Posted on: March 4, 2009
OMG! I LUV U, QT!
By Mirielle Cailles
CTW Features
Looking for love? Use your cell phone. According to a new study, for many women text messaging is the newest arena for flirtation. Researchers at Indiana University, Bloomington, have found that although men talk more in public settings, it's the women who are most expressive when talking through technology.
Studying Italy's real-time interactive music television channel Allmusic, a public venue where exchanges occur via text messaging, results showed that women nearly max out the character count limit, use more abbreviations and insertions and employ more emoticons (smiling or frowning faces).
"The messages are very flirtatious and have nothing to do with the television show," says Susan Herring, co-researcher and a professor in the IU School of Library and Information Science. "In the linguistic marketplace there have always been different values associated with standard and non-standard language, and here we have found results that are paradoxical, that are the opposite of the recognized socio-linguistic gender patterns."
Herring and her co-researcher, Asta Zelenkauskaite, were expecting findings consistent with past research on gender-defined public communication.
"Women have historically used standard language when they are social aspirers, or want to be perceived as above their station," Herring says. "Men talk more; women are more polite."
After viewing 1,164 gender-defined messages on iTV, a new medium that mixes interactive television with texting, the opposite was true. Data showed that women used more non-standard language, such as abbreviations and expressive insertions to represent emotions like enthusiasm, sadness and emphasis.
"There are news shows in Europe where viewers can comment through iTV, but we have not analyzed any of those yet," Herring says. "There are different linguistic marketplaces, and politics is one of them, just like dating is."