Who comments on blogs about cancer?
While writing up the first of my papers about gender and blogging, I realised that it was not enough simply to look at whether the blogs written by women or written by men gained the most comments. I needed to look at who was commenting on the blogs too. So I went back through all the entries of the 20 cancer blogs, and calculated whether women or men commented most (and had another category for commenters who did not disclose a gender specific identity).
The first thing I discovered was that my original statistics were wrong, because so many of the men's blogs were commented on by 'junk' mailers. Once I had cleaned up the data, a very different picture emerged. Instead of an equal picture where the men's blogs got as much comment as the women's, the women's blogs were attracting over five times the amount of comment than did the men's.
The second thing that became clear was that gender couldn't be used as a bottom line explanation for commenting interation. While women posted the most comments overall, men posted more comments on blogs written by men and women posted more comments on blogs written by women. My explanation for this pattern is that the comments on the cancer blogs are markers of shared experience, offering or seeking support and guidance. Because some of the types of cancer the blog authors experience are gender specific, this gives rise to a gendered pattern of interaction. So it's the shared experience (which is gender specific) not the gender of the writer in itself which generates the pattern. However, it is really obvious from the statistics that the women's blogs are much much more interactive than the mens', and that the offline storytelling which supposedly enables shared experience to support friendship between women seems to be carried over into the blogosphere too.
So, the point I'm at is to reinforce the importance of considering content and context in the analysis of gender and CMC. What I've found is markedly different from the observations of Melissa Gregg's paper 'Posting with Passion' that Jess pointed out to me the other day. Just as with offline interaction, there are some general differences that carry over across content and context, but genre and discourse style can complicate that in various ways.
The first thing I discovered was that my original statistics were wrong, because so many of the men's blogs were commented on by 'junk' mailers. Once I had cleaned up the data, a very different picture emerged. Instead of an equal picture where the men's blogs got as much comment as the women's, the women's blogs were attracting over five times the amount of comment than did the men's.
The second thing that became clear was that gender couldn't be used as a bottom line explanation for commenting interation. While women posted the most comments overall, men posted more comments on blogs written by men and women posted more comments on blogs written by women. My explanation for this pattern is that the comments on the cancer blogs are markers of shared experience, offering or seeking support and guidance. Because some of the types of cancer the blog authors experience are gender specific, this gives rise to a gendered pattern of interaction. So it's the shared experience (which is gender specific) not the gender of the writer in itself which generates the pattern. However, it is really obvious from the statistics that the women's blogs are much much more interactive than the mens', and that the offline storytelling which supposedly enables shared experience to support friendship between women seems to be carried over into the blogosphere too.
So, the point I'm at is to reinforce the importance of considering content and context in the analysis of gender and CMC. What I've found is markedly different from the observations of Melissa Gregg's paper 'Posting with Passion' that Jess pointed out to me the other day. Just as with offline interaction, there are some general differences that carry over across content and context, but genre and discourse style can complicate that in various ways.
Labels: gender blog jess melissagregg commenting interaction
posted by Ruth Page at 9:33 AM
2 Comments:
Hi Ruth,
Interesting post. I guess it would have been too easy to say "men receive more comments." :)
That you decided to look at who is commenting rather than simply which blog garnered more comments has made me wonder how the "who" is constructed. I'm remembering some comments on a few e-mail lists and this is def. an issue that cropped up at BlogHer '06: certain blogs attract certain kinds of commenters. One of the discrepencies included the notion that a-list blogs (as in technorati authority) are *mostly* written by men and those blogs *mostly* link to men...so I wonder how the linking works on the blogs you're researching. Does the blogroll and/or commenters build a general picture of the blog stature? I believe Susan C. Herring in "Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs" (http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html) says something about a-list blogs and that kind of linking although the article was written in 2004.
I wonder also how the blogs written by men and women differ in style. I mean, how does each blog encourage (or not) comments and do the blog authors always respond and to whom?
After some searching I've found this: "the finding that women
tend to have more outward links means that the facile ‘men-filter’ and ‘women-journal’ distinction should not be made." Hrm...it's from an article by Sarah Pedersen and Caroline Macafee called "The Practices and Popularity of British Bloggers." Here: http://elpub.scix.net/data/works/att/213_elpub2006.content.pdf
I suppose gender is only one thing among many of the possible influences.
Thanks for the great post.
Hi Jess,
Thanks a lot for this, and for the reference to Pedersen and Macafee's paper. I'll check that one out right away.
You are right that the authority ranking of the blogs is another influence in the complicated network of factors around blogging interaction. I also used technorati to see who was linking to each of the blogs as well. I'll put a post up about that one too.
The whole style issue is another factor I am working on too. The linguistic features I'm looking at come under the category of what Labov (1972) calls 'evaluation' which I've argued in other places (2002) can be used to signal solidarity between teller and audience in conversational narratives. This is the main crux of the section I'm writing right now. I guess it deserves a post all of its own, too.
Thanks again, for the helpful comments and the further leads.
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