Et apropos til den ofte tilbakevendende "stildebatten" her på
forumet. Følgende artikkel sto i The Observer for et par uker siden.
Is that a hemail or a shemail in your inbox?
by Nick Paton Walsh
The Observer, 20 may 2001
Men and women use the internet in entirely different ways, and have
distinct styles of writing emails, according to new research.
`There are pretty good odds at being able to guess the gender of
someone just by reading their email,' said David Silver, an assistant
professor in the School of Communications at the University of
Washington. `Many studies have found that men using email tend to
supply answers or give a response that shuts down the dialogue. Women
are more prepared to open up the discussion. They're also more
prepared in a chat room to say "I don't know. What does everyone else
think?"'
Male messages tend to be basic -- confirming someone is right, telling
them they are wrong or offering solutions to problems. Women tend to
keep conversations going and ask more questions. They aren't afraid
to admit ignorance, or that they are wrong.
A study by Dr Susan Herring, a linguistics expert at Indiana
University, has also shown that men tend to make strong assertions,
disagree with others and use profanity, insults and sarcasm. By
contrast, women tend to use diplomatic assertions along with
questions, offers, suggestions and polite expressions.
The balance online is shifting to empower women. Silver said a huge
change had occured in global internet use in the past few years as
women lay claim to a medium previously dominated by `geeky' men.
`Many women in the mid-Nineties were put off the internet by slang,'
he said. They would also go into chat rooms and get insulted -- or
`flamed' -- very often. The old internet chat rooms were racist,
homophobic and often very sexist. There was a lot of misogyny
online. So women simply started their own chat rooms.'
Silver pointed to a series of studies into the differences between
male and femail behaviour online. One study showed women were a lot
less hierarchical in their use of the internet. In one chat room for
academics it was noticed that female undergraduates, graduates and
faculty members all treated each other equally. In the same chat
room, researchers noticed women were a lot quicker to share
information, and happy to share booklists with colleagues. The study
also found tht, while women confess online to not knowing an answer,
men prefer to stay silent.
The news comes as the gender balance in internet use shifts towards
women. In the UK, women account for 40 per cent of those online at
present and this is expected to rise to 60 per cent by 2005, according
to a survey by leading analysts, Forrester. Experts predict that 68
per cent of those who come online next year will be women.
In the United States, the Pew Internet and American Life project has
released a study showing that 51 per cent of internet users are women.
How to tell the gender of a sender
Answer `yes' to more than 2 of the questions and the sender is male...
1. Does it contain any expletives?
2. Does it not invite an answer?
3. Is it very short? Would it make better sense if it were longer?
4. Does it presume everyone else in the world knows less than its
author?
--
______ _________________________________________________
/ | jonivar skullerud jonivar@bigfoot.com |
| jon | http://www.bigfoot.com/~jonivar/ |
\______ | |
\ | None are more hopelessly enslaved than those |
ivar | | who falsely believe they are free. -Goethe |
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