school still leaves these kids at a disadvantage.
Among the 10- to 17-year-olds surveyed who go online, three in 10 from
households earning less than $50,000 said they relied on school for their
primary access to the Net, compared with one in six overall. One in three
Hispanic Net users said they mainly relied on school for access, compared
with one in 10 for whites and Asians. Hispanics also were twice as likely
to say they learned their Internet skills in school.
In contrast, only 1 percent of all surveyed said they depend on churches
and community technology centers -- the other solutions advocated in the
'90s -- for primary Net access.
''Students need to have access because this is really key for their
future,'' said Thien Nguyen, state and federal programs coordinator at
Andrew Hill High School. ''They talk about the three R's -- reading,
writing and arithmetic. Technology is really becoming the fourth thing
there.''
It's unlikely that even the most ardent wire-the-schools visionary from
the '90s could have predicted the degree to which children would come to
rely on the Net for schoolwork.
While many teachers continue to keep the Net at arm's length and treat
it as a supplemental tool, 45 percent of the Silicon Valley teens and
preteens consider the Internet to be the most important resource for
schoolwork -- and that rises to 57 percent of high school students ages 14
to 17.
Just one in five teens or preteens said libraries were their most
important tool for schoolwork.
The news from school is undeniably encouraging. The assumptions that
guided many of the Net-access efforts of the past half-dozen years have
been borne out -- but not necessarily in the classroom. Only 4 percent of
those who have access at school said they have Internet access at their
desks. Forty percent said they can log on elsewhere in their classrooms.
Two-thirds of those who go online at school do so in either a library or
computer lab.
That arrangement, with the Internet as a resource apart from the rest of
the school day, makes it unlikely the Net will ever become truly integrated
into the fabric of instruction.
The strings attached to school access, such as time limits, make it no
substitute for a computer at home. It is only at home that the computer
truly comes into its own as a tool for social networking.
Of the one in 10 kids who chat every day and said they rely on chat,
e-mail or instant messaging as the primary means to stay in touch with
family and friends, virtually all log on mainly from home.
The school-only user may get the benefits of the Net's vast library of information,
but the mercurial two-way nature of the medium and the time to explore and
experiment are reserved for those who can log on from home whenever they
please.
It's unlikely that children who rely on school for passage to the wired
world will ever truly live on the Net the way their more affluent
classmates do.
ABOUT THE MERCURY NEWS/KAISER FAMILY FOUNDATION SURVEY:
The survey is a joint project of the Mercury News and the Henry J. Kaiser
Family Foundation. Representatives of the Kaiser Family Foundation worked
with the Mercury News to develop the survey questionnaire and to analyze
the results. The Kaiser Family Foundation paid for the survey-related
expenses, and each organization bears sole responsibility for the work that
appears under its name.
A representative sample of 804 randomly selected children in Silicon
Valley ages 10 to 17 and their parents were interviewed by telephone
between Oct. 10 and Dec. 11. The interviews were conducted by Taylor Nelson
Sofres Intersearch of Horsham, Pa. The survey's margin of error is 4.3
percentage points overall. Sampling error is larger for subgroups, and
sampling error is only one of many potential sources of error in this or
any other survey.
The survey defined Silicon Valley as Santa Clara County and select
cities within Santa Cruz, San Mateo and Alameda counties.
The Kaiser Family Foundation is an independent, national health
philanthropy dedicated to providing information and analysis on health
issues to policymakers, the media and the public. It is not associated with
Kaiser Permanente or Kaiser Industries.
To view the survey results online go to:
KFF.org
''Growing Up Wired'' is a Mercury News/Kaiser Family Foundation survey
of more than 800 Silicon Valley residents ages 10 to 17 and their parents
and guardians. The results have been statistically weighted to provide a
represetative picture of the region's families.
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