Huffaker & Calvert (2005) and Grasmuck, Martin & Zhao (2009) talks about how racial and gender identities are formed online and transferred offline. Huffaker & Calvert study came to the conclusion that there is not much difference between genders online. They looked at how each gender express themselves as well as how they use emoticons. Grasmuck, Martin & Zhao studies how race is presented in CMC thru Facebook.
Different sites focus on different things within their site. For example, “Black Planet” focuses on race and “Christian Mingle” on religion. Each CMC context allow different context to be shown in the profile. IM, email and text messaging does not allow the profile to be viewed by other people. On the other hand Facebook, blogs and other site do allow the profile to be shown which helps form the person identity. Due to the openness the internet allows gender and racial identity to be exaggerated or revealed more easily. It also allows people to provide false or too much information which causes people to form a false perception. As we view different CMC context we interpret and perceive the person in a way that we feel they fit not the way they really are.
I have not thought about the gender or race of the people in this class mainly because I do not feel that it makes a difference. I do not feel race or gender should place a parent in the interaction with a person. Although I do not pay attention to gender now that you have acted the question I can tell the difference in a female and male post but that’s it.
You bring up a good point about how certain websites are actually geared specifically toward certain groups (Black Planet, etc). The internet gives us so many tools and easy ways to get involved with people who share our interests. It might be hard for me to find a a basketweaving group in-person in Memphis, but I can find one pretty easily online!
I strongly agree with you that there should not be any differences between the classmates, not even when it comes to gender. But despite of this, still people tend to discriminate each other. There are always one group is more powerful than the other. This is life, and life is not fair. This is also human nature and their way to survive. Big fish should eat the small fish to survive. It really doesn’t matter how globalize, educated, and advanced we are, there will always be people who would suffer from being minority, disliked, or hated from another superior group because humans are so creedy, and this is sadly the fact.
I find it interesting and very true, your point on the categorized online groups. Like Clarissa said, it would be easy to go online and find a group you are interested in. As far as this class goes, I agree with you that it does not make a difference because the people we are communicating with in this class, all have the same interest, so we are all, in a sense, in our own group. :) <–notice the girly emoticon.
One website that comes to my mind is “BlackPeopleMeet.com”. I’m not sure if any of you have seen the commercial of the black couple and they are talking about how they met on this dating web site and that it is where black people meet. You can tell that the web site has a focus on a certain kind of race. I agree that race shouldn’t matter in this class or anywhere else because we are all human.
Each social platform gives the user an opportunity to set the statge for the message/image they would like to share with their audience. For instance, a person who is a facebook user would not list that they can also be found on Blackplant.com or Christianmingle.com because they may have a different prescense such as more family traffic and they may not want them to know about their profile in these targeted arena.
I think it’s interesting that you believe certain platforms encourage the “exaggeration” of gender and race. Do you think that people tend to truly exaggerate those parts of their identities, or is it a manifestation of how much they value that part of themselves?