Tyger Tyger Burning Bright

The New York Times

December 1, 2006
Editorial
When the Joneses Can’t Keep Up

An article in yesterday’s Times about obstetricians who prefer working in Botox boutiques is a reminder that the growing gap between the rich and superrich has an impact on those of us who are neither. The article, by Natasha Singer, reported that family practitioners and emergency room physicians have also jumped over into the cosmetic treatment business because the money is so much better.

As The Times has noted in a series of recent articles, the very richest earners are increasing their earnings at twice the rate of their onetime peers, and the average-rich are taking resentful note. Investment bankers are jealous of hedge-fund wunderkinds and, from the sound of it, almost every last person in Silicon Valley is envious of the founders of YouTube (with the likely exception of the Google billionaires who bought their company).

It’s hard for people flying in coach to have much patience with those in first class bemoaning their lack of a personal jet. Neither policymakers nor society at large need sympathize with the longing of millionaires to become billionaires. But we do need to worry about the effects on society as a whole when members of the educated elite think they are grossly underpaid. The more they feel as if they are losing ground against their peers, the more likely they are to ditch professions in which the pay is only good — like delivering babies — in favor of less useful careers in which the compensation is off the charts — like eliminating lines from wealthy people’s foreheads.

America has long had a problem attracting enough well-trained people to important but not particularly well-compensated positions, like public defender, social worker or teacher. But an era in which a cancer researcher moves over into health-care management consulting because the pay is better — as Louis Uchitelle reported in The Times this week — is something else entirely.

Part of the explanation is undoubtedly a tax code that has sent the incomes of the wealthiest sliver of the nation into hyperdrive. Another might be the spike in education costs, which send many new doctors, lawyers and scientists out into the world armed with a diploma and a six-figure debt. But the bottom line seems to be that in 21st-century America, more people can’t feel successful unless they’re making a killing.

The New York Times

November 17, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
In the Pink No More
By JENNY PRICE

Los Angeles

ON Nov. 1, just two months shy of its 50th birthday, the plastic pink flamingo went extinct. Or more accurately, it stopped reproducing, when its manufacturer, Union Products, shut down the factory in Leominster, Mass.

That’s sad news, but hardly surprising. The flamingo’s glory days were behind it. Union Products cited the rising cost of plastic resins and of electricity, along with financing woes. Yet while the bird reigned as an icon in the late 20th century, it was bound to succumb to the very different tastes — or the absence thereof — in the 21st.

In 1957, the flamingo that would become lawn-art king was invented by a young Union Products designer with the fitting name of Don Featherstone. Sears sold the bird for $2.76 a pair: “Place in garden, lawn, to beautify landscape,” the 1957 catalog read. Working-class homeowners readily planted it on their modest lawns — a nod to the marble or bronze sculpture on vaster properties — and art critics promptly pegged it as a prime example of the despicable spread of kitsch. In the 1960s, the suburban lawn flamingo — cheap, mass-produced, artificial and unusually neon pink — was widely reviled as the dregs of bad taste.

Which is exactly what John Waters loved about it. He made his breakout film, “Pink Flamingos,” in 1972, and to his delight the critics were outraged: “It’s like getting a standing ovation,” he said, “if someone vomits watching one of my films.”

In the 1970s, my rebel generation of middle-class baby boomers adopted the plastic bird to challenge the boundaries of high art and good taste. The gay male subculture made it a mascot, and in 1979 the student government at University of Wisconsin planted a thousand flamingos on the lawn outside the dean’s office. The bird had become a signpost for the transgression of social and cultural convention. And Union Products was reaping the rewards.

By the 1980s, flamingo-themed installations were appearing in avant-garde galleries. But the baby boomers were also carrying the flamingo in backpacks across Europe, and kayaking with it through the wilderness. The bird became the ultimate marker for crossing boundaries of every conceivable kind. By the 1990s, it had become a popular housewarming gift. In 1994, the “pink flamingo relay” at the Gay Games in New York featured a swim race and costume pageant. By 1996, you could mark a birthday by hiring the company Flamingo Surprise to plant 30 or 40 flamingos on the celebrant’s lawn the night before. And as Don Featherstone — by this point the president of Union Products — remarked proudly, “I’ve never seen a wedding cake with a duck on it.”

Which is why I’d peg the beginning of the end to the moment in the late 1990s when the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles began selling the Union Products flamingo in its gift shop. Or perhaps to the Sundance Film Festival’s 1997 celebration of the 25th anniversary of “Pink Flamingos.” Or — maybe — to the day in 1987 when Mr. Featherstone inscribed his signature in the original plastic mold, to distinguish the authentic fake flamingo from the knockoffs.

After 30 years of assaults on the cultural barricades, kitsch had become high art, and bad taste had become thoroughly acceptable.

An object that marks the crossing of borders works effectively only when the object transgresses boundaries a majority of people believe should exist. And in 2006, art is pretty much whatever you call art. The boundary of bad taste can be hard to find: decades ago, Variety called “Pink Flamingos” “one of the most vile, stupid and repulsive films ever made,” but film critics now hail the Farrelly brothers as auteurs and find “Jackass” merely annoying. And anyway, who actually knows what’s fake anymore?

The boomers’ children and grandchildren cannot possibly see a plastic flamingo lawn sculpture as outrageously funny or transgressive. My 15-year-old nephew calls it “lame.” My 16-year-old cousin says, “I don’t really think about it one way or the other.” The members of this YouTube generation will find their own conventions to challenge, but they will also have to find their own objects with which to do it.

My generation is beginning to retire, and our plastic flamingo has met its demise — officially the victim of oil prices, but really the inevitable victim of its own legitimacy.

Rest in peace, my pink plastic friend. It was fun while it lasted.

Jenny Price is the author of “Flight Maps: Adventures With Nature in Modern America.”

The New York Times

November 17, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Our Great Depression
By ANDREW SOLOMON

DEPRESSION is the leading cause of disability worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. It costs more in treatment and lost productivity than anything but heart disease. Suicide is the 11th most common cause of death in the United States, claiming 30,000 lives each year.

Despite medical advances in the last 20 years that have greatly improved our ability to help those who suffer from depression, we lack an effective system for administering care. Only a very small percentage of depressives who seek help receive appropriate treatment for their condition. Research often stalls short of being translated into useful medicine. Depressives continue to be stigmatized, which makes their lives even more difficult and lonely. Finally, many sufferers are left to spiral, unsupported, into despair because their insurance companies refuse to pay for treatment.

These problems are similar to those cancer patients once faced, and the best way to address them might be similar as well. We need a network of depression centers, much like the cancer centers established in the 1970s.

Through the National Cancer Institute, federal funds were dispersed to interdisciplinary centers like Memorial-Sloan Kettering in New York and M.D. Anderson in Houston. The idea was to make sure that 80 percent of the American population lived within 200 miles of such a center.

As this network of institutions took root, the quality of cancer treatment advanced dramatically. The centers brought researchers and clinicians under one roof, ensuring that basic science was applied to achieve medical results. Scientists communicated both within and between centers, so that everyone could make use of everyone else’s work to accelerate progress.

Following this model, the National Institute of Mental Health should coordinate and subsidize a national network of depression centers, ideally based at research universities with good hospitals and departments devoted to the subject.

The University of Michigan, host to the country’s first national depression center, which opened its doors last month, has been a pioneer in this regard. More than 135 experts on depression and bipolar disorder will collaborate there, about half of them psychiatrists. The center has a large clinical treatment program and a genetic database that will house samples from tens of thousands of depressed and bipolar patients. It is sponsoring social and biological research and pressing for policy initiatives related to mental illness.

Among the thousands of depressed people I have met with, the majority have sought treatment but feel that they are not getting good care. Many of them have been prescribed antidepressants by family doctors who lack training in psychiatry and have conducted only cursory interviews before rendering their diagnoses. Antidepressants vary in their chemistry and effects; and human brains vary as much as human minds. To treat the most complicated organ in the body appropriately demands considerable expertise.

The question I am asked most frequently is how to get better care, and it can be devilishly hard to answer. Depression centers that could deliver a high standard of comprehensive care would be a dream come true — not only for millions of depressives, but also for the research community.

Last winter, the Library of Congress organized a conference where theoreticians met with mental-health consumer advocates and clinicians. The combination was unusual and wonderful. Everyone left with fresh ideas. We need formal bodies to sustain such fruitful intimacy.

Research related to a major disease should not unfold in a purely intellectual context, nor should consumer advocacy exist solely in a lobbying context, nor clinical practice exclusively under the shadow of profit-driven pharmaceutical research. (Full disclosure: my father is the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that manufactures antidepressants.)

Before the cancer centers came around, cancer was as taboo as depression is now. But as antibiotics and vaccines for other illnesses lengthened life expectancy, cancer became more pervasive and less shameful. Depression, too, is becoming more widespread and more frequently diagnosed. Depression and bipolar illness will affect some 20 percent of Americans during their lives, and yet the stigma endures. People often come up to me after lectures to whisper about their affliction, as though everyone else in the room weren’t grappling with precisely the same thing.

It is neither wise nor feasible for a large proportion of the population to be trying to keep a secret. A national network that helped to medicalize depression in the public imagination would reduce sufferers’ shame. The very waiting rooms of depression centers would provide incontrovertible proof of the ubiquity of the illness and ease the isolation of sufferers. Within the centers, patients would find themselves the focus of an elite community of insight and support.

Alleviating stigma will also make it harder for insurance companies to deny treatment. As it is established that these mental illnesses are not character defects, but instead can be characterized in terms of brain symptoms, the false distinctions between them and cancer or heart disease will become impossible to sustain. The fiscal irresponsibility of leaving untreated an illness that causes enormous loss of productive work years would be clearly demonstrated.

We’ve made stellar progress in treating mental illness since the Prozac revolution but there is a catastrophic divide between research and practice. We must come up with a seamless way to support scientific progress and to administer the treatments we have, in order ultimately to alleviate as much suffering as possible.

Andrew Solomon, the author of “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression,” is on the national advisory board of the University of Michigan Comprehensive Depression Center.

The New York Times

November 14, 2006
Fish Oil Linked to Lower Alzheimer’s Risk
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

A substance found in fish oil may be associated with a significantly reduced risk of developing Alzheimer’s and other dementias, researchers reported yesterday.

The scientists found that people with the highest blood levels of an omega-3 fatty acid called docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, were about half as likely to develop dementia as those with lower levels.

The substance is one of several omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids found in fatty fish and, in small amounts, in some meats. It is also sold in fish oil or DHA supplements. The researchers looked for a reduced risk associated with seven other omega-3 fatty acids, but only DHA had any effect.

The study, in the November issue of The Archives of Neurology, used data from the Framingham Heart Study to follow 899 initially healthy participants, with a median age of 76, for an average of more than nine years.

The scientists assessed DHA and fish intake using a questionnaire and obtained complete dietary data on more than half the subjects. They took blood samples from all the participants to determine serum levels of fatty acids.

Ninety-nine people developed dementia over the course of the study, including 71 cases of Alzheimer’s disease. The average level of DHA among all the participants was 3.6 percent of all fatty acids, and the top 25 percent of the population had values above 4.2 percent. People in this top one-quarter in DHA levels had a 47 percent reduced risk of developing dementia, even after controlling for body mass index, diabetes, hypertension, smoking status and other known or suspected risks. Risk reduction was apparent only at that top level of DHA — those in the bottom three-quarters in DHA level showed no detectable difference in risk.

People who ate two or more servings of fish a week reduced their risk for dementia by 39 percent, but there was no effect on the risk for dementia among those who ate less than that.

The finding that DHA alone reduces risk, the authors write, is consistent with earlier data showing high levels of DHA in healthy brain tissue and low levels in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Ernst J. Schaefer, the lead author of the study, was cautious in interpreting the results.

“This study doesn’t prove that eating fish oil prevents dementia,” he said. “It’s an observational study that presents an identified risk factor, and the next step is a randomized placebo-controlled study in people who do not yet have dementia.” Dr. Schaefer is chief of the Lipid Metabolism Laboratory at Tufts University.

The study was financed in part by Martek, a concern that manufactures DHA, and one author received a grant from Pfizer, France.

Eating fish is not a guarantee of having high levels of DHA. In fact, fish intake accounted for less than half of the variability in DHA levels. Other dietary intake and genetic propensities probably account for the rest. Dr. Schaefer pointed out that the kind of fish consumed is important. Fatty fish, he said, is best, and frying will cause DHA to deteriorate.

Supplements may be an additional source of DHA, but an editorial in the same issue, by Dr. Martha Clare Morris, an associate professor of medicine at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, points out that there are no published human studies of the effects of omega-3 fatty acid supplementation. The Food and Drug Administration does not endorse DHA or fish oil capsules, but recognizes doses of up to 3 grams a day of fish oil as generally safe. High intakes of fish oil can cause excessive bleeding in some people.

Dr. Morris writes that there are few human studies examining the effect of mercury intake from eating seafood, and it is not known if the risks of eating fish outweigh the benefits.

But, she adds, epidemiological studies consistently show positive health effects from fish consumption on mortality, cardiovascular risk factors and, now, dementia.

The New York Times

November 7, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Too Close for Comfort
By STEPHANIE COONTZ

Olympia, Wash.

EVER since the Census Bureau released figures last month showing that married-couple households are now a minority, my phone has been ringing off the hook with calls from people asking: “How can we save marriage? How can we make Americans understand that marriage is the most significant emotional connection they will ever make, the one place to find social support and personal fulfillment?”

I think these are the wrong questions — indeed, such questions would have been almost unimaginable through most of history. It has only been in the last century that Americans have put all their emotional eggs in the basket of coupled love. Because of this change, many of us have found joys in marriage our great-great-grandparents never did. But we have also neglected our other relationships, placing too many burdens on a fragile institution and making social life poorer in the process.

A study released this year showed just how dependent we’ve become on marriage. Three sociologists at the University of Arizona and Duke University found that from 1985 to 2004 Americans reported a marked decline in the number of people with whom they discussed meaningful matters. People reported fewer close relationships with co-workers, extended family members, neighbors and friends. The only close relationship where more people said they discussed important matters in 2004 than in 1985 was marriage.

In fact, the number of people who depended totally on a spouse for important conversations, with no other person to turn to, almost doubled, to 9.4 percent from 5 percent. Not surprisingly, the number of people saying they didn’t have anyone in whom they confided nearly tripled.

The solution to this isolation is not to ramp up our emotional dependence on marriage. Until 100 years ago, most societies agreed that it was dangerously antisocial, even pathologically self-absorbed, to elevate marital affection and nuclear-family ties above commitments to neighbors, extended kin, civic duty and religion.

St. Paul complained that married men were more concerned with pleasing their wives than pleasing God. In John Adams’s view, a “passion for the public good” was “superior to all private passions.” In both England and America, moralists bewailed “excessive” married love, which encouraged “men and women to be always taken up with each other.”

From medieval days until the early 19th century, diaries and letters more often used the word love to refer to neighbors, cousins and fellow church members than to spouses. When honeymoons first gained favor in the 19th century, couples often took along relatives or friends for company. Victorian novels and diaries were as passionate about brother-sister relationships and same-sex friendships as about marital ties.

The Victorian refusal to acknowledge strong sexual desires among respectable men and women gave people a wider outlet for intense emotions, including physical touch, than we see today. Men wrote matter-of-factly about retiring to bed with a male roommate, “and in each other’s arms did friendship sink peacefully to sleep.” Upright Victorian matrons thought nothing of kicking their husbands out of bed when a female friend came to visit. They spent the night kissing, hugging and pouring out their innermost thoughts.

By the early 20th century, though, the sea change in the culture wrought by the industrial economy had loosened social obligations to neighbors and kin, giving rise to the idea that individuals could meet their deepest needs only through romantic love, culminating in marriage. Under the influence of Freudianism, society began to view intense same-sex ties with suspicion and people were urged to reject the emotional claims of friends and relatives who might compete with a spouse for time and affection.

The insistence that marriage and parenthood could satisfy all an individual’s needs reached a peak in the cult of “togetherness” among middle-class suburban Americans in the 1950s. Women were told that marriage and motherhood offered them complete fulfillment. Men were encouraged to let their wives take care of their social lives.

But many men and women found these prescriptions stifling. Women who entered the work force in the 1960s joyfully rediscovered social contacts and friendships outside the home.

“It was so stimulating to have real conversations with other people,” a woman who lived through this period told me, “to go out after work with friends from the office or to have people over other than my husband’s boss or our parents.”

And women’s lead in overturning the cult of 1950s marriage inspired many men to rediscover what earlier generations of men had taken for granted — that men need deep emotional connections with other men, not just their wives. Researchers soon found that men and women with confidants beyond the nuclear family were mentally and physically healthier than people who relied on just one other individual for emotional intimacy and support.

So why do we seem to be slipping back in this regard? It is not because most people have voluntarily embraced nuclear-family isolation. Indeed, the spread of “virtual” communities on the Internet speaks to a deep hunger to reach out to others.

Instead, it’s the expansion of the post-industrial economy that seems to be driving us back to a new dependence on marriage. According to the researchers Kathleen Gerson and Jerry Jacobs, 60 percent of American married couples have both partners in the work force, up from 36 percent in 1970, and the average two-earner couple now works 82 hours a week.

This is probably why the time Americans spend socializing with others off the job has declined by almost 25 percent since 1965. Their free hours are spent with spouses, and as a study by Suzanne Bianchi of the University of Maryland released last month showed, with their children — mothers and fathers today spend even more time with their youngsters than parents did 40 years ago.

As Americans lose the wider face-to-face ties that build social trust, they become more dependent on romantic relationships for intimacy and deep communication, and more vulnerable to isolation if a relationship breaks down. In some cases we even cause the breakdown by loading the relationship with too many expectations. Marriage is generally based on more equality and deeper friendship than in the past, but even so, it is hard for it to compensate for the way that work has devoured time once spent cultivating friendships.

The solution is not to revive the failed marital experiment of the 1950s, as so many commentators noting the decline in married-couple households seem to want. Nor is it to lower our expectations that we’ll find fulfillment and friendship in marriage.

Instead, we should raise our expectations for, and commitment to, other relationships, especially since so many people now live so much of their lives outside marriage. Paradoxically, we can strengthen our marriages the most by not expecting them to be our sole refuge from the pressures of the modern work force. Instead we need to restructure both work and social life so we can reach out and build ties with others, including people who are single or divorced. That indeed would be a return to marital tradition — not the 1950s model, but the pre-20th-century model that has a much more enduring pedi- gree.

Stephanie Coontz, a history professor at Evergreen State College, is the author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage.”

The New York Times

November 2, 2006
Group of University Researchers to Make Web Science a Field of Study
By STEVE LOHR

The Web has become such a force in commerce and culture that a group of leading university researchers now deems it worthy of its own field of study.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in Britain plan to announce today that they are starting a joint research program in Web science.

Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Web’s basic software, is leading the program. An Oxford-educated Englishman, Mr. Berners-Lee is a senior researcher at M.I.T., a professor at the University of Southampton and the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, an Internet standards-setting organization.

Web science, the researchers say, has social and engineering dimensions. It extends well beyond traditional computer science, they say, to include the emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being used to study how people behave on the Web. And Web science, they add, shifts the center of gravity in engineering research from how a single computer works to how huge decentralized Web systems work.

“The Web isn’t about what you can do with computers,” Mr. Berners-Lee said. “It’s people and, yes, they are connected by computers. But computer science, as the study of what happens in a computer, doesn’t tell you about what happens on the Web.”

The Web science program is an academic effort, but corporate technology executives and computer scientists said the research could greatly influence Web-based businesses. They pointed in particular to research by Mr. Berners-Lee and others to build more “intelligence” into the Web — moving toward what is known as the Semantic Web — as an area of study that could yield a big payoff.

Web science represents “a pretty big next step in the evolution of information,” said Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, who is a computer scientist. This kind of research, Mr. Schmidt added, is “likely to have a lot of influence on the next generation of researchers, scientists and, most importantly, the next generation of entrepreneurs who will build new companies from this.”

Web science is related to another emerging interdisciplinary field called services science. This is the study of how to use computing, collaborative networks and knowledge in disciplines ranging from economics to anthropology to lift productivity and develop new products in the services sector, which represents about three-fourths of the United States economy. Services science research is being supported by technology companies like I.B.M., Accenture and Hewlett-Packard, and by the National Science Foundation.

Web science research, said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a technology strategist at I.B.M. and visiting professor at M.I.T., is “a prerequisite to designing and building the kinds of complex, human-oriented systems that we are after in services science.”

Mr. Berners-Lee and his colleagues at the M.I.T. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and in Britain have had preliminary discussions with government agencies in the United States and Europe that finance scientific research, as well as with leading technology companies. But Mr. Berners-Lee said his group had decided to publicly circulate their ideas about Web science before trying to attract government, foundation and corporate funding.

With initial support from M.I.T. and the University of Southampton, the program will hold workshops on Web science and sponsor research fellowships. “But we also want to educate and train people who can understand and analyze how these huge, complex systems on the Web work,” said Wendy Hall, a professor at the University of Southampton. “That means eventually having undergraduate and graduate programs in Web science.”

The M.I.T.-Southampton partnership, the researchers emphasized, is intended as a catalyst for Web science research at universities worldwide.

Privacy, for example, will be one area of research in Web science. The traditional approach to protecting privacy has been to restrict access to databases containing personal information. But so much personal information is already available on the Web, often given voluntarily on sites like MySpace and Facebook, that the old approach will not work, said Daniel J. Weitzner, technology and society director at the Web consortium.

On the Web, Mr. Weitzner said, a better way to try to guard privacy may be to develop rules, backed by accountability and sanctions, for how personal information is used by businesses, government agencies and individuals.

Ben Shneiderman, a professor at the University of Maryland, said Web science was a promising idea. “Computer science is at a turning point, and it has to go beyond algorithms and understand the social dynamics of issues like trust, responsibility, empathy and privacy in this vast networked space,” Professor Shneiderman said. “The technologists and companies that understand those issues will be far more likely to succeed in expanding their markets and enlarging their audiences.”

The New York Times

November 5, 2006
The Overconnecteds
By BETSY ISRAEL

IT sounds like the name of a painting: Lone Adult Outside Teenager’s Door, Knocking. Next to it let’s hang a portrait of the other side: Teenager Sends Instant Messages Amid Aural Mess — the iTunes, the TV and the DVD’s that form a wall of sound to camouflage whatever is being said into the cellphone. In the film version, Teenager eventually opens door, stares at Adult. Then, with excruciating patience and a huge implied “duh!,” Teenager explains that he/she is Talking. “To. My. Friends.” From deep inside the room, an I.M. door, the sound effect signaling friends signing on or off, slams shut.

As they would explain if they had time, these teenagers, all members of Generation M (born circa 1980 to 2000), have hundreds more friends than you, the adult, had at their age, or ever. And without having to leave their rooms. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 87 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds, or 21 million children, are regularly online — 11 million at least once a day — and so the figures go for pages: 75 percent use instant messaging (82 percent of them by seventh grade) and 84 percent own cellphones and iPods (in a hierarchy of cool colors) as well as laptops, BlackBerrys and other P.D.A.’s. Those who cannot afford them still manage to “get on” — at friends’ houses, Internet cafes or libraries — and 78 percent use school computers to shop online or to check their e-mail.

For Gen M (that’s “millennial,” according to sociologists, not “media”), to be “on” with your friends is a birthright. Many first played with computers in preschool, installed (then explained) the family TiVo at age 9 and opened AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM, accounts at 10. “It started in a baby way in second grade,” explains Laurice Fox, 16, a junior at Brooklyn Friends, a private preparatory school. “We all e-mailed because that’s when AOL first introduced AIM. Even if the computer was in the family room, and we were discussing play dates, we were there at the start!”

Bobby Abramson, a senior at the Dalton School on

Manhattan’s Upper East Side, recalls watching his father surf the Internet “way back in the early 90’s, long before anyone else, and so it had this kind of magical quality.” He adds, “I still remember picking up the phone and trying to talk to the modem.”

Now, as they move through high school, college and beyond, the generation’s seemingly obsessive need to connect has inspired concern and debate among many adults. To summarize: What are the psychological implications of simultaneously talking to 50 of one’s forever best friends, who are not actually present? Are teenagers likely to misinterpret the nature of these best-friendships? As Mr. Abramson, a 17-year-old who has “studied the societal implications of the Internet” since age 10, puts it: “There’s the issue of removal. Online engagement is not a viable substitute for a functional in-person social life.”

And then comes the somewhat hysterical litany of issues: stalkers, cyberbullies, iPod-induced deafness, alleged attention deficit disorder and the fact that these children really don’t know anyone’s phone number.

Nora Delighter, 14, a freshman at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, performs an exasperated eye roll, then, deadpan, says: “It’s not like we’re robot people who live in a fantasy world. Everyone, even us, has to leave their room. Because we go to school. Where we talk to other humans and get a sense of what they’re really like.”

To ask average 14- or even 20-year-olds about the nature of their online lives is to invite such sardonic comebacks, as if to confirm the emergence of an allnew generation gap, with most 40-pluses earnestly but hopelessly stuck on the far side.

“For these kids, I.M. is unquestionably their primary mode of social interaction,” says Dr. Sandra L. Calvert, chairwoman of the psychology department at Georgetown University and director of the Children’s Digital Media Center. “Adults have to remember that this is how they communicate and that it’s thoroughly embedded. It’s like us and the telephone: blasé.”

One intense parental issue — one suggesting a potential canyon as opposed to a gap — concerns what adults call rabid 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 the age 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 spent additional 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 page crammed with photos, text, videos and blogs. Only preapproved individuals (“friends”) are permitted to view someone’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 means of 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, I don’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 conversations with their “buddies,” pseudonymous pals listed vertically along one side of the screen. Pull a stealth P.O.S. (parent over 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 each character 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, they would 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 distinguish themselves,” Mr. Abramson says. “We all know how impossible it is to get noticed in our society. It’s almost like you’ve got to graduate into life having a sponsor. So, think about it from, say, a middle-school perspective: to be suddenly 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 with new 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, even if,” as she concedes, “that has a kind of questionable aspect, like you’re changing your personality and then when you 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 when we 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 be stronger and longer lasting than earlier bonds, it’s not too soon to assess the immediate impact of the digital connection.

The good news first: The I.M. culture has given shy students who might ordinarily have spent four miserable years quasi-mute a chance to develop connections with classmates once deemed unapproachable. If friendships do not follow, at least there’s the basis for a hello in the hallway. “Even if there’s still the social hierarchy,” Ms. Marani says, “at least it’s more flexible. I.M., MySpace, that’s where our friendships start, and who knows how they’ll develop.” Ms. Cohen adds, “Think about on a college campus, where it’s thousands of kids, you know that could be pretty powerful.”

The list of more practical advantages runs as long as the average buddy list. 1) Online, you can meet and swap photos with your camp bunkmates or prospective college roommates. 2) You no longer veg out watching TV, instead TiVo-ing the few things you might want in the background while doing homework. 3) If someone seems to be in trouble, there are no longer just one or two good friends to the rescue but hundreds who send support via e-mail messages, instant messages and text messages. 4) Students study together online. Then the day of the test, those who take it earlier pass the topics covered — if not the answers — to those who take the class later. (All this via texting from a bathroom stall.)

“They may be sophisticated, very clever,” says Dr. Calvert, “but they’re still kids and they use the technology to carry out kids’ tasks.” Including those falling under the heading Classical Teen Girl (or Boy) Nastiness. For example, the cruel comments that used to pass back and forth in class via folded notes or slam books now appear, instantly amendable, in electronic postings. “Right now,” Ms. Cohen says, “it’s very popular to cut and paste someone’s notes and pass them around. Consider the damage you might inflict with one note. Now multiply that by 1,000. And, of course, there is nothing more humiliating than finding you’re not in someone’s top eight friends on MySpace.”

Or as Ms. Delighter says: “You know the person you’ve just written is there and knows perfectly well you’re there. They’re screening the way people used to screen on answering machines. And you’re screening back.”

And all of this leads to yet another question: Where do they get the time? Many students these days get home from school only after club meetings, sports events and play rehearsals. Factoring in dinner and unavoidable discussion with parents, that would seemingly leave time only for homework. Most, though, claim to spend upward of three hours online, pausing to do homework or doing both simultaneously. None of the students interviewed for this article said their grades had dropped because of their computer habits, and they could not think of anybody else’s that had, either.

Some New York City teachers report a renewed rigor in study hall, where students work against the clock to finish their night’s assignments. Students say they use every possible minute to chip away at extra work. (A small sign of the times: Some lockers are not decorated as intensely as in years past. There’s no time, and many students save their best design impulses for MySpace or Facebook pages.)

Still, there is a lot of work to be done at home, and often it is done after midnight. Members of Generation M do not seem to sleep as much as their boomer parents did. If some of those parents once carried Visine to hide telltale marijuana eyes, their offspring use it to suggest they were not, in fact, up at 4 a.m. resolving 12 best-friend conflicts and 10 geometric proofs (at the same time).

For years adults have regarded this secretive online world as somewhat annoying. At the moment, however, a more accurate word would be “disturbing.” Many over-40’s — 62 percent of them, according to the Pew Internet survey — express serious doubt about the viability of online friendships, viewing the scroll of never-ending chat as a kind of electronic chain letter to nowhere. And many more, especially parents, mistrust or blatantly fear it all — the potential for misread cues on I.M. and the potential for much worse on the “friendship” sites. (Most teenagers take care to hide their password-protected pages from parents the same way teenagers have forever locked and shielded their diaries.)

The Pew study reports that the most intense, committed users in the online universe — and winning by a wide margin — are girls 15 to 17. The report, based on a telephone survey of 1,100 12- to 17-year-olds and their parents or guardians, further notes that the intensity, the frantic attempts to keep up the number of buddies, starts to wane after age 18. As students leave high school, the emphasis seems to shift to a smaller number of good friends and academic peers with whom they share more substantial conversations.

“The whole thing gets tiring,” Ms. Marani says. “You’ve got eight or nine people and it’s 10 at night and you’re exhausted, you have work in six subjects, and here online you need a referee.” Ms. Delighter adds, “Sometimes you feel like you just want to go back to camp” — one of the few places on earth generally tech-free. “I mean, even your away message has got to be the cleverest, cutest, wittiest thing ever said, and it is actually stressful.”

Finally, Ms. Cohen says: “The invisibility thing can get tricky. I mean, it’s still just really hard to know how you’re being received. Like, if you’re flirting online, you just can’t know if the other person is really perceiving you in the way that you meant.”

Mr. Abramson believes that many troubling aspects of online life will fade with what he calls the new Web. A prime example, he says, is Facebook, the newer of the two primary social networking sites, which requires everyone to be identified by proper name. On MySpace and in chat rooms, he says, “it’s a complex world where you meet people who never reveal who they are; they’re not part of your everyday life.” He adds: “At best, this means you’ll establish shallow relationships under the guise of screen names, and I think at a point that kind of communication can come to seem not so valuable. A lot of people my age have been on the Web a long time. They’re sick of the noise and the visual clutter. They want to talk to their friends in peace.”

Dr. Calvert concludes: “It will be interesting to see, in 10 years, how these friendships hold up. With Facebook, you’ve already got people out of college maintaining a very broad range of contact — college, high school, third grade. It’s a forum for connecting with others not physically present augmented by cellphones. And that, used responsibly, has limitless possibility.”

And not only for the under-30’s. “It isn’t that adults aren’t invited,” Ms. Cohen says. “It’s just they didn’t grow up with it, so it doesn’t seem necessary. Sometimes I’ve wanted to say, O.K., imagine if everyone you knew sent you a Christmas card all on the same day. You wouldn’t actually see them but you’d have that comforting sense of being surrounded by the people you have known. Then maybe grownups wouldn’t be so lonely, and that is really the thing with us: Getting older, we are not going to be a lonely group.”