Below The Beltway

Two stories in two different newspapers today highlight the extent to which our technological age has created a new kind of generation gap.

First, today’s New York Times reports on the ways that teenagers have turned to text-messaging to create a new zone of privacy from their parents:

AS president of the Walt Disney Company’s children’s book and magazine publishing unit, Russell Hampton knows a thing or two about teenagers. Or he thought as much until he was driving his 14-year-old daughter, Katie, and two friends to a play last year in Los Angeles.

“Katie and her friends were sitting in the back seat talking to each other about some movie star; I think it was Orlando Bloom,” recalled Mr. Hampton, whose company produced the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, in which the actor starred. “I made some comment about him, I don’t remember exactly what, but I got the typical teenager guttural sigh and Katie rolled her eyes at me as if to say, ‘Oh Dad, you are so out of it.’ ”

After that, the back-seat chattering stopped. When Mr. Hampton looked into his rearview mirror he saw his daughter sending a text message on her cellphone. “Katie, you shouldn’t be texting all the time,” Mr. Hampton recalled telling her. “Your friends are there. It’s rude.” Katie rolled her eyes again.

“But, Dad, we’re texting each other,” she replied with a harrumph. “I don’t want you to hear what I’m saying.”

Chastened, Mr. Hampton turned his attention back to the freeway. It’s a common scene these days, one playing out in cars, kitchens and bedrooms across the country.

Children increasingly rely on personal technological devices like cellphones to define themselves and create social circles apart from their families, changing the way they communicate with their parents.

Innovation, of course, has always spurred broad societal changes. As telephones became ubiquitous in the last century, users — adults and teenagers alike — found a form of privacy and easy communication unknown to Alexander Graham Bell or his daughters.

The automobile ultimately shuttled in an era when teenagers could go on dates far from watchful chaperones. And the computer, along with the Internet, has given even very young children virtual lives distinctly separate from those of their parents and siblings.

Business analysts and other researchers expect the popularity of the cellphone — along with the mobility and intimacy it affords — to further exploit and accelerate these trends. By 2010, 81 percent of Americans ages 5 to 24 will own a cellphone, up from 53 percent in 2005, according to IDC, a research company in Framingham, Mass., that tracks technology and consumer research.

And in today’s Washington Post, there’s a story about what happens when the generations cross online:

When Matt Florian signed onto his Facebook account recently to check the status of his 400-plus friends, he had a friend request.

It was from his dad.

The junior at Sherwood High School in Montgomery County didn’t panic. No. He simply took a deep breath and pondered his options.

He could accept it. He could ignore it. He could accept it, but limit the parts of his Facebook profile his dad could see. He pondered more. What were the social implications of “friending” your folks?

Across the country, Facebook users are contemplating similar questions when they log onto their accounts. More and more moms and dads are signing onto Facebook to keep up with their offspring. Not only are they friending (or attempting to friend) their sons and daughters, they’re friending their sons’ and daughters’ friends.

(….)

Today, the fastest-growing segment of Facebook’s estimated 66 million users are people 25 and older. More than half of the site’s users are out of college. Whether that will have an impact on Facebook’s coolness quotient remains to be seen.

Much like the text-messaging teenagers, the high school and college students on Facebook have created a private world, and the idea of their parents becoming a part of it may have some of them second guessing some of the things they’ve been posting on their profiles.