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Non-Tech : Internet Rhetoric -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ~digs who wrote (19)	6/29/2004 2:24:08 AM
From: ~digs	Respond to of 73

recent spat on environmentalist thread exemplifies flame war : Message 20258323 cooler heads prevail

To: ~digs who wrote (19)	6/30/2004 1:02:59 AM
From: ~digs	Respond to of 73

GENDER AND DEMOCRACY IN COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION ella.slis.indiana.edu Susan C. Herring (1993) Abstract: The claim that computers democratize communication is evaluated with respect to male and female participation in two academic electronic discussion lists over a one-year period. A tendency is noted for a minority of male participants to effectively dominate discussions both in amount of talk, and through rhetorical intimidation. It is argued that these circumstances represent a type of censorship, and thus that an essential condition for democratic discourse is not met. quotes: Computer mediated communication (CMC) neutralizes social status cues (accent, handwriting/voice quality, sex, appearance, etc.) that might otherwise be transmitted by the form of the message. While on the one hand these characteristics render the medium less personal, they also provide for the possibility that traditionally lower-status individuals can participate on the same terms as others -- that is, more or less anonymously, with the emphasis being on the content, rather than on the form of the message or the identity of the sender. In a medium which permits multiple contributors to post messages more or less simultaneously to the group, gaining the focus of the group's attention or the "conversational floor" depends entirely on the extent to which other participants acknowledge and respond to one's postings. ranking of preferred topic types: MEN: issues > information > queries > personal WOMEN: personal > queries > issues > information 'adversarial' rhetoric: ranges from gratuitous displays of knowledge to forceful assertions of one's views to elaborate put-downs of others with whom one disagrees. Why do women react with greater aversion than men to adversarial exchanges? Sheldon (1992) suggests that this aversion can be traced to cultural norms of sex-appropriate behavior with which children are indoctrinated from an early age: while boys are encouraged to compete and engage in direct confrontation, girls are taught to "be nice" and to appease others, a distinction internalized in the play behavior of children as young as three years of age. As a consequence, verbal aggressiveness comes to have a different significance for women than for men; as Coates (1986) observes, women are apt to take personal offense at what men may view as part of the conventional structure of conversation. The claim of status-free communication hinges in large part on the condition of anonymity (Graddol & Swann, 1989; Kiesler et al., 1984), a condition that is not met in the discourse analyzed here, since most messages were signed, or else the sender's identity is transparently derivable from his or her electronic address.[9] In very few cases could there have been any doubt upon receipt of a message as to the sex of the sender, and thus sex-based discrimination could freely apply. However, given the existence of 'genderlects' of the sort identified here, it is doubtful that such discrimination would disappear even if everyone were to contribute anonymously. Just as a university president or a janitor's social status is communicated through their unconscious choices of style and diction, CMC contains subtle indications of participants' gender. Three factors in Kiesler et al.'s (1984, p.1129) experimental design were found to correlate with less inhibited verbal behavior: anonymity, simultaneity (as opposed to linear sequencing of messages), and simultaneous computer conferencing (as opposed to electronic mail).