The information in Chapter 3 of the Baym textbook and Gerrand’s article “Estimating Linguistic Diversity on the Internet: A Taxonomy to Avoid Pitfalls and Paradoxes” addressed some interesting concepts regarding gender within contextual influences on online communication and how to avoid some of the pitfalls when estimating the diversity of languages used on the internet.
Baym noted that differences in communication skills can reveal the gender of those communicating in an online setting. According to the textbook “messages written by women are more likely to include qualifications, justifications, apologies, and expressions for support…Groups with more men use more factually oriented language and calls for action, less self-disclosure, and fewer attempts at tension prevention”. Moreover, he also pointed out that these technological and social qualities may even influence intimacy or the quality of interactions.
Another interesting fact the book mentioned was how little attention cultural identity receives, notwithstanding, the United States is a melting pot of different cultures.
I found it valuable to learn in Gerrands’ research that estimating linguistic diversity on the internet is not an easy task. I enjoyed getting the opportunity to compare the effectiveness of each indicator.
Faithful to Gerrand’s statistics my previous experience on the internet showed a dominance of the English language over non-English languages. However, when I was younger and frequented chat rooms, few online users would type in non-English languages such as French, Persian, etc. This seems to agree with Gerrand’s charts and figures.
The growing rate of people contacting various regions of the world and the growing influence of other rapidly developing countries will most likely increase the use of other languages on the internet. The issue of language diversity on the internet is currently important and will continue to increase in importance in the foreseeable future.
I found it interesting as well that communication skills differs with gender. I do agree that each gender has a certain way of expressing themselves. However, it cause me to question if a person desires to play or assume the role of the opposite gender how will the communication skills be affected? Many people some communication skills are natural. As you pointed out from the book “messages written by women are more likely to include qualifications, justifications, apologies, and expressions for support…Groups with more men use more factually oriented language and calls for action, less self-disclosure, and fewer attempts at tension prevention”. So the manipulation of communication skills are used daily on the internet which cause many problems.
I agree with the point on how messages can reflect gender. It was interesting to me that by nature women will express with more emotion even with a message over the internet. Opposed to men who are more direct and less emotionally attatched.
I agree with the points made in the book. Women will most often point out who they heard a point from and speak from experiences. In contrast to most men who will give short reference and not put too much thought into their responses.
My husband has a facebook and rarely says anything on it in contrast to myself posting several times a week about our kids, family, fun things we’ve done, etc… this solidifies in the facebook world anyway that I can see the division clearly.
Thank you for the post.
Ahh, chat rooms. Those were the days! I will say, however, that you probably were visiting chat rooms with a dominant American culture. It makes sense that people from China or other cultures would flock to chat rooms with people who can relate to them. It was very interesting how flawed the study seemed to be, and how they didn’t seem to broaden their research enough to have a strong conclusion.