Blog #9 Guiler and Durndell: Gender Interactions in online discussion groups

I guess first and foremost, I need to clarify that this article focused on educational online discussion groups rather than those used for un-academic subjects.

I was hoping that I would be able to disprove this article and their findings based on my own personal experiences with online discussion boards, but this time, I've fallen into the categories they described. Now whether or not I employ a more female style of response on DB's would take quite a bit of time to determine.

As they mentioned in the article, women have a tendency to use positive language while men use negative more often. So in many of the academic DB's I've looked over I do tend to say "I agree" or in a roundabout way, I agree with what was being said. I have had some professors say that they would prefer that we don't use the phrase I agree because some people may leave their response at just that without justifying their reason for agreement. I rarely try to start confrontations on the internet because many people forget the fact that they are conversing with another human being and the conversation ventures into a bad place. So yes, I'll agree but I will also try to bring up an opposing side politely. There's no way around it.

I have another question in regards to this article. They mentioned that men are more likely to use sarcasm in their responses, but without the lack of tone present in the typed form, how do they know they are being sarcastic in the first place? Emoticons? Typical features of sarcasm? Even if they are following typical features, what if they were being sarcastic?

In comparison to non-academic DB's, I have noticed that girls are more likely to take on a male style of language. There are girls who are willing to start arguments and flaming others. They especially do so when they have a name that doesn't give away their gender until the tell-tale phrase of " As a women, I believe..." or "As a man, I believe...". I think everyone expects women to be more polite online because well, we're women. We are the "gentle" sex. This article shows that we are more polite but I think if they looked at other online discussion boards, they might find different results. Then again, you can never tell who's who on the internet these days.

Blog #8 Advertising for Children

So as I read through the article by Johnson, there were many observations that they made that I had already noticed in advertisements geared towards children. I actually haven't watched commercials geared towards children in a while, but on occasion I see them and they pretty much follow the same old formula. Commercials geared towards boys or advertising boy products are usually voiced over by a man. The man typically doesn't speak in a calm, soothing voice either. He uses a voice that is commanding and sounds very enthusiastic, especially if the commercial is for a toy truck or car. Of course, only boys are present in these commercials and rarely minorities are present.

For commercials geared towards girls, they are voiced over by females and like the boys commercials, only girls are present. Yet the girls do not get the same commanding, enthusiastic voice that boys do. In fact, they usually get a voice that sounds somewhat high-pitched or what I like to call the "Disney-princess" voice. It's very light and sing-songy and is mostly used for commercials advertising girl toys. Now if the product is used for something that is related to tweens, then the voice of a teenage girl is used who talks just the way a teenager would (excessive use of "like").

When boys and girls are present together, they play their roles respectively. More importantly, as I mentioned before, commercials aren't very diverse in terms of race. They are moreso than they were before, but Caucasians still dominate commercials. I have seen some commercials in Spanish that are geared towards Mexican children and they are a complete re-enactment of their English counterpart.

I think it's disappointing that the commercials limit who can buy them or who they are geared towards. Maybe there are some girls who would find boys toys appealing because they seem so cool and maybe there are boys who are curious about products geared towards girls. Of course, another interesting point is how it would be more acceptable for a girl to be interested in toys/products geared towards boys but not vice versa.