Just as the arrival of television revolutionised Bermuda 50 years ago, cellular telephones and wireless Internet access have permanently altered the Island's youth culture.

Shane Mora, Marketing Director for Digicel Bermuda, points to one highly public indicator in Hamilton: "After school, the Digicel store on Church Street is a big hangout, and you can get groups of up to a 100 kids around there. There's a real buzz, with kids looking in the window at the different types of phones."

Dreaming of owning the latest cellular telephone may strike many older Bermudians as bizarre. As Mr. Mora put it, "We've come a long way from skipping ropes and playing with jacks."

Nowadays the BlackBerry is king, as Mr. Mora saw recently when he received a new prototype model.

"It was only after a matter of days of introducing it," he recalled, before he began to see "kids as young as seven, eight or nine" sporting the latest model of BlackBerry. In this case it was the coveted BlackBerry 9700, which is described as a high-end mobile device. "I notice kids with Blackberries on the ferry every morning," Mr. Mora said.

Blackberries do not come cheaply, but the newer models have features such as BlackBerry Messenger which have proven extremely popular with younger people. Since the BBM instant message service is available only between BlackBerry devices, the application and its supporting hardware go literally hand in hand. Schools rules have had to adapt accordingly.

Digicel Bermuda was unable to supply an estimate of how many customers are minors, or of what products are used the most by particular age-brackets of younger customers. "We really don't have that information," Mr. Mora said. "The reason is that for somebody who isn't 18 years or older, the account has to be in an adult's name. The only thing to go with is non-quantitative. You do see lots of young people topping up with Flexcards and with Blackberries out and about on the streets."

He added: "We see lots of parents opening accounts for their kids."

During a recent stroll around the Hamilton Bus Terminal, groups of young Bermudians could be seen glued to Blackberries and other mobile devices. Mobile Internet access is especially prized.

With the exponential growth of the Internet in the mid-1990s, the service is rightly seen as ubiquitous by Bermudians who weren't born at the time. How does a screen-obsessed culture of texting, Facebooking and tweeting affect those of school age?

In the words of Dr. Guy Fowle, Psy.D, a registered psychologist who works with children and adults: "There's a lot of noise going on — they're exposed to a different threshold of it."

He added: "What strikes me the most is that kids have to process so much more information than of a factual kind. From my point of view, how as a parent you can help a kid is how to deal with that adaptively — what judgments to attend to and what not to attend to; what's important and what's not."

Although many parents might not be as up to speed as their children on the latest mobile technology or social networking craze, Dr. Fowle said families stood to benefit from talking about "what information is pivotal in forming your beliefs and attitudes, and what is it that's affecting kids the most."

Parents can understand their children better just by developing a familiarity with the technology they use to communicate.

Older, adult newcomers to the Internet may find its bombardment of images and moving messages excruciatingly irritating, whereas young Bermudians are accustomed to it and, crucially, have come to expect it.

In a discussion of how book-reading might foster a greater attention-span, Dr. Fowle pointed out: "The Internet is so multi-sensory. You don't have to use your imagination much, to elaborate on something or to give it more meaning. With reading, you're left with filling it in. There's less room for that on the Internet.

"That's not always good, but there may be positive things about it. It doesn't rule out the Internet. Even if you think about some of the games — there are long-term skills that are learned there. There are games where you're saving up and, say, building a house, that are related to actual life skills."

Writing as a skill has been profoundly affected, he said. "People aren't writing. If you're not doing a lot of writing but texting in shorthand — the act of writing language could become a dying part of our lives."

Many of the social issues confronting younger people remain intrinsically the same, but the wireless medium has an all-pervasive power.

"The drawback from that perspective is that somebody can always get to you," Dr. Fowle noted. "You could end up blocking it in some way, but there's still an insidiousness to it. Whereas in previous days, if you were getting bullied at school, it stayed in school."

Social networking sites gained notoriety with the rise of MySpace four years ago. Two years later, it had been eclipsed by Facebook. Facebook's own statistics tally its active users at "more than 500 million" — half of whom log onto the service on any given day. Over 150 million Facebook users access the site via mobile devices. The site is enormously popular with teenagers.

Dr. Fowle said: "With things like Facebook, people have different levels of sensitivity. So you have to be really careful you don't put anything out there that can stress people out." As an example, he pointed out that reporting you had "an OK day" as your status on Facebook can be interpreted in entirely different ways by different friends in a Facebook community.

While Facebook itself declined to provide estimates of its school-age number of members for this article, the company strictly enforces a minimum age limit of 13 for its users. Members whose accounts are found to have violated Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities will find their Facebook pages swiftly deleted.

Facebook also offers extensive safety advice for parents, educators and teen members, files of which can be accessed through the help centre found in the account settings of each user's Facebook page. Tips include "How your Teen Respond to Objectionable Content", guidelines for reporting abusive content and privacy advice for minors.

In its own time, television was perceived as a values-eroding menace to young people. TV arrived in Bermuda at the end of the 1950s. Thirty years later the advent of cable TV, simultaneously with new video games, rewrote the rules of how young people spent their time. From that perspective, cell phones and Internet socialising are just another phase in an ongoing wave, to which kids and educators will inevitably adapt — before the next fad.