Blog 9 Participation in Electronic Discourse in a "Feminist" Field

The article written by Susan C. Herrings focuses on a study which tries to equalize the amount of time in which men and women speak, by using E-mails to communicate thoughts without being interrupted by one another. According to the article men talk more frequently than women in public settings and using the Internet to communicate makes it easier for women to communicate their disagreements or agreements to topics they would not publicly speak about. so the Internet would give them a greater opportunity to do so. In fact online communication did not allow people to participate equally in discussions. the discussions were shown to be dominated by male participants, women would participate in male discussions but male participants would not do the same when women would post making it an unbalanced situation for the women. Men even in online communication groups were dominating by posting topics and only answering to those they feel are important mainly the male posts. so regardless weather it is a face to face discussion or an online the women are more often excluded and ignored in persons and online. This reminds me of one of the articles read where women pose questions or their thoughts but the men decide whether it is important to address shaping how the conversation will go on. it is unfortunate but in the article when women excluded the men by selecting to speak about something that men could not support they too were excluded and used powerless language which is commonly seen used by women. so in certain situations men can also feel what a women goes through on a daily basis when put in a situation where men are deliberately trying to exclude women. The article was very interesting and informative it proves that even on an online communications board a male will dominate in and out in society.