Bulletin Boards (BBS)

In Gergen's The Saturated Self, he talks about electronic mail and bulletin boards and how you were only able to talk and communicate with people from the same city or organization. Honestly, when he began explaining bulletin boards I thought he was talking about the bulletin boards all over campus that get overloaded with fliers. But the more I began to read about the concept of bulletin board systems (BBS) it reminded me of the old chat rooms me and my friends would talk on in middle school. Gergen goes on to explain that these "boards" created different cultures and subcultures where people could talk about different shared interests and hobbies, but only within a certain circumference of the user. If you wanted to talk and connect with people outside of your area you were charged by your phone company. (Dial-up...remember all those noises?) This article  talks about how the limited access of BBS's led to hacking, so users could access other BBS's in different areas. Which back then probably seemed like a foreign concept, but we now know is commonly practiced not just on sites but also personal information from personal computers. It also talks about BBS's still being used in places around the world where the internet is still underdeveloped and new. BBS's have now evolved into chat rooms that is now a world wide way of connecting people, some of my cousins in the Philippines actually use them to talk about anime and online games with other users. I remember using AOL Instant Messaging (IM) to talk to individual users or TinyChat to not just chat but also also video chat with multiple people at a time, and different users could request to join the video chat, so instead of talking to a simple username you can now talk to an actual person on a screen. It also evolved into entire virtual worlds, like club penguin and IMVU, where you can create an avatar, and chat with other users from all over the world. Although, some of these boards are still up and running today, I think more users prefer the new forums because these new sites are more visually engaging and organized, so instead of being bombarded with an unknown number of users talking over each other you can now pick and choose who you want to converse with. What do you think? With the slow extinction of BBSs do you think we will need chat rooms or IMs in the future?