Construction of Gender in Social Media Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Construction of Gender in Social Media - Essay Example This essay stresses that extensive research has been conducted in the past to demonstrate the correlation between gender and media. Some have included studies on different types of media like movies, cartoons, music, and games. There are various methods used in studying the kind of language used by different genders on the social media that include; content analysis and discourse analysis. This paper declares that Herring attempts to bring ideas on computer-mediated discourse as a way to show that the study of the language used in social media is of great concern. Being that most social media sites are modern, Herring acknowledges that human-human communication via computer networks is a recent thing. In her ideas, she focuses on computer-mediated language and argues that is less correct, coherent and complex. Also, she states that the language that is used on social media differs according to the cultural and social context. A careful study of this computer-mediated discourse shows that language use can reveal the identity of the user whether he is educated or not, while he is trying to mask himself. Moreover, on media, especially social media the age of user can be revealed by the content of the message that the user post. Herring assumes that the identity of the gender in social media can be expected easily by the stereotypical behaviors that are attached to each ge nder. In addition to the above studies, statistics of how men and women have been using Twitter and Instagram also holds.