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Despite the fact that it was originally printed in 1987, Rice and Love's essay still provides interesting theoretical material about computer-mediated communication (CMC) in that it seeks to dispel myths that all computer-based communication is unemotional by nature and lack of bandwidth.  Among socioemotional content found, they discuss face-saving mechanisms, disinhibition, and "flaming".  They created 5 hypotheses about socioemotional content to be measured in the datasets of six weeks of transcripts from the Medsig/Compuserv public computer conference in order to attempt to prove their thesis that CMC over computer networks mirrors participation in real-world communities.  While this study does not differentiate variables according to gender, it was interesting to me to read their conclusions that the participants did particpate in socioemotional discourse, although there was no increase in the amount of such discourse over time.  I think that if the study were moved to a non-technical forum and increased in physical time length, that the results seen might be very different and more informative.

Shade's research, although not linguistic in nature, is useful to provide a background into women's roles in constructing the Internet.  She begins by reviewing research on gendered uses of various communications technologies, including the telephone, radio, and television. She discusses cyberactivism and feminism, as well as public policy determining women's access to the internet.  She cites a case study of women in China and internet access implementation and concludes with a discussion of whether women are merely consumers targeted by merchants or active citizens in an online sisterhood (discussions that we have held in class as well).

In this text, Herring brings together a variety of sociological and linguistic essays on computer-mediated communications.  In the first section, "Linguistics Perspectives", the authors seek to define the oral and written linguistics aspects of email, IRC chat, and computer conferencing while contrasting them with face-to-face interactions.  In the second section, "Social and Ethical Perspectives", the authors deal with social issues of interaction such as cooperation versus conflict and the role of radical feminism for internet discourse ("Cyberfeminism" by Kira Hall).  The third portion deals with "Cross Cultural Perspectives" in which CMC is analysed between North American, East Asian, and Mexican students and theories of classroom diversity are presented.  Finally, the last grouping "CMS and Group Interaction" explores how CMC can change people's lives - exploring the group dynamics of online forums (Korenman and Wyatt, "Group Dynamics in an Email Forum"), how e-mail has changed the work environment, and how groups conduct internet-based protests.

This text contains 22 essays, any number of which would be relevant to our class.  For my purposes, Chapter 19 on "Charting the Codes of Cyberspace: the Rhetoric of Electronic Mail" by Judith Yaross Lee  is important because it seeks to codify email as a hybrid of oral speech and traditional writing. Philip Thompsen continues to discuss online communication strategies in Chapter 20: "What's Fueling the Flames in Cyberspace: A Social Influence Model".  Thompsen attempts to redefine flaming on the internet and propose a social-influence model which incorporates the flaming behavior and the negotiation of what that behavior means to the community. While he does not address gender per se, he does seek to define flaming behavior and explain its consequences to group members over long term online experience.