Joe LaSala, 15, is an athletic and personable junior at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. His sister, Christina, 16, is a creative and no less personable senior at Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

They are bright kids, considerate and articulate. Only clumsy generalisation can put them in that box, “the iPod Generation”, but there they are.

In particular, what separates them from the generation of business people – people like their parents – is that they have grown up with the internet fully present. They would not know what it was like to go without e-mail – it has become their habitat.

Joe is blasé about information technology, but he’s a competent and generous Accidental SysAdmin who kindly supports his sister – and others.

He says he’s on the internet about an hour a day, and you sense he could do without most of it except ESPN.com and, maybe, Facebook, the social networking site...maybe. He does use the web occasionally for homework.

Christina says people around her spend a lot of time on the internet, and that Facebook and similar destinations can be addictive and time-wasters.

The siblings are not the rabid multi-taskers you read about. One senses proportion in Joe’s habit of listening to his iPod only in the gym or on an aircraft. You get the balance in Christina’s take-it or leave-it attitude to proliferation of rock band pages on MySpace, although it’s clear her interest in music is intense and nuanced.

She finds Facebook “a really cool tool”. It seems to reflect a higher sense of community and a deeper understanding of what kinds of information engages their interest. It may reflect how young people would like to be portrayed and connected.

Christina acknowledges there are many tools for communication now and that each has its role for her. E-mail is the most used application on her Mac. She has reduced her use of instant messaging because it is too easy to eat up time: “You end up getting on there and just talking for hours on end about pointless things. It just eats up time like no other. But everybody I know has an instant message account and uses it regularly.”

The teenagers are not holding multi-party teleconferences yet and so do not know about Skype. They will probably only become aware of Voice over IP services when they take over their own domestic phone bills. For calls – to friends and parents mostly – they rely overwhelmingly on the cellphone. They do have phones on the wall of their dorm rooms, but use those rarely.

When it comes to entertainment Christina lights up. She says of the iPod: “It’s very appealing in a lot of ways. You know, the ad campaign for the iPod...the look of the iPod...everybody’s pretty into it.”

She feels it is an attractive lifestyle object and considers the elegant design of its interface justifies its popularity.

When her mother and her aunt were recently playing their old vinyl LP collection for her – Jimi Hendrix, Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, Cat Stevens, Gladys Knight – Christina busied herself writing down artists and titles of all these classic tunes she only recognised faintly, mostly from TV commercials or film soundtracks.

Later that evening, she went online and purchased many of the songs she heard that day, one at a time, on iTunes.

Joe and Christina are not particularly geeky kids, nor do they have a special interest in the technology itself or how it works, but they are avid users.

They are typical teenagers, in that they care about what the products and facilities do for them, how they make communication easy and how they create access to information and people.

Neither reads a manual when it comes to figuring out how software and websites work. Joe says once you have learned one environment, all the rest come easily: it is just a matter of pushing buttons and trial and error, he says.

Joe’s realism about the internet and technology is unmistakeable: “Basically everybody is looking to do something easier... faster... quicker. You can now find anything with the click of a button.”

Planning to work via the internet

For Lee Jung-hoon, being connected seems like a matter of life and death. “I can’t live without my mobile phone,” says the 16-year-old Seoul student.

His phone has become an integral part of life – he sends 100-150 text messages a day and has a conversation with his classmates through text messages during class via his slick Samsung Anycall sliding phone he bought in January for its functionality. It includes a high-resolution camera and a music player, allowing him to leave his MP3 at home.

He took a job distributing promotional brochures on streets to buy the phone, which cost Won210,000 ($230).

Already he is dreaming of an upgrade – to a digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) phone on which he could watch TV.

But Jung-hoon’s tech-addiction is not limited to his mobile. Asked whether he could survive without the internet, he says: “I could try to endure the situation, but only for a few days.”

The digital generation of South Korea, the most wired country in the world, has grown up surrounded by technology and seems perpetually connected.

“During summer vacation, I spent 10-12 hours a day in front of a computer,” Jung-hoon says. “As soon as I turn my computer on I check my e-mail, then visit Naver to answer questions posted by other users.”

By answering questions on Naver, Korea’s biggest search engine, he can earn points. “I have accumulated 1,000 points,” he says proudly. His ultimate goal is to become a “knowledgeable man”, the honorable title among internet search geeks that he can be awarded when his points reach a certain amount.

He can even earn real as well as virtual cash online.

“I also earn pocket money online by participating in paid surveys or buying cheaply from a game item trading site and then re-selling. There are lots of sites out there that enable you to earn money.”

Like almost all Korean teenagers and 20-somethings, Jung-hoon also socialises online, through Cyworld, Korea’s version of MySpace, the social networking website. Cyworld counts more than a third of Korean adults as members.

On his Cyworld “minihompy” (mini homepage) he uploads his latest pictures taken on his mobile phone and checks if his friends have left messages for him.

And of course, no computer session is complete without an hour or two playing the internet games – wildly popular in Korea.

In his parents’ eyes these hours are spent doing nothing. But Jung-hoon sees the future. He wants to be a software programmer and says his internet use is preparing him for that career.

In fact, unlike his classmates, instead of going to “cramming school” in the evenings, he watches educational video clips on the Education Broadcasting System internet site for two or three hours a day, which he describes as cost-and time-efficient way of studying.

Having lived this “perpetually connected” lifestyle since he was nine, he has high expectations for his future workplace. Rather than being there from 9am-6pm, he wants to stay at home and work via the internet and talk to his seniors or co-workers through instant messaging.

“Do I really need to physically be in a company?” he asks.

But his standards for workplace technology will be high – he has no time for clunky intranets and firewalled sites.

“I can easily disable a firewall but I would definitely talk to my boss about a bad intranet site. Such problems should not be happening by the time I go to work.”