I suspect that teenagers and young adults are not using message boards to much extent. I conducted interviews in 2001 with people who participated on political Usenet discussions, on Yahoo! current events message boards, and on Yahoo! politics chat. The average age of my Usenet interviewees was 41, message board interviewees 34, and chat 31. There's a referrence to this finding in the methods section in a JCMC article from awhile back: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol8/issue3/stromergalley.html. The topic may affect the average age, though. If I had done interviews in popular culture-oriented discussion spaces, it's possible the average age may have been lower (but that's an open question). As someone who was recently on a panel at AoIR in which I was talking about chat and the other three presenters were talking about blogs, I have some concern that the advent of new channels for interaction lead researchers to jump to studying that new channel when we still don't have a full understanding of the old channels. I must confess to feeling a little fuddy-duddy talking about that "old" channel of chat when blogging is now the rage. And, I suspect, researchers of Internet-channeled phenomena are likely fairly taken with new technologies as they emerge; we are early adopters, which might incline us to study the latest, hottest new thing rather than continuing to study older channels. ~Jenny Stromer-Galley jstromer@albany.edu

I've been asked to find out among other things what kinds of Internet bulletin boards are most used by young people and what proportion of young people visit them. I thought this kind of thing would be fairly easy to find out - after all bulletin boards/message boards/usenet were among the most studied forms of Internet use in the early days. But I am finding it surprisingly difficult to get this information as current surveys like the Pew and OxIS ones don't seem to track bulletin board use or virtual community participation at all (except insofar as it might be included in uses like "seeking sport information"). Is it because kids these days are all just using IM and writing Xanga blogs or do we only think this because we don't ask them about this kind of use any more?

Can anyone help with my statistical questions? And more generally does anyone else agree that as we keep chasing each new phenomenon (file sharing, IM, blogging, social network software) we risk losing track altogether of still extant and important practices (affinity group message board or mailing list use for example - or MUD use?) If these uses are indeed being displaced by other uses shouldn't we at least have a crack at measuring them so we can be sure they are gone so we can chart their decline as well as their rise?

--- David Brake, Doctoral Student in Media and Communications, London