Gender Identity Online

The lure of the internet for many people is to be someone your not – to create an alternate personality. For some people this may mean playing a fantasy role or maybe portraying personality characteristics that they wish they had. For other people interacting online is an opportunity to act as the opposite gender and learn more about gender communication.
The posts on the discussion board show that that question of “do you have a gender,” intrigued everyone in the class and lead to some good discussions. After looking over the posts I see that a number of classmates agree with me in believing that we have a gender online.
Thomas Wilkins and Rafal Kowalczyk both agree that we have a gender online. Wilkins said, “I believe that you carry a personality online. Although it is a scary thought to believe that people can pose as a man or a woman online. I don’t think this is different then those who do it in public.”
Dan Cerasale also thinks people have a gender online and echoes Wilkins’ statements about the ability for people to portray different genders online.
“A lot of people I know chat completely differently on the computer than as if you were chatting with them in person,” Cerasale explained. “If I don’t know a person when I’m interacting with them, gender is usually the first thing I try to figure out. You can usually figure it out pretty quickly, that is unless the person is purposefully misrepresenting themselves.”
Misrepresentation is a theme that Odile Dilone used in her response to the question.
“You could be speaking with a 54 [year old man] who says he is a 20 year old woman. Gender, among other things, is something hard to define by chatting with someone. Since you are not listening or looking at the person, you may be easily cheated,” stated Dilone.
I think we definitely have a gender online and we give clues to our identity in the way we communicate online. Whether it’s the tone of our messages or our underlying intent, I think we are always putting clues out there that point to our identity.
Though we may or may not want our gender identity to be shared, the marketing and advertising world would love to know the identities of visitors who traffic through their websites. This information can help business and marketers build data that describes the type of people that are visiting their site. Then can take this data to help them tailor their messages to the types of people that are visiting their websites.
While researching gender identity online, I found it interesting that the majority of links I came upon resulted in the discussion of the female identity online. One article I found particularly interesting appeared in the March 1, 1996 edition of CMC Magazine and was written by Lisa Schmesier. (http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1996/mar/ed.html)
“Gender is an elusive paradigm,” Schmesier wrote. “We may be born with a particular set of reproductive equipment, but biology doesn't make things clear cut. For years, people have debated how much of a gender identity is biologically derived, and how much is socially constructed through external cues and influences.”
Schmesier brings up the topic of gender misrepresentation on the internet and questions why if people have the ability to change identities that they are at all bringing an identity online.
“The drawbacks have been meticulously documented in popular media: people harass women in certain forums, others list women in a "Babes of the Web"-style pages,” Schmesier wrote. “But what benefits are there to being a woman, part of a visible minority, online?”
“The visibility is part of the attraction: the most active woman-centered sites online center around building a community and promoting women as socially and professionally equal to men,” Schmesier wrote.
Also in the March 1, 1996 edition of CMC Magazine, Mindy McAdams wrote about the possibilities of having no gender identity in her article “Gender Without Bodies.” (http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1996/mar/mcadams.html)
“Is it possible to be neither woman nor man online, but rather a person without gender? It would require as much conscious effort as the maintenance of a gender identity other than your body's. And it may be that our minds, so bound up with our bodies in most aspects of our lives, would give the game away,” McAdams wrote.
I think the internet is like an enormous science experiment where we can test out many different hypotheses. In this case the question was, “do we have a gender online?” I will stick with my original thoughts and say that we do. And we also have a great opportunity to learn about the other gender as we continue to debate this question.
Though the differences between genders have been discussed since the beginning of man, I think the interactions online can shed a new light onto this issue and help us build a better understanding of how our gender characteristics are revealed through communication.