The X/Y factor

Almost all of them seemed at ease in their skins, as if they'd been asked 1,000 times before about the minutiae of their lives. And the audience members fired questions at them. What would they most like to do with their cellphones? What video games do they play?

These racially and economically diverse teenagers seem more assured than your average teenager lolling around the mall or MySpace. "Kids who agree to do panels are more poised than normal," allows Buckingham, though she does point out that kids today are more "poised than kids 10 years ago. Kids are more savvy, and more sophisticated, and grow up more quickly. I'm always amazed even if you go to Indiana or Wisconsin you hear a lot of the same things you do in Beverly Hills."

Still, the kids jazz the audience; it's like each marketer is finally able to hook up directly with the power source. One can begin to see how Buckingham gets some of her ideas about a whole generation with the attention span of gnats and the vulnerability of children who've been handed most everything by their doting parents.

As Lauren, a 21-year-old from Loyola Marymount pithily summed up her peers: "My generation is always trying to find the easy way out, not the right way. We have a different idea of what passes as a work ethic. We freak out if we make mistakes."

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rachel.abramowitz@latimes.com