A Socio-cultural Analysis Of Chinese And Foreign Net Names

As one of the inevitable phenomena of internet development, net names are characterized by flexibility and are fully motivated from the Socio-cultural perspective. Net names are not only extended selves, parts of identity of Internet uses, they are also images and clues of society and culture. Net names of Chinese people and Western people show different tendencies of different cultures.The thesis is a comparative study of Chinese and Western internet users’ID (net names in this thesis) under Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory which includes five dimensions:Individualism vs. Collectivism, Masculinity vs. Femininity, Long-Term Orientation vs. Short-Term Orientation, Power Distance Index and Uncertainty Avoidance Index. Net names are randomly collected from yahoo.com and sina.com. After the analysis of them, there come some conclusions in thesis:1. In terms of the dimension of Individualism vs. Collectivism, according to the statistics of net names of modifier-head construction from China and foreign countries, it shows that in foreign countries more net names are related to individuals which are about human being, occupation, personality, mental status or some parts of human body. In China, however, more net names have a close relationship to the nature and animals, which shows holistic and panoramic view.2. In terms of the dimension of Masculinity vs. Femininity, it is easier to distinguish the gender of foreign net names. Foreign netizens provide more gender-related information than Chinese netizens. In foreign countries, net names show more tendencies to masculinity. A High Masculinity ranking indicates the country experiences a high degree of gender differentiation. In China, However, net names seem to belong to femininity and more Chinese netizens tend to find a neutral net name, which makes people difficult to judge gender. The reasons of that phenomenon are different language structures and different styles of language.3. In terms of the dimension of Long-Term Orientation vs. Short-Term Orientation, net names of Chinese netizens show long-term orientation, which focuses on the degree the society embraces, that is the long-term devotion to traditional literature and values. However, as to net names of foreign netizens, although there’s a kind of orientation in them, such as Bible or classical novels and poems, that kind of net names are relatively less. So comparing to Chinese netizens, western people enjoy simple style of net name instead of cultured style. 4. In terms of the dimension of Power Distance Index, net names related about occupation, status or people’s mental attitude in China show a relative high power distance which means that inequalities of power and wealth have been allowed to grow within the society. There are about four kinds of net names:First kind of net names belongs to the person who submits meekly to domination or mistreatment by others. This kind of net name makes us feel a sense of inferiority or depression, which comes from the oppression he suffers in reality; Second kind of net names is showing the ravenous for power and wealth. The characteristic of this kind of net names is exaggerate and showing off money. Maybe just because those people’s lust for power cannot be satisfied in reality, so they really want to get satisfaction in virtual world; The third kind of net names belongs to people who want to change the social injustice; The last kind of net names belongs to people who have a relative peaceful mind or live in upper social level, their net names always do not complain or show off something at purpose, which makes them have peaceful net names. From those net names of western netizens, it is not easy to find the names related to the poor occupation or low-status work, most of them have a close relationship to the mood or normal name,which dose not clearly and directly reflect the equality in society and their complain about some inequality of treatment.5. In terms of the dimension of Uncertainty Avoidance Index, China has a relative high uncertainty avoidance ranking, for there exists the phenomenon of filter in naming. It is really difficult to find the net name which is the same as the name of China’s leader or related to the political sensitive words. Unlike other western countries, Chinese are not to keen on uncertainty, by planning everything carefully they try to avoid the uncertainty. China has its own concept of ruling the nation in order to make sure that the country is politically stable and nationalities are unified. However, western society gives more acceptances in this aspect, there are not so many limits on net name, and the culture gives more freedom to people to talk about their leaders and systems.The thesis tries to provide new angle and insights into the research of cyber language and culture as well as culture difference. In addition I hope it can be a useful research to further study net names of different nations and people’s virtual identity. In the future, to deeply understand the users’intention, the thesis will try to combine net names with real identities of their users based on two groups in China and abroad.