technoculture314-09

Friday,July 31,2009.

The case of male teenagers' feminization when they're using thier cell phones to text message
was rather interesting, as I looked back at myself and my texting habits - they totally differed
as who were at the receiving end of my text messages! As Proitz claimed in his observation that male texters tend to use more shorter and importantly, functional types of texts - significantly
without any unneccesary 'emoticons' to make it look more fancy. After looking at some of my
mate's text messages they send to me and to the other people as well (all male friends by the way), the majority of them tend to use shorter abbrevations of words and sometimes
over-shortend words that I couldnt even understand what on earth he meant.
To list some examples, one day after my lecture I received a txt message from my mate saying : "WU??". It wasnt that hard to figure out that it means "Where are you?", shortend to the first word of the sentence to save some bother. However, the following txt I got from him was
rather puzzling this time, as it read: "PG?" What could PG possibly stand for?
He later called me and said he wanted to ask me the question :
"Pool game?"

When it comes to exchaning texts with girls, it's a totally different story.
I, for example, looking at the sentbox, tend to use a full sentence rather than extreme
abbreviations like "WU?" , but rather it was "Where are you at the moment? :)" instead.
The use of emoticon also is much more frequent when exchaing texts with girls.
It seems that when communicating with same sex, young male adults tend to express
thier 'natural' masuline side of thier personality but when in communication with opposite sex,
it appears that male texters tend to emphasize the feminine side of thier personality
in order to appear more 'understanding' of the female personality.

With relation to some of the information that was presented in lectures and tutorials on gender; it got me thinking. Some elements of communication are lost and gained by in the online world and and some elements are also gained. This is also apparent in texting. An element which could be lost (maybe others would disagree) is that of conveying tone in digital communication. One finds it increasingly harder to express tone of voice and ofcourse body language in texts. A simple exclaimation mark does not have the same effect as stressing a point or yelling at a person during a face-to-face conversation. It is through this that a sense of ambiguity is created partially due to the fact that the persons facial expressions or voice is not present to be studied by the receiver. This leads to sometimes people not fully understanding what the sender truely meant in their texts. Such as 'You're funny' is almost impossible to differenciate in text communication yet in a face-to-face conversation it is much easier to understand the context based on the senders supposed 'truth-value' in the voice or the sarcasm. This is also relevant to things such as email or online chat amongst others.
Now to Gender, i havent done extensive research in this area obviously but i would like to mention some things which i have noticed amongst the texting and online interaction of my friends. With many of my male friends, the texts or online chats (very rare) seem to be directed at instructions or information texts. Such as what time i can meet them, If they are coming to class etc. So the texts and responses are very short and informative, much like the new craze of 'Tweets'. However with many of my female friends the texts received are often much longer almost reaching the 160 character limit and tend to include information and as well as 'culture' or 'well-being' texts to ask how i am, When i am able to see them etc. The texts from the female friends seem to be more open ended and question like. However whilst writing this i have just realised that there is only a one-way overlapping in that i respond to my female friends texts often as i would to my male friends with one word responses and information (Intrestingly this often angers them) However i do not respond to my male friends in the way my female friends text me. So even though there is two genders texting me, the response is always solo gendered and not catered for both genders.

I too have made similar observations to Susie1989 with regard to texting styles of boyfriends. Just something to add: My boyfriend has a lot of girl mates as well as guy mates. Taking a sneaky peek at his past messages (as you do...), I noticed that it was not just me, his girlfriend, that he had sent feminised texts (longer in length, smiley faces etc) to, but rather all female recipients, including his mother and sister. His messages to his guy mates, in comparison, were considerably shorter (often consisting of one word) and strictly to the point, as Susie1989 has also observed.

The part of this week's lecture that caught my eye was Proitz’s study about the subconscious feminization of teenage male texters during a budding romance. A few months back I also conducted a similar informal survey about the conscious feminization of adult males.

One day when I sneaked a peak at my boyfriend’s phone while he was texting, I realized that the style my boyfriend used when texting his mates was significantly different from the style used when texting me. Like the observations from Proitz’ study, the texts to his male friends were “shorter and more ‘functional’ texts, and the texts to me were significantly longer with a plethora of emoticons. For example, all communication with his friends could be done with just ONE SINGLE word; when asking someone’s whereabouts the word “where” would be used, when asking someone to lunch the word “lunch” would be used, and when asked about his whereabouts unspecific words such as “city,” “café,” “restaurant” would be used.

However, the texts sent to me were considerably more descriptive and interesting. When I asked my boyfriend about the reasons behind the two polar-opposite styles, he informed me that he preferred the style used when texting his friends, but used a more feminized style when texting to me to match my level of “femininity.” He also added that if he would mistakenly text to me in the style of texting his friends, I would immediately ask if he were mad or angry. Because this new revelation (that my boyfriend, to some degree, fabricated his texts) had never even flitted across my mind, I further questioned my other male friends who had girlfriends if they also followed the same polar-opposite texting styles, and they did! Most said that they texted longer, more descriptive and “bubbly” texts just to please their girlfriends.

From my own observations I have learnt that with male adults, most seem to consciously feminize their texting styles in order to please their significant other. Of course, this observation was done on a select few, so in no way am I implying that this applies to the majority.