netiquette: gender differences (fwd)

anne ollila (aollila@utu.fi)
Tue, 13 Feb 1996 14:05:44 -0800 (PST)


Date: Tue, 13 Feb 1996 14:05:44 -0800 (PST)
From: anne ollila <aollila@utu.fi>
To: h-verkko@sara.cc.utu.fi
Subject: netiquette: gender differences (fwd)

---------- Forwarded message ----------

Tässä verkkoetiketeistä kiinnostuneille pari tiivistelmää jutuista, jotka ovat tulleet naistutkimusverkkoon ekofeministien postituslistan kautta.

Sexist Netiquette By Margie Wylie Netiquette is sexist. The informal etiquette of the Internet not only discourages female participation on-line, but its rule structure also tends to squelch the voices of the few women who insist on speaking up, Susan Herring, a linguist from the University of Texas has found. Herring says her studies reveal women and men have different ideas of what constitutes appropriate Net behavior. Netiquette supports more typically male communication patterns. An outgrowth of the scientific community and of hackers' interest in talking to one another, the Internet's libertarian survival-of-the- fittest ideals codify men's speech patterns as the norm for Internet discourse. The aggressive, winner-take-all attitudes of netiquette don't appeal to the way women communicate. While women tend to create shorter posts that ask questions, hedge, seek consensus and encourage other points of view, men's posts tend to run much longer, use strong assertions, challenges and authoritative statements. That in itself keeps women away from conversations that they find insulting or simply exclusionary. .. ------------------------------ Richard K. Moore - rmoore@us.oracle.com - Wexford, Ireland - fax: +353 5323970 _____________________________________________________ Ineffective Netiquette By Richard Moore .. Thus a SUBSET (females) of the net community is losing out, since it encounters significant barriers to its full participation. But in another sense, the ENTIRE net community is losing out even more! By failing to value LISTENING and CONCENSUS BUILDING, it fails to make any progress! The net is kind of like a meeting that hasn't been brought to order -- the crowd is still mingling in haphazardly clustered groups, and the room as a whole is a cacophony. The need to learn to listen, to seek consensus, to build common agendas, and work together to implement solutions. Ms Wylie's material tells us that females exhibit just those skills that the net sorely needs. The rest of us NEED that contribution, so that we can learn to use the net less as a jousting field, and more as a serious tool. It's not so much that males need to be more supportive of females, but that males need to LEARN from females. It may turn out to be true that females ultimately make their contribution with many fewer words than the males find it necessary to use (There's a typically long male sentence for you!). If so, that would be wise use of leverage on the female's part, rather than a lack of soapbox access. _____________________________________________________