ABSTRACT
There has been a vast explosion of community and youth publishing since the arrival of the World Wide Web as a cheap, adaptable and far-reaching publishing medium. Web sites now routinely include not just text and images, but sounds, speech, music, animations and video: young web-site authors are pushing at the frontiers of the medium and testing its potential. The three case studies that follow illustrate some of these issues, and provide some of the background to this development. All three young people were interviewed as part of my ongoing research into young people, language and the Internet. A random group of seventy young people were sent an email survey in 1996. Of the forty-seven who replied, the vast majority also agreed that they would be willing to be interviewed face to face about their home pages. For a variety of reasons, related to geographical location, loss of contact and changing reactions, only three young people were interviewed in 1997, although others have been interviewed since. These three initial interviews form the basis of this chapter.
