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GENDER AND COMMUNICATION STYLES ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB

(C)Tami Sutcliffe, 1998
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Library Science in the Graduate School of Texas Woman's University, December 1998.
Access the original document at http://homepages.waymark.net/~bikechic/comm.html

Problems in Communication

Human beings are defined, in part, by their styles of communication. Business people contract and consult. Artists strip down to emotions and impulses. Scientists relay data across space while interchanging theories. All of these humans are attempting to share their experiences in life with other humans. All of them have separate, vital styles which not only identify them to each other but in many ways, identify them to themselves. All human beings "shift gears" as they change roles, using one style during a conflict in the office, another while giving advice to a friend, meanwhile endlessly cultivating various other styles, to be displayed as life and experience alter the content of their message and the nature of their audience.

When humans study each other attempting to communicate, they must often be tempted to shrug, smile and turn away. The sheer number of factors conspiring against human communication occurring at all are remarkable. Attempts at communication must first surmount the physical world, with all of the noise, distortion, interruption, and physical failures present in the environment. The communicators must then somehow overcome language barriers, cultural norms, societal misconceptions, and misconstrued body language before any experiences can even begin to be shared. The fact that we ever manage to communicate anything useful to each other is amazing in itself.

One way human communication has been investigated is by examining failure. What happens when people are unable to decipher their messages to each other? Why are some people seemingly unable to communicate with others? Are there specific patterns that might explain why one human is not successful in exchanging ideas with another individual? After sifting through myriad factors including age, social position, speech traits and environmental aspects, researchers have isolated gender as one possible point of contention in the study of communication over the last ten years.