Perhaps it’s petty, but my interpretation of what compiler/commentator Jacquelyn White seemed to imply was the question of whether gender played either some role in cyberbullying, or NO role what-so-ever. As my mother told me before my first true/false test in grade school, “Look out for statements that imply that under no circumstances can one component influence another—these questions are almost always false.” Well. Perhaps she didn’t word it like that. But close enough.
We’re taking a “gender in communications class.” Even if gender is entirely socially constructed, there is no denial that gender plays at least a certain role in every human interaction. This includes cyberspace. Even if a male masquerades as a female, the individuals who interact with this person will still take the perceived gender of the individual into account. There’s just no way a person in our current, highly-gender influenced society can fully ignore it because it is so engrained in us at such an early age.
What I think could have been a much more interesting question White could have asked—but it probably lacked conflicting articles—would be whether people tend to act similarly in their online life as they do in real life. While many would just assume people would take on whatever role they please due to the relative anonymity of the interweb, with high-accountability social networking sites such as Facebook (where a wayward insult to your mother may actually be read by her, or one of her friends—just look at Failbook) bears great weight on how people will act in an online environment. Perhaps, once research catches up with the current trends, there’ll be more interest in it.
Questions:
Do you think it’s possible to completely ignore someone’s gender altogether? How might we strive to demote the importance of gender in communication? Do you think this would be a good thing?
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