CHICAGO — Even when he's asleep, Scott Kearnan is hooked into the Internet. He just turns down the volume on his computer so he's not awakened by the "brrring" of a late-night instant message.
"It's become something for me that's almost like a telephone. I may not use it, but it could ring anytime," said Kearnan, 22, of Mendon, Mass., who works for a search-engine marketing company. "If I don't have it, I feel cut off."
For William Herbert, 21, the Internet has replaced newspapers and TV weather reports (he visits Weather.com every morning). He pays his bills online, registers for classes, books airline and train tickets, checks TV listings, buys movie tickets and gets travel directions.
"My parents, when we would go on road trips, would get a booklet with travel directions that were printed and mailed. Can you imagine? Mailing away for travel directions?" asked Herbert, a senior at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts who's studying business and highway design.
It's one small indication of just how far the Internet has come -- and how its existence is taken for granted by a generation of young Americans who "have not known life without it," said Malcolm Bird, head of America Online's services for kids and teens.
Young people are the savviest of the tech-savvy, as likely to demand a speedy broadband connection as to download music onto an iPod or upload digital photos to their Web logs.
The Internet has shaped the way they work, relax and even date. It's created a different notion of community for them and new avenues for expression that are, at best, liberating and fun -- but that also can become a forum for pettiness and, occasionally, criminal exploitation.
"Students are continuously connected to other students and friends and family in ways that older generations never would have imagined," said Steve Jones, chairman of the communications department at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a senior research fellow with the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
More than any previous generation, today's young people are plugged in -- all the time -- with a world of communication and information at their fingertips.
Take Suhas Sridharan, whose introduction to the Web came as a sixth-grader in South Carolina. In those days, she regularly visited the Disney website to play games. By high school, she was researching assignments online and checking her e-mail daily.
