Even love comes by computer: Teri Wolfe of Sherman Oaks says that her teenage daughter met her first boyfriend several years ago when a mutual friend set them up by giving each the other's e-mail address. "Before they ever went out, they knew each other from talking online," she says.
Kids also use websites such as MySpace, Friendster and Facebook to socialize with old friends and make new ones. (Although the sites require users and posters to be over 16, there is no mechanism to check ages.)
The middle and high school sets usually stick to those they already know. "It would be considered kind of shady to just meet some random person," says a recent high school graduate who lives on the Westside.
Come college, though, the sites are a way to pre-meet a new crowd. Weeks before the graduate left for Harvard this fall, she and her future roommates had found each other and "were e-mailing every day. We figured out who was going to bring the TV, and which movies. We already knew each other."
Others use the websites to bring friends from the past back into the fold. Sara Goldman, 19, of Laguna Beach had always wondered about the girlfriend she'd lost track of when she changed high schools five years ago.
In Chicago, during her first year of college, she says, "I looked her up on Facebook. Her picture and profile popped up; I sent her a message and she wrote me this really long letter. It's cool that we're keeping in touch again."
Some kids expand their social circles through multiplayer gaming, Web-based games played in groups with others who live anywhere from the other side of town to the other side of the planet.
Bill Nail of Mission Viejo says his older son, Jay, 15, "is constantly on the phone conferencing with at least two friends from other neighborhoods, each of whom is playing the same computer game while they're talking. I'll go by the room and hear, 'Eddy, behind you!'
"As it's gone on, I've noticed that he and these kids, who don't go to school together, will make complex arrangements to meet," Nail says. "Their time playing the games together online produced some solid 'regular' friendships."
And preteens frequently use the information available about those in their networks to social advantage.
One mother watched her 12-year-old daughter research her new soccer team, a group of girls drawn from much more affluent neighborhoods than hers, using the team roster, MapQuest and real estate websites that told her what home in their neighborhoods cost.
