The Rise of the Teen Guru

Brill's Content Magazine, August 2000
They're brilliant, ambitious, and almost intuitively gifted at technology. A new generation of whiz kids are gaining unprecendented power and authority -- and, as a new study shows, they're reshaping the American family.

You know the story of kids like Shawn Fanning, and you don’t know the story. He got his first computer as gift from his uncle three and a half years ago, when he was 16. At the time, he lived in Harwich, a small town on Cape Cod. Now he lives in San Mateo, CA., in the center of Silicon Valley, but we’ll get to that later. Back when he first got the computer, Shawn was an avid baseball, basketball, and tennis player and, by his account, was surrounded by friends. "I was never the typical computer type from a social perspective," he says.

But then this technology dropped into his life, and it absorbed him. "It don’t think it was a conscious decision," Fanning confesses, "it more of an addiction." He abandoned sports so he could concentrate on programming. Occasionally, he’d get transfixed by projects and just not have the time to go to school the next day. His parents frowned on his fascination, but they didn’t really understand it and were helpless to stop him. "I didn’t associate myself with anyone in my family closely," Fanning explains. "My mom and I get along pretty well, but I didn’t seem to fit in." The computer became his secret craft, his exercise in selfhood.

Then Fanning discovered the benefits of control. "I would watch this guy on IRC [Internet Relay Chat], and when somebody got on and started arguing with the guy, he would kick them off," recalls Fanning. "And I thought, how the hell does he do that?" He spent two months tracking him down to learn how. It wasn’t videogames or instant messaging that got Fanning hooked — it was authority. "A lot of my interest had to do with the power thing," says Fanning, "and the ability to have real effects on people just from sitting in your room."

Most of us would be happy just to get our software to run, much less have control over the ways others use it. But Fanning is the kind of person who wanted to shape the experiences of lots of other people. In a world where 19 year-olds are adults in training, the computer gave Shawn Fanning an expertise and a chance to steer the world. Which, I should mention, he’s actually doing. Last year, Fanning dropped out of his freshman year of Northeastern College in Boston to found Napster, the phenomenally popular site for trading MP3 music files. The site is one of the fastest growing new media properties of all time; Napster accrued 9 million users in six months -- American Online needed 12 years to rack in that many. In a true test of its success, the Recording Industry Association of America (along with bands like Metallica) have sat up, taken notice, and sued Napster for copyright violations. But this legal détente may simply be the transposition of a generation gap. The powers that be are terrified of Napster. The powers that will be are transfixed by it. Fanning, a VP in the company he started, is now surrounded by management two decades older than himself. On this age issue, Fanning admits, "Yeah, it’s pretty weird."

These days, we’re all living with the weirdness. Teenagers -- and Fanning at 19 is, by comparison, a fogey -- are at the helm of the largest sociologic shift in a generation. Raised on email, instant messages and Internet-time, teenagers are developing into titans of tech. "Eighty-five percent of teenagers know more about the Internet than their parents," says Don Tapscott, who interviewed over 300 teens for his book "Growing up Digital." "This is the first time in history that children are an authority on something." They lobby to get the computer in the home. They comprise a significant portion of very heavy Internet users. And, as a soon-to-be published study makes clear, their passion is flipping the organization of the American family.

In a three-year, pioneering examination of computer use in the home, a group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University documented a dramatic inversion of authority, prompted by technology. The study, accepted for forthcoming publication in the peer-reviewed journal Human Computer Interaction, studied how families made sense of a new computer, how they adapted to it and struggled with it. What they discovered is that teenagers emerged as the "family guru" — the resident technician, teacher and occasional tyrant. "It’s not just that teens have a vast choice of…content and interactions" via the Internet, writes the study’s head researcher Sara Kiesler, a professor at CMU. "With the advent of the teenage guru, the child in the family plays a new role of child-as-technical advisor, a role…that confers on the teen authority and probably independence as well."

The scenario sounds familiar, but the consequences are less so. We know the ways that the Internet is rattling the economy, the media, and the music industry (courtesy of Fanning), but what about on a more intimate level? This new-found independence is leading to whip-smart screenagers running their own companies and turning their parents into bystanders, a kind of vestigial software. "My parents are really supportive of what I’m doing," says Michael Furdyk, the 18 year-old head of BuyBuddy.com, a kind of consumer-reports of tech devices. BuyBuddy is Furdyk’s second company. The lanky, animated Furdyk sold his first company, MyDesktop.com, for a million when he was 16. He now works as a consultant for Microsoft on the side. Furdyk, like Fanning, is the poster-boy for young entrepreneurs. I interviewed him at a giant conference of eager fellow entrepreneurs, called the "Bootcamp for Start-Ups," where he was working the room in the middle of a school day. When asked if his parents are worried about him and his school work, he answers casually, "I think they kind of leave that to me to think about."

Fanning and Furdyk are only the most-visible members of this vanguard. The deeper changes will be much less easy to identify. These are critical days, when the audiences for computers crosses the threshold between, as they say in social science, "early adopters" and "early majority." 1953 was one of those years. That’s the year that over 50% of American households with children under 5 years-old had televisions, marking the point at which boob tube’s social influence — its ability to blur public and private behavior, to educate and to alarm -- would be felt irrevocably from there on out. Baby boomers raised on television had their "social geography" completely remapped, says theorist Joshua Meyrowitz in his book "No Sense of Place." They saw all behaviors, proper and improper, mix in a teeming electronic cauldron. Meyrowitz argues that you can almost count the days from then until 1967, when that first TV generation hit 18 and ignited the "youth movement" and the socially progressive causes of late 60s. The automobile triggered many of the same ruptures in familial formulas by untethering adolescence from parental control. This year stands be another one of those years, when nearly half of American families have a computer, when technology fades from trend stories into the fundamental fabric of the culture.

This fact intersects the other giant demographic reality: the rise of the echo-Boom. There are more American children between the ages of 2 and 22 than ever before, about 76 million of them, accounting for 26 percent of the entire population. "In the last couple years, America has gone totally teenage," says William Strauss, author of the upcoming "The Millenials" about ascendance of teen culture. What television was to their parents, computers are to them. But technology, unlike TV, requires skill, which is rapidly collecting in those under voting age. Authority follows close behind. According to Sheri Parks, an academic who studies the impact of electronic media on families at the University of Maryland, the social climate is prepared for a radical shift. Ever since World War II, teens have accumulated more and more control over the home. "They already directly control millions of dollars and influence many more. They heavily influence what computer the family buys, what second car the family gets — this is why you see minivans advertised on Nickelodeon," she says. But now, as technology becomes woven deeper into families, where the parents are working and often absent, "kids are taking on new kinds of power" The computer presents an invisible, elusive world, she cautions. "Parents can’t control what is invisible."

II.

Amber Jackson doesn’t seem like the kind of 19 year-old who would know her I.Q. score. But she does. "It’s somewhere between 140 and 150," she says with a laugh and a flick of her tightly-braided dreds. "I <I>know</I> it’s not over 150." She’s far too unassuming and open to have this statement come off wrong -- it feels earned. To Amber, a score that high isn’t so much an intellectual distinction as a passport; I.Q. scores were used to identify the "advanced" students, of which she was one, in Jackson’s public high school in Pittsburg, PA. "We were the favorites, everybody liked us. That’s why they came to us first," she says.

"They" were a team of social scientists at Human Computer Interaction Institute at CMU. In the late winter of 1995, they approached journalism teachers in 4 high schools in the Pittsburg and asked them to help identify students who would be willing to participate in a study. At the time, Amber was 15. Her freshman English teacher Mr. Halpern, who ran the school newspaper, pulled her aside and told her about the researchers. They wanted to give her a computer, free internet access and email if they could study how she and her mother (her parents are divorced) used them over time. "They were going to give me all this cool stuff and all I had to do was let them know what I did," she says now, sitting in the bright café/racquetball courts that double as the cafeteria of CMU, where she is sophomore. "I had just bought a <I>typewriter</I> to write my papers...I figured I had nothing to lose."

With that, Amber and her mom joined one of the most insightful — and controversial — studies about the social impact of computers and the Internet called "HomeNet." Ninety three families in eight neighborhoods of Pittsburg joined the study in two waves, March 1995 and March 1996. A total of 237 family members participated. About 25% of the households were minority (largely African-American), and 60% of the family members were 19 years-old and up. The average income of the families was $42,500, a little higher higher than the U.S. median but lower than that of Internet users on the whole. The project specifically excluded those who had active Net connections at work or home: all the subjects were Internet "newbies."

That spring, Amber and her mom went to CMU for an introductory session about the project and to get their free MacIntosh computer. The researchers explained that they had set-up the computers so that they could mine data, remotely, about their computer use: how much each family logged on, how long they were online, what sites they visited, and how much email they sent (but not, thoughtfully, the content). All the families then answered a pre-test questionnaire about their level of computer skill, social involvement and psychological well-being, which included agree/disagree questions like "I felt everything I did was an effort," and "I can find companionships when I want it." They also were asked to quantify how much time they spent we each family member, and how time they helped them in using the computer.

Amber says she had no idea what precisely they were studying. In fact, once the computer got situated in their house, Amber ignored the fact that they were being examined. "You never thought you were a part of research because they would mail you a questionnaire once every 8 to 10 months, so you really forgot about it." The questionnaire itself was dense. "You would fill it out for days," recalls Amber.

The initial responses surprised the researchers. As social as in the Internet might seem to anyone who has an teenager in their home (who comes back from school only to start instant messengering the friends they were just with), the initial analyses showed that heavy users of the Internet, those who got online more than 5 hours a week -- teens in particular — were experiencing slight increases in their levels of depression and a diminishment of their social circle. These conclusions flew against their expectations. The $1.5 million HomeNet project had, after all, received funding from a handful of technology companies, including Apple, Intel, and Hewlett Packard, that had obviously anticipated positive results. "For a year before the study came out [in the journal American Psychologist], we had a sense about how controversial this was going to be," says Robert Kraut, the bearded academic and head researcher of HomeNet.

When the first study to come out of HomeNet was released, in August of 1998, it made the front page of <I>The New York Times</I>, in a story headlined "Researchers Find Sad, Lonely World in Cyberspace." To some, it confirmed their worst fears about the Net-addled generation, but the criticism was resounding. "It’s just phenomenally bad research," says Donna Hoffman, co-director of eLab, electronic commerce research lab at Vanderbilt, and editor of the Marketing Science journal. "When the academic community read it, they thought they had made it up." Some saw problems with the sample group, carping that general conclusions about Internet use could not be drawn from a hand-picked assembly of families in one city without a control group (Notably, the study was almost devoid of participants between the ages of 22 and 40, a key internet-audience). Many blamed the <I>Times</I> extending the conclusions of a limited study much too far, for playing into a cultural suspicion of new technology. "What about a study that says you experience slightly <I>less</I> loneliness by going online?" asks Katelyn McKenna, a noted NYU researcher on the Internet and psychology. "How much attention would that get?"

But these findings were just the first chapter. Though the HomeNet trial concluded in 1998, the mountains of data they culled are still being analyzed. As incendiary as these initial conclusions might have been, HomeNet is unprecedented, and the results of the research — with some still to come -- are critical for beginning a larger cultural conversation about the impact of the Internet. In the study’s defense, Kraut argues that they openly admitted to its limitations. "We had a trade-off," he says. "We had an in-depth look at a local sample rather than a superficial look at a broadly representative sample."

More to the point, the fervor over these debut findings misses one of HomeNet’s most important and irrefutable findings about computers: teenagers were obsessed with them. TK hours spent online. And, as the next round of HomeNet research shows, this interest is not an isolated phenomenon, without consequence. It is a catalyst. A trigger.

III.

Sara Kiesler decides to show me a videotape. The sedate, thoughtful Kiesler, a professor in the Social and Decision Sciences Department at CMU, is the primary author of the upcoming HomeNet study titled "Troubles with the Internet: The Dynamics of Help at Home." Kiesler has been studying the impact of electronic communication since the 1980s, using businesses as her test subjects. At this point, she’s done enough work on psychological impact of email that she knows how to use "; )" tactically.

The researchers made the videotape during their "ethnographic" visits to the homes for HomeNet. It’s as if they were anthropologists come to study a tribe puzzling out a device that had, almost literally, fallen into their laps. The researchers arrived in teams -- "someone would be a notetaker, someone would do the camera, and somebody would ask questions," says Kiesler — and they would probe the family about a range of issues: their day, lifestyle, what they did and didn’t like about computers. Then they would accompany them to the computer and ask them to show a typical, day-in-the-life scenario, how they used it, what they enjoyed most. But the typical scenario consistently looked like confusion and failure. "What we kept finding was that people had trouble," says Kiesler. "It happened almost every place we went."

The videotape runs through an all too familiar parade of bafflement. In one segment, a mom and child sit in front of the screen, staring down an hourglass. "Wait a minute, we’re connected. No we’re not connected," the mother says, then tentatively: "We’re idle now." Another woman, when asked what the computer is doing, responds: "I don’t know — this is what happens sometimes. I don’t think it’s frozen… I can hear it humming." On principle, the researchers would not step in if there was a problem; observing the kinds of crises that the HomeNet participants encountered — and their response to them — without effecting them was precisely the point. The tape is often hilarious and sometimes hard to watch, particularly when human naivete collides with electronic indifference. One exasperated mom says flatly to the camera, "The garbage can is full to bursting and I don’t know how to empty it." The tape also records one man entering the words "community development" into a search engine. He gets 58 <I>million</I> results. "At this point, I just start scanning," he explains.

To Kiesler, these troubles represent an epidemic of helplessness, the shadow to all the innovations that the computer has wrought. "People just gave up — they felt ‘I’m not good at computers,’" she says. "The lower end of the people were quitting for reasons like ‘I couldn’t get a dial-tone or get connected,’ and all they needed to do was to call us and we would have helped them. But they didn’t even know how to diagnose the problem." Eighty-nine percent of the households requested help in the first year of the study, a figure so high it suggests far more about the oversights of hardware and software companies than the handiness of the households. One of Kiesler’s strongest conclusions is that tech firms are deeply disconnected with their own customers and need to become much better listeners (She recommends they kick their support staff into surveying their own customers — before there are problems).

The tape is fascinating not only what it documents, but for what is very noticeably absent: there are no teenagers complaining at all. In fact, judging by the footage, the desperation seems to be the province strictly of adults. The reason why reveals a lot about the social texture of technology, and begins to explain the origins of the "teen guru" phenomenon.

It started with phonecalls. Over the course of the HomeNet trial, the researchers were blindsided by the amount of technical assistance needed by the families. Kiesler attests that once the study started, all the resources had to go into support for the families. "I got a call one Thanksgiving Eve — my whole family is there, the turkey was in the oven -- and one of our HomeNet participants called me and said, I’ve got family over here and I can’t get my computer to work, get over here please!"

While an enormous number of homes relied on the help-desk CMU established, Kiesler found that more than half of the individual family members never called. Some were afraid to call, some simply abandoned the machine, others got through with the help of friends and family members. Of the other half that did call, Kiesler noticed an interesting pattern. In most families, one person made almost all the contacts with the help desk in that first year of the study. You might expect that the people who called would be those who needed help the most — new computers users, for example. This makes perfect sense — if you already know how to drive, then you probably wouldn’t call up the DMV for advice. But in fact, she found the opposite was true. Those who called the help-line were those who knew the most. Good drivers, it seemed, wanted to know how to drive even better.

As unlikely as this might seem, it’s a common trait in humans: if you already know something about a subject, then you’re more likely to want to know more about it. Social science research in politics, consumer behavior, and the diffusion of innovations reveals that knowledge "accrues most to those who already have a substantial amount of it," writes Kiesler. "People who are more interested and skilled in a domain are more likely to realize what they do not know, are more likely to have the confidence to challenge themselves and to stretch the limits of their expertise." Plot this expertise on a graph, and you’d see the majority of us lingering near the bottom — some of us know nothing, others know a little bit but not enough to tip us into becoming smart about it. As technical knowledge grows, though, it doesn’t just inch forward. It feeds on itself. It accelerates.

This finding aptly describes one of the stereotypes of the contemporary workplace: the lone tech-wizard who visits the office cubicles, ministering to wounded printers and crashed hard-drives with a kind of alchemical mastery. Our cluelessness is common enough, but so is his frustration. We wonder how he knows so much, and he wonders why we can’t learn to fix it ourselves. In the workplace, these savvy folks are deemed "information gate-keepers" by social scientists because they manage and administer technical advice inside an organization. They are where technical knowledge concentrates. Typically, these gate-keepers have more seniority over the people they help, more ties outside the organization, and more "authority and centrality than those to whom they pass advice," writes Kiesler. They are the interface between the workplace and the outside world.

Kiesler had expected to see the same role reflected in the HomeNet study: that computer know-how would aggregate in one person, most likely the dad — most often the household technician -- who would have more seniority and ties outside the family. Except, what she found was an almost precise inversion. In 31 of 54 households (54%) with teenagers, the person who called the help desk the most was a teen. In these homes, knowledge inside the family trickled up. Those with the least seniority claimed the most authority. And gender-wise, girls helped their parents as much as boys. Within each intergenerational paradigm, boys tended to give advice to women (38% of all boy-woman pairs) and men (48% of all boy-man pairs) almost equally. Girls tended to give more help to women (49% of all girl-woman pairs) than to men (17% of all girl-man pairs). Kiesler writes this off a marginal stastical difference, though it does suggest about the difficulty fathers might have in receiving technical advice from their daughters. Extrapolating by Kiesler’s research, future generations of dads will just need to get used to it.

Kiesler dubbed the crackerjacks "teen gurus," not only because they good at driving the computer, but because they became consulted by the rest of the family. "Teens technical expertise shifted intellectual authority in the family," writes Kiesler. "Gurus were admired for their abilities…and sometimes they were held in awe." She quotes one interview with a teenage girl about her relationship with her dad:

<I>"Sometimes if I’m not doing anything, I’m just like washing dishes or something…he can’t access something, I can help him. Sometimes, [he says] ‘I know what I’m doing’ (she lifts her eyebrows, indicating skepticism). I don’t know, maybe he gets upset that I know more about this than he does…[It] gives me the upper hand."</I>

Another 41-year old mother turned consistently to her son for guidance:

<I>"I have done [that] yet because I need Bobby [teenage son] to help me do that…But Ok, so now where were we, Bobby? Do I have to unconnect and reconnect? What do I do?"<I>

Amber Jackson’s experience with her mom, Debbie Jackson, reflects a similar switch in expertise. Amber’s mom had actually had exposure to a computer before, at work as an international operator for AT&T in Pittsburg. But the machine still eluded her. "I picked and I probed it and then I would call Amber over and say, ‘Amber, can you turn this thing on for me?’" says Debbie. "If there’s ever anything I don’t understand, I go to Amber for support." Even though Amber’s off at college now, she still comes home on weekends to help her mom. But Debbie’s confusion is no longer confined to the home. At work recently, Debbie was struggling to pull up some documents in PowerPoint and failing. "My boss’s 11 year-old daughter just went right up to the computer and — zip, zip, zip — she pulled them right up," she says. "When I see young people like that, I’m not jealous, I’m just out of my league. You can tell it’s just a whole different generation."

In some ways, this authority-inversion shouldn’t seem strange — it’s as familiar to us as the expression "whiz kid." But what draws teens like Amber, or this 11 year-old, so intensely to the computer? What exactly are they gaining? Kiesler argues that the reason teens are online so much is partly because they have more time for recreational computing than adults — except that, of course, the aged have just as much free time but you don’t see them online in the same numbers. A bigger factor is that teens are at an age when social experimentation is key, suggests Kraut, and the impulse that keeps them glued to the phone receiver keeps them plugged in. They also have less fear of hurting the machine. One grandmother quoted in Kiesler’s home interviews explains that she thought she "broke something" when the computer didn’t work. Teens, on the other hand, are technologically impervious. "They’ve grown up with computers, so it doesn’t seem new to them," Kiesler says. "If you look at risk-taking in teens, they are less fearful about the consequences of their actions and are more exploratory."

Surprisingly, the world they’re finding online looks a lot like they’re already living in. New surveys of newsgroups conducted by researcher Katelyn McKenna at NYU show that the majority of teens spend the bulk of their time talking with friends they already know from school. So while they might be risk-takers, what they’re most often seeking on the Internet is the comfort of the familiar. Even their new online relationships are surprisingly constant -- In a two year study from 1997 to 1999, McKenna found that 57% of the on-line relationships formed by teens were still intact two years later, and that 34% of those became closer.

Beyond these social implications, there’s another reason why teens may be drawn to computers, one which Kiesler’s own research suggests but doesn’t articulate, the same reason Shawn Fanning found himself hooked on code. If it’s true that gaining expertise in the computer translates into a position of authority inside a family, who better than the most disenfranchised of its members to master it? Kiesler points out that the emergence of the household guru both encouraged and <I>discouraged</I> computer use and skill-development by others in the family; because of their advanced skill, the gurus started controlling the use of the computer. They set up protocols for how the computer would be organized, when it could be used, and even disassembled the machines. One kid changed the error sound so that the machine burped up an expletive whenever someone made a mistake. They made their knowledge as public as possible. They flaunted it.

Teenagers get obsessed with all kinds of things. And no doubt, at a time when you’re surrounded by a world of rules, curfews, and status symbols, being able to trump one parents’ technology is becoming not only a particular pleasure, but a kind of rite of passage. Kiesler draws a parallel between these teen gurus of the microchip milieu and immigrant families; couples would arrive and send their kids to American schools. Soon enough, their children would be fluent and telling them, "This is the way we do things in America, mom," says Kiesler. "We drive at 16, we go out on dates." According to Kiesler, teenagers are instrumental for making the transition to the new culture. They are the bridges to what will be.

Social scientists who study immigration call this "cultural brokering." When families undergo rapid change, teenagers become intermediaries between the home and the outside world, says Andrew Fuligni, a professor of developmental psychology at New York University. They learn the language, the new rules, unburdened by traditional rules and the sense of what they <I>can’t</I> do. But Fuligni points out that concomitant with this power is a sense of responsibility, one that native families may ignore. "Many American born parents emphasize their child’s autonomy and want them to find their own path," he says. "With immigrant families, there is in kids a sense of obligation to the parents." These duties offer a vital structure to their lives. "All of the research shows that immigrant families look better psychologically and behaviorly than American-born families," he says. "People’s typical reaction is that there is a lot of pressure in these families, but immigrant kids have a sense of purpose and a role to play, rather than a sense of ennui."

Thirteen year-old Ilya (Eli) Anopolsky is two kinds of bridges — the child of an immigrant and a child of technology. He and his mom came to the United States, Bensonhurst specifically, from the Ukraine when he was two years-old. He’s a sweet kid with a fixation on swords and penchant for programming languages. At this point, he’s got HTML, DHTML, and Javascript down. Last year, he went to entrepreneur summer camp organized by the National Foundation on Teaching Entrepreneurship -- where he was the youngest person in the class -- and won the award for the best business plan for a web-design firm he cooked up. (Cash prize: $120 bucks.) "We went inside Razorfish," says Eli, referring to a premiere New York internet design firm. "I was trying to see what they have there, because they are the competition."

On the Saturday afternoon I met with him and his mom, Kiesler’s observations about teen guru’s rise in authority and independence were inescapable. Eli now has a design company called DevotionInc.com, and he’s worked on over 50 websites. Most recently, he designed a site for SwordsOnline.com in exchange for $5000 worth of swords. The owner of the site doesn’t know Eli is 13 and has never spoken to him, he says. "If she knew I was 13, she would have never given me the swords." Eli and his mom bicker some over how much time he should be spending on the computer. "It worries me," says his mom Anna. "Sometimes I have to get up at 3 to 5 am, and I have to turn it off because he falls asleep at the computer." But Eli wins out in these arguments, not just because he’s got an incredibly strong sense of self. It’s because Anna believes he may be stepping into the next American way of life. "It’s like two sides of coin — I’m really happy that he’s interested in something," Anna explains. "But I don’t know where the margin of reasonable use should be. So I’m trying to be a little soft on him."

As a teen guru, though, Eli is under considerable pressure. "People expect me to be able to do too much — my mom, my teachers -- they want me to fix their computers," he says. One teacher gave him 100 on his report card because he wired up the computer room at the school. "I think he’s too young for the pressure," adds Anna.

These pressures aren’t entirely unprecedented, says Nancy Darling, a researcher on human development and family studies at Penn State. She points to Margaret Mead’s 1928 classic study of adolescence "Coming of Age in Samoa," which examined, in part, the ways that cultures deal with change. Mead identified three types of societies: "pre-figurative," "co-figurative," and "post-figurative." "Pre-figurative" societies describe relatively stable worlds where children are socialized by their parents into firm ideas of how life should be lived. "Co-figurative" cultures are ones in balance with change — parents and kids teach each other. But in "post-figurative" societies, ones undergoing rapid technological change, parents have less and less to offer the kids because their knowledge isn’t relevant. Kids, like Eli, are forced to come up with their own life-models. Peers socialize each other in a destabilizing circuit. "Kids’s values become very different from the parents and they will not obey," says Darling. "They have lots of specific knowledge but no context to put them in."

As it stands, teen gurus may experience increased isolation for their knowledge. Michael Patterson, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon and researcher in the field of expertise, is currently studying the psychological effects of specialization. His work thus far, drawn mostly from analysis of the initial HomeNet sample group, indicates that experts tend to feel more socially withdrawn, even independently of their use of the Internet.

Patterson explains that the findings imply that technical sophistication is a kind of one-way street: the more you know, the more trouble you have understanding why a novice can’t figure it out, which leads to increased isolation. These disjunctions are annoying for Eli, but teens may very well be seeking that out. "We were joking the other day about the way that teenagers always want the room in the basement or the attic — where no one else wants to be — as a way of distancing themselves," says Kiesler. This, in a way, accords with our older mythologies about what a teen geek looks like. We’ve come to think of computers as the domain of geeks, a remote colony of IS guys and hackers down the corridor.

But Shawn Fanning played baseball, football, and soccer before he got hooked on Windows API code to design Napster. Amber Jackson is so social that, in the hour interview we conducted on campus, friends of hers dropped by so regularly that I realized she just had lots and lots of friends. Both Shawn and Amber illustrate just how difficult it can be to label these well-adjusted, young turks of technology. With the advent of instant messaging and huge, hive-like networks like Napster itself, computers can be as social as cocktail parties — and attract the same kinds of extroverts who know how to dominate the room in the real world.

And more and more, the teen gurus don’t keep their expertise inside the family. Naturally, they leverage it to bigger advantage: they start businesses. Dotcoms have thus far been the niche of ambitious twentysomethings, but universities are now discovering a swell of teenage CEOs. In a precedent-setting decision, Harvard recently overturned its long-standing ban on student businesses run from dorm rooms. Why? Because phenomenally qualified high school seniors found themselves looking elsewhere when they couldn’t take their companies with them to college. It’s not just a relaxing of principles. Harvard now caters to greenhorn mavens with a new program called the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center, to teach students about venture-capital funding and the tricks of starting start-ups. The center itself was conceived by a Harvard senior who had been a programmer since 11 years-old.

Shawn Fanning may be the purest and most celebrated example of this precociousness in a culture ripe to exploit it. Jacqui Thorpy is on her way there. Like Amber, Thorpy also attends Carnegie Mellon, where she’s a sophomore, but she’s already operating on global terrain. Thorpy is an incredibly self-possessed 19 year-old. She has a black belt in Okinawin Go-Ju-Ru Karate, I learn from an informational bio she hands me. She has also competed in ski and swim tournaments, and enjoys "white water rafting, canoeing, scuba diving, and water skiing." She too "wasn’t a geek" in high school — she the was "the opposite." Like Eli, She’s been running websites since she was 14, starting with one called TeenFashionPage.com. I’ve met with Thorpy because her business plan for her newest project TeenFx.com, a "niche portal" for kids 13-19, garnered a favorable write-up in the Wall Street Journal. Thorpy is just about to wrap-up her first round of venture capital financing. "There’s not a whole lot I can say about it," she says, "except that it went really smoothly."

At this point, Thorpy spends a good deal of time tending to the site. She’s got a staff of senior management in New York, all adults. The site content, in subject areas like "Health," "Body & Soul," and the somewhat bold "Sex & Love" (appreciate the order of those two), gets produced by teens which she manages. School, meanwhile, has become a training ground. All of her classes are designed to take TeenFx.com into account. "I’m taking entrepreneurial topics, that focus on raising investment," she tells me. "I’m also taking organizational behavior, how to run a business, and professional writing — how to read resumes, memos, the stuff that I need to know." This is what gurus do: she’s learning as fast as she can. (Near the end of the conversation, I get to experience the exercising of teen-guruhood first hand. Since I’ve first got my cellular phone, I’ve wanted to be able to see the caller ID before having to answer the call. I’ve scanned the instruction manual multiple times and I still don’t know how. I figured I’d give Thorpy a try. Naturally, Thorpy knows how. "I just figured that out the other day. Let me see." She takes the phone and, fiddles with three buttons, and voila.)

But there is something disconcerting about this confidence compacted into somebody so young, and it’s not simply the shift in authority that is present in the interview itself. In a way, it’s the shadow of teen guruhood itself. Thorpy, like may teenagers, has lots of different expertises, sports for one. But only her company TeenFx.com requires her to manage adults and other teens, pretty much seven days a week. This isn’t just a lemonade stand taken to the Nth degree — Thorpy understands marketing, spin, and even how to glide through an interview with the press. Thorpy hasn’t just trumped her parents — she’s become one. She’s the parent of a child called TeenFx.com, and it demands constant attention.

HomeNet’s Kiesler suggests some of the dangers of this acceleration in the conclusion of her study. In it, she notes the emergence of "teen gurus" may be further blurring the boundaries of childhood and adulthood. Thorpy has no reservation about the blurring. "I want to develop TeenFX into a large, well-known company known around the world," Thorpy tells me straight-off. "I want to go public within a year."

But she could stand to be a little more wary of that acceleration. Shawn Fanning, out in San Mateo, is precisely where Thorpy would like to be, and his world is starting to split at the seams from the pressure. At the time that we speak, he hasn’t slept for 24 hours because he’s been up coding. What he wants most is to go backwards, reclaim just a little bit of the shelter of being a kid. "I’m so burned out right now," he says. "I’m still able to some work done just because it’s so important. But in reality, I’m dying just to go back to school to have some fun." Teen gurus may be our best bridges in times of technologic change, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are prepared to withstand every kind of weight. "It’s a total rollercoaster" at Napster right now, says Fanning. "And pretty soon you break down."