Study of Gender Feature in Computer Mediated Communication
Nowadays computer mediated communication (CMC) is rapidly turning our world into a global village. We are able to talk to each other in online chat rooms, mediated by nothing but computers. And we are increasingly seeing the benefit of the Internet which
- PDF / 1,706,129 Bytes
- 8 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 18 Downloads / 148 Views
Study of Gender Feature in Computer Mediated Communication Xiaoyi Zheng
Abstract Nowadays computer mediated communication (CMC) is rapidly turning our world into a global village. We are able to talk to each other in online chat rooms, mediated by nothing but computers. And we are increasingly seeing the benefit of the Internet which empowers women, who are considered less powerful in the traditional patterns of male-dominated communication, not only participate in the CMC ‘‘equally’’ but also find community to pursue their own interests. Thus, the Internet is said to eradicate gender prejudice in communication, leading to greater gender equality and gender became a lesser issue than it had been in previous times. Keywords Feature of gender
Computer mediated communication Network
39.1 Introduction According to previous researches on gender and language, women and men do talk differently, adopting different styles in face-to-face communication due to the different cultural myths they have absorbed [1, 2]. 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 will really provide an escape from gender differences. By examining the messages
X. Zheng (&) Tourism College of Zhejiang, HangZhou 310000, China e-mail: [email protected]
Z. Zhong (ed.), Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Engineering and Applications (IEA) 2012, Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering 219, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4471-4853-1_39, Springer-Verlag London 2013
297
298
X. Zheng
posted by women and men when chatting online, the language features of women and men under investigation will be analyzed [3]. To investigate the impact that the Internet is making on language, in his 2001 book—‘Language and the Internet’, Crystal discusses how the language used in various Internet communities has developed in separate papers [4]: on the language of e-mail, ‘‘chat-groups’’, virtual worlds (MODS and MUDS), and the World Wide Web [5]. It give answers to the questions ‘‘Is the Internet bad for the future of language?’’ and ‘‘Will creativity be lost? Are standards diminishing?’’ by concluding with a look at the effects of the Internet on language as a whole, Crystal argues positively, that the ‘‘Net speak’’ will change fundamentally the way we think about language. As more women begin to venture online and more research being done in this area, the findings of studies with respect to gender and CMC tend to problematize claims that the cyberspace is gender-free and the notion that the CMC improves communication between women and men [6]. Susan Herring (1993a) in one of her article ‘Participation in electronic discourse in a ‘‘feminist’’ field’ presents results about activity on two academic e-mailing lists, claiming that instead of women and
Data Loading...
