Gender Differences In No Phone Groups

Article “OMG! We've been here B4!” by Clive Thompson is a reflection of what the effects the telephone has on everyday communication as well as the development of the telephone over the years. Thompson however explains that the early days of the telephone weren't seen as a helpful tool for social interaction, but an abate to conversation. When the cell phone first emerged on scene, it was believed that people choose to communicate face-to-face less and call instead. Clive Thompson explores the thought that texting may make people shield their emotions, limit conversations to only the phone, and erode intimacy. Although the telephone had various opinions, the cell phone did not destroy traditional etiquette but altered the way we communicate with one another.

Conversation is a normal part of every day life. People converse everywhere they go; whether they are with their friends’, at school or even while at the store, a conversation is bound to ignite. While communicating has its ups, it also has its downs; these ‘downs’ can happen especially when men and women are communicating because, according to Deborah Tannen, they have different communication styles. Tannen illustrates this in her video, He Said, She Said: Gender, Language, & Communication, where she talks about and gives many examples of how men and women differ in their conversational approaches. I definitely agree with Tannen in regards that conversation between the sexes is asymmetrical.

For example, most people just text each other if they want to communicate instead of meeting them face-to-face. We recently had a friend who went to orientation at a college, and the dean said “The largest problem with today’s students is that they are bad at talking face-to-face.”  In America, people text twice as much as they call (textrequest). This can cause many people to have a difficult time fully understanding others and interpreting their emotions. According to fastcodesign, during an experiment in 2005 people were asked to send 10 messages, either sarcastic or serious, to a recipient. They believed the person receiving the messages would easily tell if the sender was serious or sarcastic. To their disbelief, the receiver identified the correct emotion only 56% of the time. After this, they repeated the experiment, but with voice recordings. This time the recipient could tell the emotion 73% of the time. This proves how important it is to talk to someone in person over messaging to fully understand their mood. Many people become annoyed when doing an activity with another person who is on their phone the entire time. Since most people text rather than talk face-to-face today, this is a major contributor to poor communication

In "Sex, Lies and Conversation" Deborah Tannen, linguistics professor at Georgetown University, explains the discrepancies between female and male mechanics of conversation: females tend to converse while facing one another and respond with supportive remarks; males tend to converse while looking away from one another and respond with dismissive remarks. According to Tannen, such discrepancies arose from childhood development and socialization. Because females developed bonds through conversation from a young age, they often express their feelings and thoughts with others. Males, however, developed bonds less dependent of socialization, but rather through the participation of various activities as children. Therefore, females developed the

As children grow up, they learn how to communicate in various ways. One learns when and who to share his or her troubles with, how to bond with fellow classmates, and how to express feelings by using language. Tannen states that “many women bond by talking about troubles, and many men bond by exchanging playful insults and put-downs” (Tannen 215). . Tannen's research in “You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation” shows that the differences between the communication patterns of men and women go beyond social occasions, and appear to be in the basic forms of the opposite sex. “Men use communication to maintain independence, while women talk to maintain intimacy (Morrison 1). Female students often find that males like to hide their feelings and speak undemonstrative outside the classroom

“Sex Differences” is an essay written by a professor of linguistics named Ronald Macaulay. In the essay, he pointed out that there were no gender differences regarding to language development. He talked about various stereotypes about how men and women speak. He also explains in depth about how social environment made an impact on the talking between men and women. He also concluded that those linguists who still believe in that theory only continue to do so even if what they found in their research is not statistically significant. In many ways, Macaulay’s essay is persuasive. Through this essay, one would agree with him that there is no different form of language in which women and men speak.

o men talk more than women in a classroom setting? In “How Male and Female

    Sherry Turkle, a professor and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, wrote an essay called “No Need To Call” to talk about her research on cell phones and social life. She goes in depth into a few lives of those who use their cell phones frequently and those who avoid it. Turkle starts off her essay by talking about Elaine, a seventeen year old. Elaine acknowledges the use of texting within her generation, she states “It’s only on the screen that shy people open up.” (373). Elaine then follows this by speaking of the ability to pause and think before you send a message. You have more time to think before you say something, unlike in person or on the phone. Turkle then reflects on this teen’s analysis, she says, “Elaine is right in her analysis: teenagers flee the telephone. Perhaps more surprisingly, so do adults.” (374).

In Mark Glaser’s October 22, 2007, article, “How Cell Phones Are Killing Face-to-Face Interactions,” Glaser discusses how cell phones are causing people to no longer interact with each other.

In her July 2007 article “WHO DOES THE TALKING HERE?,” published in The Washington Post, Linguistic Professor Deborah Tannen expresses her expert insight to the common assumption that women speak more than men (356). According to Prof. Tannen, women, being concerned with building and maintaining relationships, use “rapport-talk” as opposed to men, who use more of a “Report-talk” style of communicating (357). The well-published author contends that merely counting words is insufficient for gaining understanding of the existing gender bias. However, we can gain (insight) to the differences in gender communication by analyzing “ when” people choose to speak, as well as, “why” people choose to speak (358).

In the article “HE SAID, SHE SAID. “Mine’s Higher” vs. “We’re the Same”, Deborah Tannen explains that men and women have different conversation styles. Although conversation styles of men and women are not quite same, but the ultimate goal of communication for both men and women always stays the same, to connect with others and to be more powerful. Men like talking while focusing on hierarchy, on the contrary, women like talking topics that can reinforce the relationship. The author states that verbal communication is similar to rituals, and differences of rituals can cause misinterpretations and behavior changes.

Within our own world, there was a study done by a group researchers with the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia and the Department of Information Science at Cornell University titled Talking Less during social interactions Predicts Enjoyment which is focused on the loss of human connection present within modern day social interactions. Within the study, they were able to use an app to observe how often people texted each other and what they sent. Through this program, the researchers were able to observe the social interactions between different focus groups. The pilot study was used to demonstrate, “How conversational properties of social interactions can predict psychologically meaningful outcomes, such as how much a person enjoys the conversation

Male and female differ in their use of communication because their reasons for communicating are different. Men

In order to be able to solve some of the problems associated with gender miscommunications, we should distinguish first between the two different types of communications: verbal communication and nonverbal communication. Verbal communication consists of messages expressed by linguistic means such as the use of intonation, the specific words we choose to say, and the way we are saying them. There are differences in females and males usage of language/verbal communication. As we might expect from traditional sex-role stereotypes, girls tend to establish more egalitarian same-sex groups. Girls use friendly groups as a training ground for cooperation. Boys view friendly conversation among their friends as training for verbal aggression. Females are more verbal, use three times more amount of words than males, they are much more descriptive and use more adjectives. Women are less direct in their communication style. As Prof. Tannen showed in one of her research, women are more indirect in answering questions depends on the situation. They answer questions the way they would like to be answered by men, which means more than just a yes/no answer. However, men answer the way they would like to be answered

Central idea: Humans have always communicated face-to-face and the use of technology poses cognitive obstacles to communication. The lack of human presence during technology-mediated communication contributes to less nonverbal cues possibly creating a politer conversation if it is not face-to-face.