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It used to be that sending your teenager to his or her room was a punishment. Now, thanks to the technology glutting most teens' lives, it's more like a passport.

Even within the confines of their bedrooms, today's teens have access to more computers, more music, more cell phones, more video games and more television content than any generation before them. And while teenagers might see the high-tech revolution they've grown up in as a normal state of affairs, the implications for the world around them - the media, the entertainment industry, schools, parents - are massive and still mysterious.

Teenagers on average spend more than 72 hours a week in "connected activity," including watching TV, spending time online and talking or text-messaging on their cell phones, according to a recent Harrison Group study of teen habits. More and more, teen self-esteem is tied to how well they are able to communicate in this high-tech environment.

Lizzy Anderson, a 16-year-old Granite High School junior, figures "probably 85 percent" of her friends regularly text-message one another; in fact, she barely uses her cell phone to talk at all. "Sometimes I'll text-message my friend even though she's sitting right next to me," said Anderson, of South Salt Lake.

Combining her cell-phone text-messaging with accounts on social-networking Web sites MySpace and Xanga, she's able to track the comings and goings of her peer group much easier than generations past did.

"I have a friend who just barely got a cell phone, and it was always really, really hard to keep track of her last year when we wanted to go out and do stuff," Anderson said. "We'd call her and be like, 'Well, we tried to call her.' "

Steven Holman, an 18-year-old Delta High School senior, tried to delay getting sucked into text-messaging and MySpace, but eventually couldn't avoid either.

"I have a MySpace," Holman said. "It's just like the text-messaging; I used to make fun of people who did it, then someone talked me into doing one and now I can't stop looking at it."

Family-neglect effect: Jim Taylor conducted the study for Connecticut-based Harrison. The group's third such survey in the past four years tracked 1,000 teens nationwide in the fall. Among the more notable findings, according to Taylor:

* 59 percent of the teens surveyed are online every day.

* 68 percent have a personal Web site on MySpace, Facebook or a similar social-networking site.

* 67 percent have their own cell phones, and they spend an average of 39 minutes a day sending text messages.

Taylor said the increased, tech-related communication among teens, even if it's not face to face, has created a generation that is remarkably tightknit, as well as remarkably self-absorbed.

"It's a generation of people who can now define themselves as a celebrity in their own life, and they measure their achievement by the volume of relationships they've created," Taylor said, noting the propensity of many MySpacers to "collect" friends in vast numbers. "We've seen a strengthening, as more technology becomes available, of the bonds that tie together the generation."

Taylor has seen the "MySpace effect" in his 14-year-old daughter, noting that his study shows the teen generation's agility in dealing with new communication technology - whether it's through social-networking Web sites or text-messaging - often comes at the cost of participation in family life.

"[MySpace] is so time-consuming that it detracts from doing other things they should be dealing with, in particular the family," Taylor said. "Every kid now has the capacity to manage an entire universe with only partial inclusion of their family."

That's not quite true for Heather Robinson, a 17-year-old senior at Canyon High School in Cedar City. Her family shares two computers, one in the trailer next to her house where several of her siblings reside and one in the main house. At school, where she's an editor for the Canyon High newspaper, the district limits access to MySpace and outside e-mail. At home, her access to the online world is limited by having to share computer time.

Her parents usually don't really care about her time online, Robinson said. "But then all of a sudden, they'll be like, 'Hey, you've been talking to that person too long.' "

New gadgets, same talk: Lizzy Anderson's dad, Bill, 55, said his kids' online and cell-phone activities have yet to become a detriment to the family dynamic, although they are a source of "meaningful discussion" at home. From what he has observed of Lizzy's communication with her friends, teens today might have new tools to talk, but they're chatting about the same old things.

"The content of the communication is not any different than when I was a kid," Bill Anderson said. "But the connections are wired now instead of face-to-face. . . . I look at [Lizzy's] MySpace and . . . you can see what people are saying, and it doesn't look like anything more than the kinds of topics I was talking to my friends about when I was a kid, face to face. Now they just do it over the Internet."

Holman was able to talk his dad into getting him a cell phone when he was in eighth grade, selling it as a means for the family to communicate across expanses of its Delta farm. Now the senior, who plans to attend Brown University in Providence, R.I., in the fall, uses his cell number as his primary phone. His parents don't monitor his phone use or online activities much, but his younger sister doesn't have it so lucky.

"They haven't been too bad with me because I know how to use the computer better than they do," Holman said of his parents. "But my little sister, who's 15, my mom made her tell them her password so they could check her MySpace. My sister was mad because they didn't do that to me."

If recent statistics are any indication, teens' use of technology will only continue to climb, particularly where social-networking sites are concerned.

New York-based JupiterResearch's annual look at teen online activities released earlier this year shows twice as many teens age 13 to 17 started using sites such as MySpace in 2006 compared with 2005.

Analyst Mark Best said social networking ranked 13th of 15 choices in a list of teen online activities in 2005; in 2006, it rose to fifth, even though teens had more online options.

"Usually when we see movement and talk about trends, if we see a few years of, say, 5 to 10 percent growth, that's pretty dramatic and we would talk about that," Best said. "When you go from 24 percent [of kids using social-networking sites] to nearly 50 percent [in one year], that gives you a little context of what we're talking about."

Target that teen: Naturally, where teen trends go, business follows. From clothing manufacturers to electronics makers to fast-food restaurant chains, everyone is trying to reach teens in the world they live in.

Advertising agencies are increasingly aware of the changing ways in which teens communicate, said Nancy Panos Schmitt, a marketing professor at Westminster College in Salt Lake City.

"MySpace is extraordinarily important to people under the age of 25 as a regular means of communication, and to those trying to reach people at that level," Schmitt said.

"You must have that kind of communication with them."

Teen taste-makers met several months ago in Southern California to trade notes, and they overwhelmingly support Schmitt's assertion that new communication avenues and authenticity are the key to reaching kids who have grown jaded by traditional advertising efforts.

By the time the average American teen turns 18, she has been exposed to more than 1 million TV commercials and 25 million print ads. If companies want to keep up with the MySpace generation, they need to know how to target that audience better than ever before.

"At MTV, we are completely obsessed with what teens want," said MTV President Christina Norman, noting that "MTV spends more time on lifestyle research than any other brand in the world."

The network's research helps MTV constantly add new viewer-generated content and interactive programming to its globe-reaching network, Norman said, and moved MTV to create a "Virtual Laguna Beach," where viewers can create new versions of themselves, as well as the "Stew Channel," which allows viewers to share video clips À la YouTube and comment on each other's profiles À la MySpace.

Norman contends that "the idea of age-appropriate content and programming is all but extinct" thanks to the way teens use the Internet, but MTV knows the kids won't just buy into anything the channel puts on the air.

"The worst thing you can do is shovel out schlocky product and think teens will buy it," Norman said.

Matthew Swenson of American Apparel said the company doesn't even bother advertising its clothing on television. Instead, it relies on an extensive, interactive "virtual store" and an American Apparel community on Second Life, a virtual online community, to spread the word.

He, like so many others who aim to get teens' attention, recognizes a revolution is well under way.

And all are recognizing the wisdom of poet and singer Gil Scott-Heron, who wrote in 1970 that "the revolution will not be televised."

If things continue the way they're going, the revolution just might be texted and MyÂSpaced.

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* DAN NAILEN can be contacted at nailen@sltrib.com or 801-257-8613.