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Text as Mask: Gender, Play, and Performance on the Internet
... There exist a few quantitative, data-driven studies on gender-specific behavior with the focus on the use of communication media, including a study on telephone usage in 317 French homes [24], a large-scale Belgian mobile phone call and test message dataset [25], and a genderspecific content analysis of instant messages [26,27]. Gender differences in online gaming is relatively unexplored, with the exception of recent work on gender roles [28], the relation of gender and age group [29], and gender swapping [30][31][32][33], i.e. the phenomenon of playing a gender different from the biological sex. ...
... We have no information about the biological sex of players. The possibility of freely choosing a virtual sex may lead some players to experiment with gender roles [31][32][33][34]. Selecting a gender different from the biological is called gender swapping which is common in online environments [35]. ...
Superpositions of social networks, such as communication, friendship, or trade networks, are called multiplex networks, forming the structural backbone of human societies. Novel datasets now allow quantification and exploration of multiplex networks. Here we study gender-specific differences of a multiplex network from a complete behavioral dataset of an online-game society of about 300,000 players. On the individual level females perform better economically and are less risk-taking than males. Males reciprocate friendship requests from females faster than vice versa and hesitate to reciprocate hostile actions of females. On the network level females have more communication partners, who are less connected than partners of males. We find a strong homophily effect for females and higher clustering coefficients of females in trade and attack networks. Cooperative links between males are under-represented, reflecting competition for resources among males. These results confirm quantitatively that females and males manage their social networks in substantially different ways.
... циального взаимодействия, одинаково комфортной для всех коммуникантов вне зависимости от их пола и гендерной самоидентификации, и формирование новых норм гендерно нейтральной коммуникации (Graddol, Swann, 1989;Danet, 1998). Однако опыт наблюдения за конкретными практиками интернет-опосредованного социального взаимодействия заставляет исследователей расценивать подобные представления как «утопические» и определять киберпространство как «неэгалитарный виртуальный мир», либо исключающий женское участие, либо создающий враждебную для женщин среду (Yaniski-Ravid, Mittelman, 2016). ...
The relevance of the study is underpinned by the modifications of the Russian society gender canon, the Russian gender worldview transformations and by the growth of importance of the communicative and linguocultural Internet space that constitutes the field of spontaneous social, psychological and linguistic experiments and also representative sources of information on the Russian-speaking men and women’s speech practices. The research is aimed at revealing and describing derivational, semantic and functional features of the 23 lexicographically undefined, engendered lexical units motivated by the adverb popolam (‘in half’) pointing at the extralinguistic situation of the financial responsibility dividing ina couple. The research is conducted on the material of the authors' contexts corpus including 1750 speech products manifesting informal Internet communication that were published inthe period from 2012 to 2022. The corpus contexts were obtained by continuous sampling method with the help of the Russian social network VK search engine and Google web search engine. The authors used methods of word-formation, semantic interpretation, contextual and discursive analyses and statistical method. The analysis has diagnosed that the constituents of the derivational nest with popolam- as the basis are used to nominate, categorize, characterize and evaluate masculine and feminine persons as participants in romantic, sexual and family relations. The innovations are also used to denote and characterize relationships in a couple from the point of view of financial responsibility division between partners. They are also used to designate actions and behavior types of participants in such relationships. The analysis proves that the innovations contain stable negative evaluation and are prevalent in woman's language. The analysis revealed that the functions of denomination, categorization and negative evaluation of the social interaction subjects and phenomena depend on the main ideological function of the innovations. The ideological function is increasingly important underthe circumstances of the conflict between patriarchal and new egaliterian gender contacts. It is determined that popolamshchik (‘slammer’) as a male denomination is not only the most widespread and important constituent but also a key word of the gendered Internet discourse.
... Anonymity involves the absence of any revelation of personal information or identifiers. Research of other online interactions has shown that anonymity increases the frequency of self-disclosure (Kiesler et al., 1984), role play (Danet, 1998), and antisocial behaviour (Donath, 1999;Herring, 2007). This does not necessarily mean that the user cannot be identified to technology companies. ...
Engagement with video games can potentially advance student digital competence however, there is a digital skills gap by the time young people progress into adolescence. This current research explores how elementary school students’ digital self-efficacy might relate to experiences in video game environments to influence perceptions of digital competence. We examine the differential impact of sex, self-efficacy, and socioeconomic status (SES) on 7–10-year-old students’ (N = 613) perceptions of video gaming and their digital skills. Analysis revealed the unexpected finding that SES was inversely related to enjoyment for gaming and digital technology, with students in the lower-SES category responding more positively compared to students in higher SES categories. As expected, boys self-reported digital skills higher than girls across all SES categories. We argue for the use of gaming pedagogies to support learning in classrooms that accounts for nuances in students’ digital self-efficacy moderated by gender and SES.
... Anonymity involves the absence of any revelation of personal information or identifiers. Research of other online interactions has shown that anonymity increases the frequency of self-disclosure (Kiesler et al., 1984), role play (Danet, 1998), and antisocial behaviour (Donath, 1999;Herring, 2007). This does not necessarily mean that the user cannot be identified to technology companies. ...
... Anonymity involves the absence of any revelation of personal information or identifiers. Research of other online interactions has shown that anonymity increases the frequency of self-disclosure (Kiesler et al., 1984), role play (Danet, 1998), and antisocial behaviour (Donath, 1999;Herring, 2007). This does not necessarily mean that the user cannot be identified to technology companies. ...
... Anonymity involves the absence of any revelation of personal information or identifiers. Research of other online interactions has shown that anonymity increases the frequency of self-disclosure (Kiesler et al., 1984), role play (Danet, 1998), and antisocial behaviour (Donath, 1999;Herring, 2007). This does not necessarily mean that the user cannot be identified to technology companies. ...
... Anonymity involves the absence of any revelation of personal information or identifiers. Research of other online interactions has shown that anonymity increases the frequency of self-disclosure (Kiesler et al., 1984), role play (Danet, 1998), and antisocial behaviour (Donath, 1999;Herring, 2007). This does not necessarily mean that the user cannot be identified to technology companies. ...
... Anonymity involves the absence of any revelation of personal information or identifiers. Research of other online interactions has shown that anonymity increases the frequency of self-disclosure (Kiesler et al., 1984), role play (Danet, 1998), and antisocial behaviour (Donath, 1999;Herring, 2007). This does not necessarily mean that the user cannot be identified to technology companies. ...
... Anonymity involves the absence of any revelation of personal information or identifiers. Research of other online interactions has shown that anonymity increases the frequency of self-disclosure (Kiesler et al., 1984), role play (Danet, 1998), and antisocial behaviour (Donath, 1999;Herring, 2007). This does not necessarily mean that the user cannot be identified to technology companies. ...
... Anonymity involves the absence of any revelation of personal information or identifiers. Research of other online interactions has shown that anonymity increases the frequency of self-disclosure (Kiesler et al., 1984), role play (Danet, 1998), and antisocial behaviour (Donath, 1999;Herring, 2007). This does not necessarily mean that the user cannot be identified to technology companies. ...
... Anonymity involves the absence of any revelation of personal information or identifiers. Research of other online interactions has shown that anonymity increases the frequency of self-disclosure (Kiesler et al., 1984), role play (Danet, 1998), and antisocial behaviour (Donath, 1999;Herring, 2007). This does not necessarily mean that the user cannot be identified to technology companies. ...
... Anonymity involves the absence of any revelation of personal information or identifiers. Research of other online interactions has shown that anonymity increases the frequency of self-disclosure (Kiesler et al., 1984), role play (Danet, 1998), and antisocial behaviour (Donath, 1999;Herring, 2007). This does not necessarily mean that the user cannot be identified to technology companies. ...
... Anonymity involves the absence of any revelation of personal information or identifiers. Research of other online interactions has shown that anonymity increases the frequency of self-disclosure (Kiesler et al., 1984), role play (Danet, 1998), and antisocial behaviour (Donath, 1999;Herring, 2007). This does not necessarily mean that the user cannot be identified to technology companies. ...
... Anonymity involves the absence of any revelation of personal information or identifiers. Research of other online interactions has shown that anonymity increases the frequency of self-disclosure (Kiesler et al., 1984), role play (Danet, 1998), and antisocial behaviour (Donath, 1999;Herring, 2007). This does not necessarily mean that the user cannot be identified to technology companies. ...
... Anonymity involves the absence of any revelation of personal information or identifiers. Research of other online interactions has shown that anonymity increases the frequency of self-disclosure (Kiesler et al., 1984), role play (Danet, 1998), and antisocial behaviour (Donath, 1999;Herring, 2007). This does not necessarily mean that the user cannot be identified to technology companies. ...
... By the late 1990s, theorists of computer-mediated communication were exploring the changing nature of texts, play, and performance on the internet (Danet 1998) and the identity reconstruction and anonymity of participants in virtual communities (Donath 1999). In the technological and media shifts of the past four decades, the participation of children and young people in these social practices is undeniable (Beavis 2014b), particularly since the rise of web 2.0 or the social web (Mills 2015). ...
This article debates the potentials and challenges of extended reality technologies - virtual, augmented and mixed reality - for language learning. It explores the learning benefits of video games, the advantage for focusing students' attention, hands on interaction, embodiment, and transmediation. It considers the pedagogical pitfalls with VR, MR and AR for language learning. It concludes with a discussion of digital divides in relation to extended reality (XR) technologies.
... Research on computer-mediated environments also explores how interlocutors construct identities, position themselves and perform styles when they communicate with one another (in virtual groups or communities), a key theme in this special issue. As outlined in Androutsopoulos' (2006a) introduction to a special issue on "Sociolinguistics and computer-mediated communication", early research on identity was predominantly socio-psychological in its approach (see, e.g., Turkle 1995); " [v]iewed this way online text is a 'mask' (Danet 1998) that participants put on to assume multiple virtual identities that differ from their 'real-life' identities" (Androutsopoulos 2006a: 423). Moreover Androutsopoulos (2006a: 423) claims that "less attention has been paid to the processes by which people establish member identities in the frame of an online community", although there are some exceptions he draws our attention to, predominantly within the field of language and gender (see, e.g., Herring 1993Herring , 2000Herring , 2003. ...
This paper functions as the introduction to the special issue on ‘relational work in Facebook and discussion boards’. We position our research endeavors within interpersonal pragmatics (see Locher and Graham 2010), by reviewing literature on politeness, impoliteness and relational work in the context of computer-mediated communication. Foregrounding the relational aspect of language, we are particularly interested in establishing the connections between politeness, face and linguistic identity construction. We then position the four papers that form this special issue within this field of research. Two papers contribute to the study of relational work on discussion boards (Kleinke and Boes; Haugh, Chang and Kádár) and two deal with practices on Facebook (Theodoropoulou; Bolander and Locher).
... On Facebook, for example, a photograph of the participant has more impact on the judgement of others than written submissions (Van der Heide et al. 2012) . In a BBFG where a pseudonym is the sole means of identification participants can be less reticent about broaching intimate, delicate or personal subjects (Danet 1998;Walston & Lissitz 2000), and have less need to conform to prevailing opinions; they can be spontaneous (Markham 2004) . If anonymity can exist within the group, the online community moderator is able nonetheless clearly to identify and trace comments and interactions by a respondent in order to summarise the contributions of each participant . ...
Bulletin board methodology emerged at the end of the 1990s and is becoming the most frequently used qualitative study technique. This interactive approach groups a community of participants in a private or public online forum for a duration that varies from several days to several months. Discoveries, exchanges of view, personal opinions and group reactions are all part of the power and interest of the internet in this era of social media. This article presents the principles of bulletin board development, and specifics to aid understanding of this tool within social networks and to help organisations adapt to a paradigm shift in marketing in which consumer-respondents are co-creators of meaning and knowledge.
... Although Aycock and Buchignani cite Geertz in asserting 'The direct application of traditional ethnographic analysis is problematic in the analysis of computer cultures', we have not found it so (1995: 185; see also Howard, 2001: 557, 559-602). Aycock and Buchignani ask the question, 'What is the relationship between the realities grounded in the empiricism of directly lived experience and virtual realities generated online?' (Howard, 2001; see also Danet, 1998;Markham, 1998: 115-20, 129-40). 13 We have discussed some of our experiences, highlighting the contours of this community's practices and locations. ...
The article is an analysis of the methodology used to study a community spawned from an Internet website devoted to a television serial. In the five and a half years the site was in existence, its real-time, linear, archived Posting Board spawned a community. Herein, we discuss how our work at the site offers insights into significant concepts in the practice of ethnography. In particular, we are concerned with such questions as: How much distance is necessary between the ethnographer and her site/subjects? Is distance necessary? Who is inscribing whom? We also discuss the generative problem of anonymity and how this concern has opened up our perceptions of ourselves and our field site.
... It is not Josh from Ithaca and Pam from Natchitoches that interact, but 'MrReb' and 'DreamyAngel' who engage in situations where they move around, sit next to each other, take road trips, or serve a beer. In dating chats, we can observe an ideological process similar to the transgressions and identity changes that characterize carnival and other play genres such as charades (Danet 1998). Participants use their screen names as masks and enter a space that is marked as different from everyday reality, hence acquiring a certain degree of unaccountability. ...
Three half-hour conversations each from five English and four Spanish dating chat rooms were analyzed following conversation analytic methodologies. Participants in the chats often engaged in playful and humorous erotic conversations, using a set of interactionally negotiated conventions about chatting that constitute a play frame, characterized linguistically by graphemic representations of laughter, appropriations, reproduction of a humorous pronunciation, and interactions through alter personae. Such playfulness enhances participants' pleasure while allowing them to maintain critical distance, and balances the constraints of public interaction with the pursuit of private erotic pleasures. This study contributes to our understanding of the social and discursive dimension of sexuality, going beyond issues of sexual identity and focusing on the conversational negotiation of eroticism and desire.
This article examines the experiences of female users of imageboards – online anonymous-by-default bulletin boards. Using thematic analysis on 12 Instant Messaging (IM)–based interviews with female-identifying imageboard users, this study gathers and presents their experiences and perceptions of benefits and drawbacks of use. Major findings include negative perception of mainstream imageboards and a contrastingly positive sentiment towards the platforms investigated as part of this study. Using imageboards represented a unique, entertaining and social experience. Interviewees predominantly used imageboards to be hyperbolic, ‘vent’, discuss sexuality or explore thoughts they otherwise would not. The study’s findings question previous narratives of women on imageboards which position them either as mostly unaffected members of the space or as out-of-place minorities ‘getting by’ – by virtue of using masculinist strategies. Rather, participants describe ambivalent experiences around navigating these spaces, including benefits of entertainment, sense of belonging and the affinity towards gendered self-experimentation.
Recent large-scale surveys of social media have repeatedly shown that Facebook and Twitter are losing popularity amongst teenagers, with newer ‘image-first’ apps such as Snapchat and Instagram becoming preferred amongst this demographic. Whilst there is a wealth of research which has examined more general reasons for this shift, it is unclear to what extent these explanations can account for more local level user practices. This article interrogates these issues by taking an ethnographic approach to examine prevalent discourses of social media amongst young people in an East London youth group. Specifically, I explore the ways in which social media apps and platforms are discursively represented by the young people with reference to their everyday lives. This leads me to argue that whilst some of their practices can be accounted for by broader trends of social media use, issues that reflect the lived realities of the young people (e.g., crime, social networks) equally influence their engagements with different platforms.
In the past decade, the popularization of social media in Pakistan has greatly influenced the way in which people communicate and interact with each other. The rapidly evolving nature of online social media communication in the country when viewed against the backdrop of the country’s socio-cultural characteristics and religion is particularly significant. Facebook, being the prime social media platform in Pakistan has been revolutionary and liberating because while acting as a medium of communication, which transgresses the traditional manner of gendered social interactions, it has at the same time enabled the users to perpetuate and reinforce the existing gender ideology. As a result, Facebook in Pakistan has evolved into a space where individuals construct gender identities discursively. Using Multimodal Discourse Analysis, I investigate the ways in which Pakistani men multimodally construct their gender identities on Facebook. I show how Pakistani men are not only upholding the existing socio-cultural norms and discourse but also there are subtle signs of digression from the established models of masculinity.
Susan Herring, the originator of the computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) paradigm, describes efforts to extend CMDA over time in order to address changes in computer-mediated communication (CMC), such as nontextual communication and the trend toward convergence of multiple modes of CMC in a single platform. Following a review of three broad stages of technological evolution that shaped CMC from 1985 to 2017 and the themes favored by CMDA researchers at each stage, Herring proposes a reconceptualization of CMC itself as inherently multimodal. This reconceptualization includes communication mediated by graphical phenomena such as emoji and avatars in virtual worlds, as well as by certain kinds of robots. She argues that the principles at the core of the CMDA paradigm apply equally to interaction in these nontextual modes.
Throughout history, the social construct of gender has carried stereotypes expressed through the use of language and other social practices in face-to-face interactions and in written text. Today, the easy availability of computers has presented another medium of expression and with it, another context with gender considerations and implications. While considerable research focused on the issues surrounding the effects of gender in classrooms, information on how gender affects online learning is scarce. Very few new online learning technologies address the emerging issues of gender and safety in online classrooms (Machanic, 1998). The availability of computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools has paved the way for online education and learning. The US Department of Education statistics suggest that approximately 20 million students will be enrolled in college in the United States by the year 2010 (Cardenas, 1998), and many other countries are experiencing similar interest and growth in this new form of distance education. Online education based on CMC is one of the ways academic institutions are addressing the rise in student enrolment and related costs (Blum, 1999), as well as a resource for professional development for busy teachers. A 1994 study by American Demographics showed that women are about equally as likely as men to use home computers for educational purposes. Women are also more likely than men to be a major target market for CMC-based higher education.
This article uses a research project into the online conversations of sex offenders and the children they abuse to further
the arguments for the acceptability of experimental work as a research tool for linguists. The research reported here contributes
to the growing body of work within linguistics that has found experimental methods to be useful in answering questions about
representation and constraints on linguistic expression (Hemforth 2013). The wider project examines online identity assumption
in online paedophile activity and the policing of such activity, and involves dealing with the linguistic analysis of highly
sensitive sexual grooming transcripts. Within the linguistics portion of the project, we examine theories of idiolect and
identity through analysis of the ‘talk’ of perpetrators of online sexual abuse, and of the undercover officers that must assume
alternative identities in order to investigate such crimes. The essential linguistic question in this article is methodological
and concerns the applicability of experimental work to exploration of online identity and identity disguise. Although we touch
on empirical questions, such as the sufficiency of linguistic description that will enable convincing identity disguise, we
do not explore the experimental results in detail. In spite of the preference within a range of discourse analytical paradigms
for ‘naturally occurring’ data, we argue that not only does the term prove conceptually problematic, but in certain contexts,
and particularly in the applied forensic context described, a rejection of experimentally elicited data would limit the possible
types and extent of analyses. Thus, it would restrict the contribution that academic linguistics can make in addressing a
serious social problem.
A number of Internet-democracy commentators have proposed that online communications may facilitate the Habermasian public sphere of communicative rationality. In contrast, Mark Poster and other cyber-postmodernists claim that this public sphere notion is “outmoded” in relation to online practices. They argue that cyberspace represents a “hyperreality” in which the rational subject is radically decentred. As such, cyber-postmodernists argue, cyberspace undermines communicative rationality and the public sphere. The concept is seen to be useless for evaluating democratic interaction through the Internet. In this paper I evaluate this argument by exploring actual cyberspace experiences of selfhood and by looking further at the notion of communicative rationality. My investigation shows that the Internet does indeed alter interactions in new ways, but that the changes that result are not as radically hyperreal as some cyber-theorists claim, and, furthermore, that these changes are able to be taken into account by the public sphere conception.
communication;interdisciplinary study;discourse analysis;social practice;computer networks
My study aims to see what the communication between women and men in online chat room will be like; whether it will remain the same as that of the face-to-face interaction; whether the new way of communication under the anonymity provided by computer-mediated communication (CMC) will neutralize distinctions of gender and whether the Internet really provides escape from gender differences. By examining the messages posted by women and men when chatting online, the language features of women and men under investigation will be analyzed.
The term “chat,” when used in association with computer-mediated communication, refers to synchronous computer-mediated discourse (SCMD) that takes the form of either private interaction (e.g., one-on-one communication via instant messaging) or public interaction (e.g., group communication in a chatroom).Keywords:language learning technology;computer mediated communication;discourse analysis;intercultural communication;second language acquisition;interactionist learning technology
How is intimacy produced within digitally enabled communication platforms such as the mailing list? How do geographically dispersed subjects represent and ‘make present’ their identity? This paper addresses such questions through a case study of the email discussion group, Cybermind. Providing an evocative example of the power and affective relations across mailing list culture, the case study demonstrates that, contrary to the popular critical imagination, the linguistic and rhetorical behaviours of the online self function in a manner that is relatively predictable and therefore fairly stable. Thus the paper challenges the 1990s dream of the online, radically decentred subject. This does not overlook the fact that identity is always a performance and the product of highly mediated cultural, material and institutional forces. However, the complex interplay between technology, fantasy and materiality in the shaping of identity has not been fully explored. Crucial to the production of identity are the symbolic and technological relations of presence. Authors assume that the material signifiers of writing can be deployed to express, to make present, the particular version of subjectivity they wish to convey. Moreover, even the representations of multiple and playful selves are, in fact, quite carefully governed by their authors. The paper concludes with a discussion of the extent to which the socio-technical architecture of the mailing list is conditioned by fantasies of presence and economies of affect.
This article focuses on the use of broadband internet in the home, focusing on different material aspects of the internet. Inspired by actor network theory and cyborg theory, a concept of a mundane cyborg practice is developed to outline how the internet is integrated into everyday life and related to other technologies. This concept is used in mapping everyday life through ethno-graphic participant observations and qualitative interviews. Raymond Williams' concept of flow is used to map how the internet is integrated into everyday life and thereby becomes a mundane technology that bends time and space. The flow-like character of the internet and its frequent use creates new material practices. This article argues that when we look at the internet, we have to take into consideration all the mundane aspects of internet use and sometimes perceive the users as mundane cyborgs.
In this article, we explore what online daters perceive to be the risks of online dating, along with providing accounts of dangers and risky situations encountered by online daters. Between November 2008 and November 2009, we conducted online in depth interviews with 29 participants and analysed the interview transcripts using thematic analysis. All participants believed that online dating was risky in some way. The risks that participants identified were risks of lies and deceit, sexual risks (including pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections and sexual violence), emotional and physical risks, and the risks of encountering dangerous and untrustworthy people online and in person. Participants framed these risks in terms of the risky ‘other’ – focusing on risky ‘others’ allowed our participants to move the ownership of risks away from themselves onto these ‘others’.
As an information and communication technology, the Internet has contributed to structural changes in social life. This technology has opened up new social spaces for people to communicate across time and space, explore interests and interactions, and form and maintain relationships. Gender is a social structure that matters, but how it matters online is a topic that has intrigued researchers for the last 20 years. Research in the area of online gender interactions is multidisciplinary and addresses a variety of online forums including discussion groups, chat, instant messaging, blogs, virtual worlds and social network sites. Patterns are identified in the literature and examples of gender fluidity, gender reproduction, and a blending of gender fluidity and reproduction are presented. This paper provides a framework for understanding the multidisciplinary research on this topic and discusses how changes in online demographics and recent developments in information and communication technologies, such as social network sites, present new forums in which to explore the role of gender in online interactions.
This study examined the world of Internet dating. It explored the motivations of daters, their styles of courtship, and how they negotiated problems of trust and deception. The authors employed in-depth interviews and participant observation with men and women who met online. Internet daters sought companionship, comfort after a life crisis, control over presentation of themselves and their environments, freedom from commitment and stereotypic roles, adventure, and romantic fantasy. The authors also studied the development of trust between daters, the risks they assume, and lying online. Most participants in the study eventually met, which sometimes resulted in abrupt rejection and loss of face, but other times ended in marriage.
Despite early hopes that the internet would facilitate more socially equitable communication, many age-old forms of discrimination appear to have been preserved. Men are routinely aggressive towards women, experienced users harass newcomers, and young people dominate new social and entertainment media. The current study statistically examines peer scoring and reviewing behavior by over 300,000 users of a prominent new media website over a seven-year period in terms of the gender and age of the users. Findings support previous research on male bias online as well as reveal a complex age hierarchy with gender interactions, which became rather homogeneous over time for all users except older males.
The midlife years (45–55) often coincide with fundamental changes in women’s lives, as women experience transitions such as menopause, changes to family structure due to departure of children or divorce, and parents’ ageing and death. These circumstances tend to increase women’s reliance upon their social support networks. Evidence suggests that social support is critical in helping women manage transitions during the midlife period and develop a sense of self-efficacy; this article highlights that this support is being increasingly exchanged through mediated communication channels. The article presents a comparative investigation of mediated communication channels, primarily email and online chat, through which women give and receive social support, and addresses the factors underpinning women’s media choices. The findings indicate that in determining their media selection, women are judging their ‘audience’ and social context of their communication in order to select the most appropriate channel through which to exchange support.
At present, cyberspace tends to occupy a growing part of the social realities of most teenagers. The present study suggests that personal weblogs collectively can be said to comprise a social institution which serves to foster and maintain a cult of femininity. In promoting a cult of femininity, these personal weblogs are not merely reflecting the female role in society; they are also supplying one source of definitions of, and socialization into, that role. The main business of this study is to engage with a fairly large amount of data and try to answer some basic questions about how personal weblogs open up a new context for female teenage identity construction. More precisely, this article analyses the different gendered discourses British and Spanish female teenagers live out when they narrate their current and former romantic relationships. The study suggests that these female teenagers’ self-concepts, floating free of corporeal experience, derive from a struggle between their social relational identity and their individual-based social identity.
In this article, I investigate the linguistic practices by which participants in online dating chats become authentic gendered and sexual beings in the virtual world. This process of authentication validates them as members of a specific gender or sexual group, which is a key prerequisite for engaging in the intricacies of online desire and eroticism. Authentication in this context is necessarily a discursive act because of the absence of visual or aural cues, and it takes place through linguistic strategies such as the age/sex/location schema, descriptions of the self, and screen names. The resulting gender and sexual identities are sketches or stereotypes whose value derives from the acceptance of social and cultural discourses on gender and sexuality that are negotiated in the interactions. Authentication, therefore, is not an external process imposed upon people, but the result of specific social practices.
This article suggests that those interested in both welfare theory and welfare policy cannot afford to overlook the emerging interactions between online and offline environments. It explores the main parameters of the debate relating to cyberspace, in particular, and Information and Communication Technologies more generally. It argues that the pervasiveness of free market capitalism means that the negative consequences of the Internet for society and social welfare reform are those most likely to prevail at present. The task of the social policy community, then, is to contribute to a ‘cybercriticalism’. The article outlines a concept of ‘virtual rights’, the purpose of which is to reinvigorate the traditional categories of rights in an information society to which they often appear unsuited.
The relationship between chat and gender is a topic that has been discussed for more than 20 years now. Feminist theorists have claimed that virtual reality effaces gender. Others have pointed to the fact that gender matters online as well as offline; linguists in particular have shown that `real-life' gender leaves traces online in the form of discourse styles and patterns. This article has a somewhat different focus. It analyzes blatant plays with gender in Swiss internet relay chats (IRCs). In these games, chatters make use of gender, and put it on stage. These plays are possible because the construction of the gender in IRCs is achieved almost exclusively by communicative means. They might also be possible because the IRC releases the pressures of social constraints with regard to gender. And they have an effect, which could be described in gender theoretic terms as `queering.' But it has to be observed that these plays are made visible as plays, marked, and temporally limited; afterwards, gender constraints are effective again.
Although a substantial body of research exists on gender differences in computer-mediated communication, relatively little empirical attention has been directed toward how people perform a different gender online, or to what behavioral cues other participants attend in assessing others’ real-life gender. This study analyzes deceptive gender performances and assessments of their authenticity in The Turing Game, a publicly available synchronous text chat environment that supports spontaneous identity games. Content analysis of game logs shows that contestants produce stereotypical content when attempting to pass as the opposite gender, as well as giving off stylistic cues to their real-life gender. However, contrary to previous evidence that people judge online gender authenticity on the basis of linguistic styles, the judges in The Turing Game base their assessments mostly on stereotyped content, leading to a high rate of error. These findings are interpreted in terms of signal costs and conscious accessibility of cues.
This paper brings together three distinct bodies of scholarship: feminist and critical race reading of cybercultures and on-line identities; feminist analysis of gender and racial passing, and scholarship on racism and nationalism as gendered and sexualised. The paper is part of a larger project on sexuality, immigration and nationalism in Israel/Palestine and in cyberspace and is based on cyberethnography of on-line bulletin board of Russian-speaking queer immigrants in Israel. At the centre of my discussion is an ambiguous figure, a participant with nickname “Daughter of Palestine” who appeared in one of the discussions and immediately caused waves of suspicion. Was she a Palestinian woman passing as a Russian? Russian-Jewish? Russian-Israeli? Or was she neither? And most importantly, does it matter? This paper approaches on-line passing and outing as performance of borders. I look at the ways imagined borders between Israel and Palestine and identity categories of “Jew” and “Arab,” “straight” and “queer” are questioned and reinforced, and how passing becomes the very tool of constituting the borders it aims to cross. I address sexual, racial and national borders as threateningly ambivalent, showing that Daughter of Palestine functions as a figure that makes both easy crossing and unproblematic protection of borders impossible.
A relationship among language, gender, and discourse genre has previously been observed in informal, spoken interaction and formal, written texts. This study investigates the language/gender/genre relationship in weblogs, a popular new mode of computer-mediated communication (CMC). Taking as the dependent variables stylistic features identified in machine learning research and popularized in a Web interface called the Gender Genie, a multivariate analysis was conducted of entries from random weblogs in a sample balanced for author gender and weblog sub-genre (diary or filter). The results show that the diary entries contained more ‘female’ stylistic features, and the filter entries more ‘male’ stylistic features, independent of author gender. These findings problematize the characterization of the stylistic features as gendered, and suggest a need for more fine-grained genre analysis in CMC research. At the same time, it is observed that conventional associations of gender with certain spoken and written genres are reproduced in weblogs, along with their societal valuations.
This article focuses on the service providers of the future: virtual assistants on the Internet. Recent technological developments, supported by intensive research on artificial intelligence, have enabled corporations to construct ‘virtual employees’ who can interact with their online customers. The number of virtual assistants on the Internet continues to grow and most of these new service providers are human-like and female. In this article I profile virtual employees on the Internet — who they are, what they do and how they present themselves. I demonstrate that the Internet suffers from the same gender stereotyping characteristic of customer services in general and that the unreflective choice of female images is, at the minimum, a symbolic reinforcement of the real circumstances of gender divisions in customer service.
We investigated the construction of gender in chat groups. Four unacquainted persons chatted in two gender-anonymous conditions and a non-anonymous control condition. In one anonymous condition, the gender focus was made salient. The other groups did not know about the gender focus. All participants had to guess the gender of the others and give reasons for their decisions. Results suggest that (a) overall, 2/3 of gender guesses fit the sex category of the targets, (b) gender anonymity was more comfortable for women, (c) participants used mostly gender-stereotypic cues to infer gender, however, men and women used syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic cues (with different predictive value) to different degrees, (d) conversational behavior varied depending on gender anonymity, and (e) degree of gender salience was irrelevant for the use of gender as an organizing category.
In recent times much has been said about the possibility that the two-way, decentralized communications of cyberspace can provide sites of rational-critical discourse autonomous from state and economic interests and thus extending the public sphere at large. In this paper the extent to which the Internet does in fact enhance the public sphere is evaluated. Online deliberative practices are compared with a normative model of the public sphere developed from the work of Jürgen Habermas. The evaluation proceeds at a general level, drawing upon more specific Internet research to provide a broad understanding of the democratic possibilities and limitations of the present Internet. The analysis shows that vibrant exchange of positions and rational critique does take place within many online fora. However, there are a number of factors limiting the expansion of the public sphere online. These factors include the increasing colonization of cyberspace by state and corporate interests, a deficit of reflexivity, a lack of respectful listening to others, the difficulty of verifying identity claims and information put forward, the exclusion of many from online political fora, and the domination of discourse by certain individuals and groups. The article concludes by calling for more focused Internet-democracy research to address these problems further, research for which the present paper provides a starting point.
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