Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World

3 CHARACTERISTICS OF A GENERATION THE EIGHT NET GEN NORMS

When Growing Up Digital was published in 1997, my daughter Niki had just turned 14. She did her homework on the computer in her room and, like most girls her age, she loved to talk with friends on the phone. We had a phone curfew of 10 p.m., and after a while we noticed she wasn't talking on the phone anymore. That seemed like a good thing, until we discovered that Niki was talking to her friends on the Internet via ICQ—one of the early instant messaging systems—from the moment she walked into her bedroom until she turned out the light. As her parents, our first reaction was to feel like she had tricked us, and the issue of ICQ became a sore spot for us all. But my wife and I were torn, ...