The vast majority of teens in the United States, 87% of those aged 12 to 17, now use the internet. That amounts to about 21 million youth who use the internet, up from roughly 17 million when we surveyed this age cohort in late 2000. Not only has the wired share of the teenage population grown, but teens’ use of the internet has intensified. Teenagers now use the internet more often and in a greater variety of ways than they did in 2000. There are now approximately 11 million teens who go online daily, compared to about 7 million in 2000.

The vast majority of teens in the United States, 87% of those aged 12 to 17, now use the internet. That amounts to about 21 million youth who use the internet, up from roughly 17 million when we surveyed this age cohort in late 2000. Not only has the wired share of the teenage population grown, but teens’ use of the internet has intensified. Teenagers now use the internet more often and in a greater variety of ways than they did in 2000. There are now approximately 11 million teens who go online daily, compared to about 7 million in 2000.

EAS028
 

"A legacy flaw in the latest version of the multi-protocol IM client is said by the company to be of 'extremely low risk', but could be part of a worrying trend"

PDF/text available

Baron begins her analysis by situating instant messaging as a form of computer-mediated communication and attempting to create a profile for IM communications among undergraduate students.  She first reviews the linguistic differences in spoken speech: social vs. informative speech and standard vs. non or sub-standard usage by men and women.  In terms of written language, she reviews concepts related to personal letter writing and studies about gender identification of online texts. She analyzed the IM data for turn taking, sequences, conversation length, and lexical issues to determine possible effects of gender.  She found no differences in turn taking, but found that women had greater overall conversation length and length of ending sequences.  From the lexical analysis, Baron found that men used more contracted forms of words (e.g. "I'm" instead of "I am") than women.  Most interesting to me, and not at all surprising given my real-world online experiences, was the finding that women used more emoticons than men in the IM conversations.

Thanks to Annette for this page.

This very recent compilation (2005) contains 11 scholarly articles on the subject of adolescent girls and their use of the web, from perspectives of age, gender, ethnicity, and sociology/media theory.  With regard to the subject of teenage girls and fandom, I am interested in Scodari's work on the negotiation of age and gender in TV fan newsgroups, since I am also discussing women's speech in such groups.  Mazzarella continues this topic with her discussion of the "cultural economy" of teenage girls fandom on the internet.  Finally, Thiel takes on the description of the construction of identity and gender identification for girls over instant messaging, which she describes as both a cultural and an experimentation space.  While this text does not discuss specific linguistic topics, it does serve as an interesting sociological reference for young women's behavior on the internet, which could influence or inform linguisitic decisions online.

article reporting on study done about IM use by college students...focus on gender differences and speech patterns

An online IM application that allows users to access their Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and GoogleTalk accounts without downloading the clients.