Patriotism, Power, &
Privacy Online

Gender and Power in Online Communication

Held on Thursday, May 2, 2002 at 6:30 pm in PNW 239

Susan Herring is a Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Science, Adjunct Associate Professor of Linguistics Fellow, Center for Social Informatics Fellow, Center for Research on Learning and Technology, Indiana University, Bloomington.

New communication technologies are often invested with users' hopes for change in the social order. Thus among its numerous alleged effects, the Internet has been claimed to promote gender equality: it neutralizes status differences by masking physical cues to gender identity; it empowers women and members of other traditionally subordinate groups to find community and organize online; and the World Wide Web offers opportunities for women to engage in entrepreneurial commercial activity on a par with men.

Alongside this list of advantages, however, are reports of stalking and virtual rape, of women's communities undermined by harassment, and of women defined as a 'niche market' for e-commerce by marketers. These reports suggest a social reality controlled by male interests, in which female participation is problematic or marginalized.

In this talk, Susan Herring will address how these two apparently conflicting representations of gender on the Internet can be reconciled. She has surveyed research on gender and computer-mediated communication (CMC) since the late 1980's, the period when women started logging on in significant numbers, comparing popular discourses about gender on the Internet with empirical findings from disciplines such as communication, linguistics, anthropology, social psychology, and gender studies.

Issues addressed will include access, patterns of Internet use, representation of gender identities in CMC, language use and discourse styles, response patterns, community formation, norm enforcement and harassment, as well as issues associated with women-centered and women-only groups. She will conclude by considering the impact of the growing commercialization of the World Wide Web on women, who now comprise slightly over 50% of web users in the United States (Media Metrix 2000). Questions for the future include what sorts of communication the Web enables (are we moving from interactivity back towards a more television-like broadcast model?), how graphic images and multi-modal interfaces contribute to the representation and perception of gender, and the consequences for social change of the ideological dominance of the Web by commercial interests.