WHAT MAKES information and communication technologies (ICTs) alluring to children and teenagers, says Kathryn Montgomery, co-founder of the Washington-based nonprofit group Center for Media Education, are three basic elements: interactivity, convergence, and ubiquity.

	SO YOUNG AND SO HI-TECH. These teenagers have only met each other twice, but their gadgets ensure they remain the best of friends.

Indeed, as a more interactive medium, the Internet provides several ways for young people to communicate with each other, interact with what is on a site, and create their own content. Combining new technologies with existing ones are also expanding the scope of computer-mediated communications to include personal and professional interactions. And the new media are becoming more pervasive, touching all aspects of the lives of the younger generation.

But the young are also using ICTs far differently from the ways they have interacted with the old media of television, radio, and newspapers. They are likewise relating to the new technologies in a manner that their parents never did — keen about the complexities and challenges of the technologies, as well as about being able to learn them. This attitude Idit Harel, a noted new media expert formerly with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, has summed up in the phrase "High tech is now my tech."

Since they themselves are helping define the uses of the new digital media, teenagers like Roch, July, Margo, Jeric, and Lei are really adept at — and comfortable — conducting a great deal of their lives online. For most of them, computers were already a fixture at home and in school at an early age. Jeric, Margo, and July were sixth graders when they first experienced surfing the Internet to do research for their homework, as well as acquiring their first cellphones.

Jeric and Margo derived so much satisfaction just from getting cheat codes for the PC games they were playing then until they discovered IRC. They were introduced to chatting only in their third or fourth year in high school, with July confessing to developing an addiction to it just last year. In a week, he'd be online for 50 hours, costing him P200 in prepaid Internet cards. There came a point, though, when he got bored of chatting. But then he met his new gang.

Lei, the only one in the group without any connections to St. Joseph's, also started chatting last year, initially with the chat rooms in Yahoo!. Then she found her way to IRC and stumbled upon Roch in #makata.

"I met Roch when we took turns composing lines for a poem in #makata," recounts Lei, a psychology sophomore at Polytechnic University of the Philippines. "Then, someone using the nick (alias) 'anak ko' entered the chat room. That prodded me to ask Roch to become my virtual mom and adopt me. She took me to #rochy and that's where I eventually met the others."

Roch and July's friendship started out through an even more peculiar encounter. Narrates Roch: "I came to know July when I commented in the main channel how ugly the current issue of Josephian was. I was expressing concern because I also wrote for the paper before."

July replied to Roch in private, agreeing with her comment but without telling her that he was the paper's editor. "She eventually learned who I was," he says. "After that, we arranged a meeting at the school patio. We have become close since then."

OUTSIDE OF the church confessional, baring one's soul in a faceless encounter may seem unimaginable to many grown-ups. Today's youths, however, are at ease with such a situation, and take advantage of the "always on" peer interaction allowed by the technology. As Roch puts it, "It's easier to open up when there's no eye-to-eye contact. When the exchange becomes very personal, you can cry to your heart's content without the other person seeing you. That way, you don't embarrass yourself."

The others agree. "As far as I'm concerned," says July, "I hate to approach somebody and cry on that person's shoulder. It's fine with me to just have someone there listening to me, even if it's not personal, only technological."

Yet hearing him and the rest of the rochy barkada attest how they have known each other more intimately, becoming closer than siblings from their online interactions, gives me the impression that there is more to the social networking than just the technology. Of course, ICTs are helping them a lot to keep in constant touch with their intimate community. But these young people are also seeking out those in whom they find a genuine interest, individuals with whom they have something in common, people who are much like them.

In this regard, they are no different from us who made friends in a pre-networked world. Only that in forging their cyberfriendships, they don't check out someone's physical attributes first, though they may send each other scanned images of themselves later or post avatars on their instant messengers and blogs.

So who are we to argue that our generation nurtured far more meaningful and dynamic relationships only because ours did not need the intervention of machines? Of course, some may argue that relationships, whether of the filial, fraternal, or romantic kind, require the personal, face-to-face, human touch for them to endure the test of time. But even without this, relationships may thrive if there is one remaining constant: communication in whatever form and manner that generations may choose.

That is why I can't say I still have a relationship with my friends in high school. We haven't been in touch for a long time, despite the emergence of the cellphone, the Net, the virtual chat rooms. The communication lines have been broken. The technology is there, but we have simply not used it.

All these have led me musing over how technology would figure in my two young daughters' future relationships. My eight-year-old and three-year-old will be teenagers sooner than I expect and will be exposed to a digital culture even more different from what we have now. Roch herself says that while relationships of all sorts are still possible offline, "it's hard to communicate and maintain them without the use of new technologies because they are a major part of our generation." If that's the way it is today, my daughters could be looking at relationships that are highly wired — and wireless — and "forever on."

Well, so long as they don't get too tied up as to greet their parents "good morning" in a chat room.