Gender Differences In Weblogs

Every innovation of communication technology will cause changes in communication pattern and mode. Weblog, a new star of modern communication technology, has a lot of advantages comparing to others: the convenient access and operation, the quick and smooth communication with people worldwide, and the high degree of freedom to express your own opinion. All of its merits make weblog more and more popular. It has taken an important role in the culture communication in China in recent years and is becoming an indispensable part of some people's everyday life. Weblog is one of the latest genres of the Internet communication. To keep trend with the development of netspeak, it is urgently needed to make a systemic exploration and analysis on weblog language.Gender differences in language have been studied in many fields by scholars all over the world. Language and gender has become an important branch in sociolinguistics, especially since Robin Lakoff raised the issues"women's language"and"women's status"in her book in the 1970s. Up to now, the study on language and gender has been involved in many fields including psychology, sociology, communication and applied linguistics. Based on the former related researches, this thesis, from a theoretical perspective in terms of sociolinguistics, studies the gender differences in weblogs.The analysis was a combination of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. Qualitative analysis means in this research we use the method of questionnaire. Then, through using quantified analysis, the author will categorize the data collected, and make the statistics, present results in a table. The questionnaire through email and QQ sent to author's classmates and friends. 90 copies are valid and in order to meet equilibrium in gender, the researcher sorted out 88 questionnaires among which 44 copies were from males and 44 copies were from females.The variables the author coded in this study were, personally identifying information of blog authors, topics of weblogs, emoticon features, creative language use, taboos and intensifiers. The reason why the writer chose these six variables is that from these six aspects, we can see the characteristics of Internet language. There are five chapters in this thesis. Chapter one is literature review. The definitions of CMC and weblogs and the research in Western countries and in China are included in this part in order to pave the path for later sections of the thesis. Chapter two provides the theoretical framework to the present study. The thesis adopts the gender and language as the theoretical framework to approach the possible gender-linked differences in CMC.Chapter three details the research methodologies used in this study, including the research questions, subjects, method and data collection procedure.The chapter four illustrates the gender differences in after 80s'weblogs in terms of personally identifying information of blog authors, topics of weblogs, emoticon features, creative language use, taboos and intensifiers. And then the author discusses the analysis results. Overall, the results indicate that bloggers reveal a considerable amount of personal information in their blogs, including name, age and location and so on. Meanwhile, there is no gender difference in the display of personally identifying information. On the choice of blog topics, men prefer to politics, economy, sports and so on, while women more prefer to choice feeling, family, and fashion. In weblogs, women use more emoticons and creative language. Furthermore, in the weblogs men use far more openly aggressive language, while women use far more expressions offering support and a deepening of their relationship with the readers.Women are more inclined to use extravagant adjectives and intensifiers than men to express their feeling.Chapter five provides some causes of the identified gender differences from different perspectives, especially from the cultural and social perspectives and points out the implications of gender differences.This research study provides a variety of insights into the ways how men and women interact with others in online settings, contributes to the new research background for communication, and enlarges the scope of sociolinguistic theory on gender and language. Practically, the relationship of language features and gender differences in CMC can contribute to the distant education.