For kids, friendships that click

Now kids' ability to reach out to those they've just met, hold onto those they know, and bring disparate parts of their lives together with the touch of a key has changed the boundaries and definition of social life. Online, kids and teens still act their age, whether warm, silly and spontaneous or bratty and viciously cruel. But they do so in a much more public way.

"In the past, a kid might have wanted to introduce a friend from home to a friend from camp, but the barriers, like taking time to write a letter or risking a phone call to a stranger, were too high," says Michael Thompson, a Massachusetts psychologist specializing in children and families and coauthor of "Best Friends/Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children."

"The ability to 'meet' in cyberspace in a very low-risk way, and the simple ease of it has given kids a real confidence in their networking ability."

What may be most stunning to adults who still remember the pre-computer era is that these skills don't seem to be learned -- they just appear one day, instinctively, and fully formed. Kids share Internet lingo and information with each other, and years of playing computer games make them utterly comfortable at the keyboard.

The most basic kid networking, the friend-to-friend introduction, takes place constantly: Two girls, newly graduated from different elementary schools and about to start different middle schools, discover that each knows someone who'll be in the other's class, and immediately turn on the computer and start making introductions.

A seventh-grader hands the new kid in school a dozen IM screen names, and within a week, she's "talking" to all her new classmates, even the ones she's too timid to approach in person.

Last year, Maddie Cane, 12, of Santa Monica met a neighbor's friend and liked her "so I asked for her e-mail address and screen name. We started writing, just talking about random things."

Cane also uses the computer to keep in touch with a friend from preschool who now lives in Massachusetts, and has e-mail-introduced her neighbor -- "my best friend at home" -- to her best friend from school, who lives in Malibu. The two girls write, but have never been face-to-face.

Friendship spreads internationally. "I took my niece, age 16, with me on a working trip to Japan, and she met three kids," says Thompson. "She shot some photos of them, and to reinitiate a relationship, all she had to do was send the digital photos to them over the Internet. But she went further. She posted the photos on her website, wrote about the kids, and in that way introduced her acquaintances in Japan to her circle in Chicago."