Proposal

Proposal

Introduction

Nowadays, keeping in touch with friends and relatives is more important than ever in our history. Technological advances in communication let people write, talk and even have video conferences with people thousands of miles away. In this technological growth, social media have become one of the most important tools to interact between people. Social media have also changed completely the way we communicate with each other. Language change for example is probably the most interesting aspect of those changes. Differences between sex and age show the beginning of a new era in communication, when people 25 years and older learn and adapt to the social media, while people between 16 to 18 years old have used these resources since they were really young (Schwartz et al. 2013).  In this paper we want to look into social media language differences among Texas Tech University students. Also we want to go further in understanding how social media as one of the most important communication strategy today is perceived by the students.

Literature review

Social media captures more interest every day. More than 1/7 of the world population uses Facebook or Twitter (Schwartz et al. 2013). This growing pattern of use of social media allows people to communicate with others and express themselves in a more personal way. Also, according to Alter (2014) in social media seems to be more important to people the way they want to be perceived by others than their real thoughts. The combination of high interaction between people in real time and expression of feelings, mood and status updates, allows researchers to obtain a high volume of information when personal and common language is used (opposite to books that are written in an impersonal language) (Argamon et al. 2007).

Language differentiation between gender and age has been an interest of many researchers for a long time. Usually the hypothesis in this topic states that is possible to identify with some grade of certainty the age and gender of a writer based on the word use (Mulac et al. 2013). More recently it has been reported that other good predictors of gender and age will be style and topics (Pennebaker & Stone 2003; Argamon et al. 2007).

When it’s related with sex, articles, prepositions and informational words are used mainly by males, while females use personal pronouns, auxiliary verbs and emotion words (Argamon et al. 2007; Schwartz et al. 2013). It’s also been reported that males use more possessive words (like “my”) and object references, and women use adjectives to describe their partner and talk more about relationships (Argamon et al. 2003). When the comparison is based on the social interaction, females post more photos and are more interested in other people´s relationships; males tend to look for the number of friends and professional achievements (McAndrew et al. 2012). In terms of age, younger people use emoticons, abbreviations and words related to real time status (like home, fun, beer); in older people topics related with professional development, politics and family increase their importance (Argamon et al 2013; McAndrew et al. 2012; Schwartz et al. 2013).

Despite language studies are common and the behavior according to age and sex were well describe, there is no evidence of how people think about this statements and whether people are conscious about differences between ages and sex in language use in social media. Thus study aims to related to age and gender relationships with language in social media is far from over and new data is available every day. This study wants to look into Texas Tech students´ perception of the social media as well as the language used by females and males in two different age groups (undergraduate and graduate students). Finally we want to know whether people agree to the general statements that were made in terms of language use in social media.

References

Alter, C. 2014. The Facebook Effect: Everybody Is So Cliché. Time. Retrieved date: 03-10-2014. Retrieved from: http://ideas.time.com/2013/10/02/the-facebook-effect-everybody-is-so-cliche/

Argamon, S., Koppel, M., Fine, J., & Shimoni, A. R. (2003). Gender, genre, and writing style in formal written texts. To appear in Text, 23, 3. Retrieved date: 03-10-2014. Retrieved from: http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/papers/male-female-text-final.pdf

Argamon, S., Koppel, M., Pennebaker, J. W., & Schler, J. (2007). Mining the Blogosphere: Age, gender and the varieties of self-expression. First Monday, 12(9). Retrieved date: 03-10-2014. Retrieved from: http://uncommonculture.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2003/1878

Joiner, R., C. Stewart, et al. (2014). Publically different, privately the same: Gender differences and similarities in response to Facebook status updates. Computers in Human Behavior, 39(0): 165-169. Retrieved date: 03-10-2014. Retriever from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563214003707

Masin, R. & Foubert, J.D. (2013) Effect of gender and Facebook use on the development of mature interpersonal relationships. Journal of Student Affairs, Vol. XXIII 51-59. Retrieved date: 03-10-2014. Retrieved from: http://www.sahe.colostate.edu/Data/Sites/1/journal-of-student-affairs/2014-journal-of-student-affairs.pdf#page=51

McAndrew, F. T., & Jeong, H. S. (2012). Who does what on Facebook? Age, sex, and relationship status as predictors of Facebook use. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(6), 2359-2365. Retrieved date: 03-10-2014. Retrieved from:  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563212002075

Mulac, A., Wiemann, J. M., Widenmann, S. J., & Gibson, T. W. (1988). Male/female language differences and effects in same‐sex and mixed‐sex dyads: The gender‐linked language effect. Communications Monographs, 55(4), 315-335. Retrieved date: 03-10-2014. Retrieved from: http://www.siu-voss.net/Mulac__male-female_language_differences.pdf

Pennebaker, J. W.  & Stone, L.D.  (2003). Words of wisdom: Language use over the lifespan. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 291–301. Retrieved date: 03-10-2014. Retrieved from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.291

Schwartz, H. A., Eichstaedt, J.C, Kern, M. L., Dziurzynski, L., Ramones, S. M., et al. (2013) Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach. PLoS ONE, 8(9): e73791. Retrieved date: 03-10-2014. Retrieved from: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0073791#references

Maria Cristina Rios Blanco