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Abstract: The aims of this master´s thesis are to determine how certain usernames influence the perception of gender on online communication and to identify possible differences between the language of men and women used in online communication in the form of a forum. The theoretical part discusses at first the internet in general; its origins, how communication came to be on it, the characteristics of internet language and differences between communication in real-life and online. Then we turn our attention to differences between the language of men and women, which can occur in either face-to-face (or written) communication or in online communication in general. The empirical part focuses on the experiment conducted for the purpose of this thesis. This part of the thesis contains the methods of the experiment, the details of it, the analysis of the communication happening on the forum and the analysis of the questionnaires given to the participants of the experiment. This is followed by the discussion of the findings/results and the concluding thoughts. The findings of the study confirm all the hypotheses set in the thesis, i.e.: Hypothesis 1: the majority of the participants will not be able to guess correctly the gender of other participants in conversations with made-up usernames (Discussion 2). Hypothesis 2: there will be differences between the language of men and women in both types of conversations regardless of the type of username used. Hypothesis 3: participants regardless of gender will add more contributions to the forum in conversations with made-up usernames (Discussion 2) because of the anonymity.
Keywords: internet, online communication, language, username(s), difference, influence, experiment, men´s and women´s language, gender.
Published in DKUM: 23.11.2018; Views: 1392; Downloads: 145
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