Re: UKNM: Search Engines digression

[Chris Locke]

At 03:31 PM 10/2/98 +0100, you wrote:

>Felix Velarde wrote:

>> 

>> On 2/10/98 I read:

>> 

>> >Felix Velarde wrote:

<snip>


Any discussion of gender preferences in on-line communities is often flawed

by the difficulty in 'proving' gender in these online environments anyway.


Most results are inconclusive for this very reason, and also becuase it

depends so much on context that it's difficult, as always, to come up with

any results that are more than general abstractions from limited sample data.


See this article, way back from 1994:



http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/e/ejvc/aejvc-v2n03-we-crossgender.txt


I love the poetic summary from this:


"Computer mediated communication is a fascinating extension of the ways

in which human beings already communicate. It has the potential to be

liberating, and it has the potential to duplicate all the misunderstandings

and confusion which currently take place in interactions between women and

men in everyday life. The choice of directions is not being made

deliberately, but is being made in the thousands of daily online

interactions, the choices of ways of speaking, and of subjects, which are

gradually shaping, as a river slowly carves a canyon, the culture of

cyberspace."


Can we stop now?