Social cues are important part of language and can help create understanding. The lack of social cues in a computer mediated environment obviously leads to more stressed understanding between parties where “communicators have to work harder to achieve their desired impact and be understood” (Baym, 54). In order to create a more natural, open, or comfortable environment, we have substitutions like emoticons to manufacture expressions & impressions ingrained in face-to-face communication. When there is a lack of cues, people can become disengaged with audience, impersonal, even “depersonalized” (Baym, 54). Anonymity can allow and even protect a person who chooses to be disruptive, volatile, and even abusive. So you end up with people like “flamers,” who perpetuate negativity in communication forums.  The lack of guiding social norms has led to a more volatile and unpredictable environments.  Everyone has their own set of guiding norms, and if one of those people feels like being aggressive and antagonistic, they have that freedom.

Baym stated sometimes identification, such as gender and racial classification, aren’t always directly presented, but can become obvious through our patterns.  Researchers “concluded that gender influences mediated interaction just as it influences unmediated communication” (Baym, 66). Mediated messages provide even more concrete examples to support traditional communication theory. What first struck my memory was Deborah Tannen’s Genderlect Communication Theory, which stressed men and women are of “two distinct cultural dialects.” She outlined some general tendencies in communication patterns. One claim was that “men’s report talk focuses on status and independence; women’s rapport talk seeks human connection.”  Baym cited that in mediated messages, women tend to focus on “relational dimensions of conversation” and men on “informative dimensions” (66). She also wrote that women’s messages tend to include “clarifications, justifications, apologies, and expressions of support” (67). These examples line up with Tannen’s gender theory of women’s focus on rapport, creating relational bonds and connections.

The Gerrand article addressed many of the problems and limitations with current research attempts to quantify language use online. I still don’t understand why the constant desire to classify is important, or what implications it has for the future. Maybe permittance and popularity of more languages could allow for a greater diversity of voices online. But, I think what matters is the content, not the form. Is a dominant cultural ideology necessarily attached to a language? I feel even ESL users can present their cultural values through their writing, no matter the language. The biggest problem I see is simply the isolation of non-English speaking users. These users can still post content, but might have more sparse forums to do so.

I only purposefully encounter any other languages on the internet, with the intent of using them as a source of information, such as definitions or vocabulary. However, these sites are written in English as instruction for an English-speaking audience. I have randomly clicked on links that are written in other languages. This occurs mostly on image-based sites, like Pinterest and Flickr. I don’t search it out, but I happen to click -through to a lot of international posts. Images seem to be a universal language. On Flickr, I often find captions and comments Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and Japanese. Sometimes I get frustrated if I can’t read a recipe or craft instructions because they in another alphabet, and click away because that site is not intended for me.

I don’t know if our mediated communication will adapt to grow stronger across cultures or become further segmented. I hope that we will be able to express some universal artifacts of our respective cultures, such as sharing of art and music in order to discover each other, despite language.