According to Huffaker and Calvert, 40% of blogs are written by males and the other 36% by females. Huffaker and Calvert also say that blogs are based on the authors age, demographic and gender. Also, most of the time the author’s of blogs provide all of this real information on the home page of their blogs. Witmer and Katzman did a study that says that emoticons are used more often by females to express emotion than males are. Males tend to deny their feelings even if they are feelings of sadness. The study also showed that males also would not use emoticons when in conversation with other males, but would use emoticons when in conversations with females. It found that females use emoticons equally if they are in conversation with either males or females. Deborah Tannen believes that males have a more direct style when it comes to communicating online and that females have a more intimate and indirect style of communicating. As far as our class goes, we can tell which class members are males or females by their names most of the time or by reading their blog posts because males and females do speak in different tones online and I think that’s the whole point of the gender roles.
9 thoughts on “Blog # 8”
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I think that for the most part it is easy to tell gender in class by looking at names. However, I had a girl in one of my anthropology classes named Jesse James. On the first day of class the teacher was calling row and when calling her name she as many expected a guy to say here, but instead was a petite red head. So there are instances where even names can fool us, and also lead to discrimination even.
You said that men tend not to use emotions even if they are sad but, based on Huffaker and Calvert study they did not found any differences between how often men and women use emotions, and that male use more sad emotions than women. So, basically, women don’t use emotions more than men but women are better in hiding things and control their emotions.
Do you think that age matters at all? Huffaker & Calvert studied teens – maybe younger men and boys feel more able to express their emotions? Or is it that it is easier to express emotions online versus face-to-face?
I do think tone does play a part in how we discover is someone is male or female. But like it was stated earlier like names it can often be misleading since there is no language that is specific to only one gender. Since all language or tone is interchangeable there are no real determining factors.
I think both are possible. Young men lack of life experiences, which make them more emotional because there are not yet used to tuff situations. Also it is easier to express emotions online, especially, no one can see that young man crying for example :)
The use of emoticons is fascinating to me and I think that women generally use emoticons on blogs, texts, descriptions of pictures, and if they could in daily life! Men just do not think to use this new(er) technology aspect; therefore, men use emoticons less.
I believe men and women use emoticon about the same because I know men and women who use them a lot. As far as knowing the gender by name this would be hard because now name no longer have a gender preference.
Males are more introverted by nature so the findings that males do not use emoticons did not surprise me. Males are raised to be harder, direct, and territorial. Therefore, the use of emoticons is not a favorable. I cannot recall if I mentioned this before but my husband gets so annoyed when males use LOL.
I would definitely agree that men tend to use emoticons a whole lot less than women do. Usually, because men tend to IM/text to get a specific point across, using emoticons guys appear effeminate to other guys. However, my personal experience suggests that this tends to change between men when they are closer friends. For example, I use emoticons all the time when exchanging messages with my closest friends. But, if it was a dude I didn’t know that well, I’d be a lot less inclined to use an emoticon.