Tips?

What are you talking about?  It wasn't the youth vote that put Obama over the top.  It was the AA vote.  As a boomer, cusp as it is, the world doesn't revolve around Gen X, Y, Zee,Millenial, etc.  Apparently, it does revolve around AA's.  (No harm, no foul, intended.)

Iowa, Montana, Oregon, Wisconsin, Vermont, Maine, Virginia, Washington, Nebraska, Minnesota, Missouri, Colorado, Connecticut, Kansas, Utah, Delaware, North Dakota, Idaho. Alaska, & Nevada?

Was it the AA vote?

Oh so is this the reason you all appear to be more accepting of a woman being called bitch, whore, and cunt? Has crude speech become everyday discourse for young people?

I've been on the net - and building it - since 1991.  For all of those years I have been promoting and analyzing it (current title - Chief Evangelist), using it and closely watching the demographics small and large.

I think the diarist makes a very good point. My mom is a Silent Generation lady (1941), my friends span the gamut (my eldest friend passed away last year at 99, my nieces and nephews are mid-20s).  How each of these folks have adopted the net and what it means to them is a fascinating narrative.

There is likely something to be learned from all parts of this equation.

I agree with almost everything.

This is very perceptive and one very interesting (and I think accurate) explanation of why there was so much strife during the primary.

You raise extremely interesting points. Seeing a million posts with only "FAIL" must have been odd and confusing to a lot of people.

I think that it goes both ways, though. Some older people tend to be more respectful, others get on the internet and don't have the social construct that normally binds younger people who grew up with it. They don't see the internet as a collection of actual people, so they don't quite grasp the concept of netiquette. So they feel free to be as rude and hateful as they like, and when they see someone asking for civility, it just blows right past them. They take things more personally and don't understand the subtle line between snark and cruelty.

Not all older people are like this, of course, but there is a very distinct subset.

As a 59 year old boomer I have to agree your analysis.

Where I differ, and this is with Chitown Denny, as an Obama supporter a saw it go both ways. It was a two street that I for one just couldn't drive down.

I love the these blogs, etiquette and common courtesy and decency are not requirements to post. Sadly.

well, it could be that.  However, as someone who helped with building our internet site at my university back in the early 1990's,  I am not sure where this shift of manners went.

I felt, for the first time ever, like an old fart (and if I am an old fart, so are the Obamas', cause I am younger than they are) due to the type of babbling I was exposed to on dKos and huffpo.

I felt like I had fell into myspace instead of a political blog.   And I felt the disrespect, big time, which in turn prompted my bad behavior, which is no excuse, but I am a bit of a hothead.

To me, pimp is a horrible word and should not be used in MSM to make a point about a candidate's family who is campaigning for them.  It may get props from the "young" crowd, but it pisses off a lot of us old farts, not to mention demeans women (regardless if you think this is "ok" speech or not - hey, if you think it is ok, try using the word "pimp" at an business meeting with the directors and execs there)

I can only hope this is something that as the "under 30 crowd" gets to be older, that they will get more civilized.  And then see it turned on them by the new under 30 crowd.

I definately agree with you here.  We youngsters (I am 5 years your junior) have a different set of rules.  We tend to use snark more to disagree.  We also tend to use more multimedia than our elders (pictures, videos, slideshows, etc.).

I will try to keep that in mind and not go the excess with things like Fail pics that I have done in the past.

demographics of the blogosphere.  Certainly, in the public at large, the age divisions between Hillary and Obama supporters were huge and distinct, but on-line, not so much so.

I may be unique among the users here in that I've probably got more years logged on the Internet engaging in political debate than almost everybody else.  Back in the eighties, I used to have an ASCII text-based on-line forum (a BBS).  The World Wide Web was in its infancy.

If anything, things are more polite now than they used to be.  I know, that sounds impossible.  I used to have the police involved frequently in feuds involving death threats, stalkings, including threats to my own safety that required the intervention of GTE security, the Treasury Department, LAPD, and eventually Kroll Associates.   So, yeah, it can be a lot uglier and less polite than this and some of us old Internet farts know it.

If I hadn't found all that exciting in some odd way, I suppose I probably would have taken up a different hobby.  I suppose that's a sad commentary on me.

There probably are a few confused Clinton supporters that aren't as computer-literate or used to the elbowy nature of blog netiquette, but there aren't as many as you think.  I think you'll find that many of them are used to using corporate email systems, which by its less formal but texty nature provides an easier glidepath to the blogosphere.  Corporate email systems often devolve into something like MyDD, with long, sarcastic, sniping posts denigrating everybody else in the company.  Why does that happen?  Well, when you're typing on a computer, everybody assumes you're doing something important!  That's much, much safer than hanging out in Everquest or SecondLife.  Actually, they have caught on to these things nowadays, but it used to be an easy dodge to waste time.

I think you'll find that that describes many of the people on both sides of the Obama/Clinton spectrum.  Younger people, and by that I mean people that grew up with the Internet, unused to the corp/email milieu, probably find this more confusing than the rest of us do.  They have less experience with long-winded text communication.

Good manners and etiquette are never out of style, no matter the medium nor age group of its participants.

I have my doubts that twenty-somethings on the internet are less civil than their older internet-savy compatriots.  Though I do agree with you that younger people are more likely to be internet-savy, can we agree this isn't rocket science?  Older folk who use the internet have been doing this for just as long as the young 'uns, or, in some instances, longer.  Those who don't use the internet aren't part of the debate.

Think a British writer got closer to the truth when he suggested that following the American election on the internet was exciting, but ultimately this reminded him of thousands of people being stuck in a traffic jam and complaining.  We're stuck in our bubbles.  There is a lot of typing going on but few are really listening.  That's not an age thing.

It's easy to be rude when you're not facing another individual.  Anonymity may just make some jerks bigger jerks.

I'm beginning to think there's a downside to all this blogging.  This is the first presidential election where I believe campaigns have hired and used bloggers anonymously.  I leave it to some astute political writer to write about the effect of this when some time has passed.  

I try to stay away a day or two a week and read print more often, especially books.

But you are right - we often don't listen to each other here or on other blogs.  

dKos has long had a handful of members interested in demographics and survey after survey there (before I left 6 mo ago, anyway) indicated that the average dKos member was a white male with at least one college degree, in his late 30s - early 40s.  I don't recall the exact median age, but somewhere along there.

I'm sure that, with the influx (members starting flooding in once Kos became a regular talking head on the teevee) there may have been some demographic movement, but not that much.  

First let me say this: I am a caucasian female age 62.  I have two master degrees and still young people (in person) talk to me as if I have an IQ of 60 when it comes to technology.  I have one of my degrees in Education Tech, ran the network for our school and have been online since 1989.  But still because of my gender and my age I am talked down to.
Online, the discourse tends to be quite rude.  
It does not speak highly of anyone that the only way they relate is through rudeness.  I admit it. I don't get it.

So I was surprised that young people were following Obama.  Not surprised how obnoxious they were about it.  But if Obama is a truly compassionate man, I don't get any of it.
Why follow someone or some party where putting others before yourself is a hallmark?    
From what I observe in real life, having stuff supercedes everything.  
I do get it when I read "why should I care about old farts....it's time for them to die anyway."

For the first time in my life (after 40 years of working with young people as an educator) I do not like what I see at all.  After all these years, the sexism and the ageism stunned me.

I know my comment is not pleasant and I appreciate your attempt to explain and start a discourse.  But I feel overwhelmingly saddened. I knew many of the 30 and 40 something white males still disparaged women in power.  To see it in young people, male and female, has become so discouraging.
I know the battles women fought....as well as the battles minorities fought.  There is no contest here.  All the battles were important and mattered.  But my truth is based on statistics.  Minority males have made greater strides in most areas, much more so than women.  In some areas where minority males fared worse (like the justice system) they still do.  But in upward mobility, power in government, pay, leadership positions ALL men, regardless of ethnicity, still do better than women.
In politics, racism is as bad as sexism and vice versa.  But with young people, apparently (from this election pov) sexism is nothing more than a joke.
These are my observations.

In this election, I will vote for Obama.  I will NEVER vote for a right winger.....NEVER HAVE, NEVER WILL.  But like many women who worked for the democratic party for decades, who did the grunt work while the men got all the leadership positions, I will NOT work any longer for a party that I believe has just betrayed me.
BOOMER women are different than BOOMER MEN.  We were the gophers, the girls the men brought along.  While they talked about world issues we were expected to sit quietly and look pretty in our flowered smocks.  We listened to the music of men....the words of men.  Finally in the 70s we started breaking away.... we went from the "Girls Room" to the Women's Room.  Women like Hillary Clinton broke ground.....and now in 2008, we were told sexism is OK in the democratic party again because young people were more important, and they would throw a temper tantrum if they did not get their way.  Sigh.

It's over for a lot of us.  Rudeness and sexism are acceptable for them.  For us, not so much.