Friday, 10 January 2014

Language & Technology Mini Investigation

My Investigation: The Gender Differences Within The Convention of Texting

In the online article http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/12/31/creaky_voice_uptalk_gendered_texting_do_women_communicate_differently_than.html, it suggests that there are many differences in the way men and women text. Amanda Marcotte said that women use more emoticons, ellipsis, lengthening words by adding extra letters (nooooo), repeated explanation marks, abbreviations and back channel agreement. It is also said that women use pronouns whilst men use prepositions and swear more. 

I decided to text this by taking 5 different conversations, all between different people but in total the data is from 5 girls and 5 boys either 16 or 17 years old. I think this is enough data to collected so far but I may collect more to see if my data is correct but on the whole I believe my hypothesis is correct that these differences are present in the way we text, the girls do seem to use more exclamation marks and send kisses (xxx) most of the time and the boys do swear a significant amount. However, there are some differences such as the boys use just as many emoticons as the girls. I will collect more data to see whether these patterns are correct. 

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