Mining the Blogosphere: Age, gender and the varieties of self-expression

Abstract

The growth of the blogosphere offers an unprecedented opportunity to study language and how people use it on a large scale. We present an analysis of over 140 million words of English text drawn from the blogosphere, exploring if and how age and gender affect writing style and topic. Our primary result is that a number of stylistic and content-based indicators are significantly affected by both age and gender, and that the main difference between older and younger bloggers, and between male and female bloggers, lies in the extent to which their discourse is outer- or inner-directed. In fact, the linguistic factors that increase in use with age are just those used more by males of any age, and conversely, those that decrease in use with age are those used more by females of any age.

Sharing of Sponsored Advertisements on Social Media: A Uses and Gratifications Perspective

“…Eisenberg and Fabes 1998), and self-expression (e.g. Argamon et al 2007). As the bombardment of content on social media is not gender specific it may be that the motivations to add to the existing clutter are the same for both males and females in the context of sharing tourismrelated sponsored advertisements.…”

“…However, it has been suggested that study characteristics and type of helping behaviour play an important role in determining the differences between genders with regards to altruism (Eagly and Crowley 1986). Gender has also been found to be an influential factor for self-expression on blogs (Argamon et al 2007). Based on the existing research it is suggested that gender will affect the motivations of consumers' intentions to share tourism-related sponsored advertisements on social media.…”

Stereotypical gender actions can be extracted from web text

“…Such an approach allows us to tap a larger amount of text thanks to the millions blogging about virtually everything on a regular basis. The work of Argamon et al (2007) conrms the gender dierences previously found in formal texts, and in addition, provides evidence that there are substantial dierences in the content as well (e.g., females are blogging about past actions more frequently than males and males are blogging about politics more frequently than females).…”

“…It is possible to collect metadata like the gender of the posters, create two sub-corpora based on the text created by the two genders respectively, and then compare the two sub-corpora to reveal statistical dierences between the linguistic patterns or content (Argamon et al, 2007). Such an approach allows us to tap a larger amount of text thanks to the millions blogging about virtually everything on a regular basis.…”

Identifying the Authors’ National Variety of English in Social Media Texts

“…The detection of gender, age, and other clues of the author's personality and language has also attracted a great deal of attention (Argamon et al, 2007a;Cheng et al, 2011;Schler et al, 2006;Argamon et al, 2007b;Peersman et al, 2011;Rangel and Rosso, 2013;Simaki et al, 2015aSimaki et al, ,b, 2016Simaki et al, , 2017Sboev et al, 2016;Lins and Gonçalves, 2004). These studies investigate one or more sociodemographic factors, and many of them use data from social media.…”