Philippine E-Journals

Exploring Gender Communication in Facebook Wall Posts

Rhona Maria A. Waga

Discipline: Arts And Science

 

Abstract:

The purpose of this study is to explore gender communication in Facebook through human -human interactivity and discuss the types of messages that Facebook users post and share on their walls. Facebook users share personal and impersonal topics. Based on their posted FB statuses, male participants were very vocal about topics on love and relationships. Male participants posted and shared statuses which are categorically impersonal whereas female participants posted and shared statuses which are categorically personal. Both male and female participants use emoticons to express their emotions and express their interest and involvement to the topic being discussed and no specific difference can be attributed separately, however, male respondents use more varied types of emoticons than do female respondents. The most notable finding derived from the study regarding the conversational opening was that most conversations start with self-disclosing comments about personal and impersonal topics. Adjacency pairs are also used for closing conversations. There may be other features of gendered communication in social networking that have not been discussed in this paper. What have been textually analyzed in this study are the predominant topics, conversational patterns, language presentation and extent of human-human interactivity that were reflected in the collected actual comments of the participants.