Democracy in computer-mediated communication: Gender, communicative style, and amount of participation in professional listservs Mahmood Reza Atai ⇑ , Fatemeh Chahkandi Department of Foreign Languages, Tarbiat Moallem University, Post Code 15614, No. 43 Mofatteh Street, Tehran, Iran article info Article history: Available online 11 January 2012 Keywords: CMC Communication style Gender Flaming Listservs abstract This study examined the claim of democracy in computer-mediated communication with regard to amount of participation and communicative style of genders and the effect of topic of discussion on these aspects. To this aim, 300 randomly- chosen messages from two listservs (language testing and taxonomy) were coded for the number of female and male participants, frequency and length of messages, frequency of new topics, frequency of responses to each topic type and to the same and cross gender topics, stylistic features of females’ and males’ language, and frequency of flaming. For each aspect of analysis, v 2 statis- tical test was applied to examine the significance of the differences between genders in and across the lists. The results indicated that given the amount of participation, the democracy claim was breached as male dominance and presence was more ubiquitous. However, the results supported the provision of a democratic platform as far as manner of participation is concerned since both genders presented common communicative needs and priorities and there was no support for differentiation of genders’ communicative styles. The findings promise implications for EFL/ESL education. Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Nowadays, so many people use the Internet regularly to interact in chat rooms, discussion groups, listservs, and other virtual envi- ronments. Accordingly, the Internet communication has opened up very fresh avenues of research to social scientists and educators in order to examine the nature of peoples’ behavior as well as the characteristics of the discourse taking place through computers. A hotly-debated question regarding the nature of computer- mediated communication (CMC) in the past few decades has been to see in what ways computer-mediated discourse is similar to or different from face to face communication and if gender differences in discourse styles and amount of participation prevail in the anon- ymous Internet environment. It is argued that since information about peoples’ gender is lost in the Internet and females and males can manipulate their identities in the light of anonymous environ- ment the Internet provides, traditional differentiations between females and males found in face to face communication are re- solved and the ‘anonymous’, ‘impersonal’, and ‘egalitarian’ (Ferrara, Brunner, & Whittemore, 1991) CMC creates a democratic environ- ment in which females and males may enjoy equal access to information and communication and an equal right to participate freely (Landow, 1994; Spears & Lea, 1994). Many studies have so far tried to examine the extent to which the Internet provides such a democracy. But it seems that no single conclusion or consensus is arrived at, since while some argue that the Internet has the potential to provide such an opportunity (e.g. Dubrovsky, Kiesler, & Sethna, 1991; Hiltz, Coppola, Rotter, Turoff, & Benbunan-Fich, 2000), others (e.g. Herring, 1993) do not endorse such a view. The present study re-examines linguistic representa- tions of women’s and men’s computer-mediated discourse in post- ings to two discussion group and adds a new dimension of the effect of academic topic on the gender-related discourse which is explored by few, if any, previous studies. The findings may have contributions to the existing gap concerning the relationship be- tween gender and discourse (Herring, 1992, 1993; Rodino, 1997; Savicki, Kelley, & Lingenfelter, 1996; Smith, McLaughlin, & Os- borne, 1997; Wolfe, 1999). 2. Literature review 2.1. Studies investigating the claim of democracy in terms of amount of participation In this study, amount of participation refers to the number of fe- male and male participants, frequency of each gender’s postings, frequency of topics they posted, and the length of their messages. The results of studies investigating these features are mixed which implies that there is little consensus among scholars as to which gender dominates the discussions. Some scholars maintain that 0747-5632/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2011.12.007 ⇑ Corresponding author. Fax: +98 21 88306651/88304896. E-mail addresses: atai@tmu.ac.ir (M.R. Atai), f.chahkandi@gmail.com (F. Chah- kandi). Computers in Human Behavior 28 (2012) 881–888 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Computers in Human Behavior journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comphumbeh