It's always nice to have a best friend or a significant other who you care about tremendously. In the Yahoo! group that I have followed for the past 5 days, the members are there for one common purpose, and that is to discuss issues related to their best friends: their cats and/or kittens. It doesn’t take long to see that the member’s lives just wouldn’t be “purr-fect” without their cats. The group I observed was a Usenet group. Usenet is a system that allows the world to come together and communicate with one another. It is made up of servers which store messages. Invented in 1981, it has come a long way since its early days. Today, there are thousands of groups on the Internet that allow people from around the world to discuss issues with one another. There are groups out there on almost any topic you can think of. The reason I chose the cats and kittens group was because I was curious to how people interact with each other when talking a topic that is not controversial. For example, in a politics discussion group I was also checking out, you have people arguing back and forth all the time. I was very curious if the same would be true for a discussion group about cats and kittens.
While the group has over 5,000 members, only a handful of those people actually frequent the group on a daily, or even weekly basis. Topics being discussed in the group vary greatly. Members discuss anything from health related issues, to personal stories, to sharing tips on how to raise your cat. The whole idea of a group revolved around cats seemed kind of silly to me at first, but as I frequented the group more, I realized that the group could actually be very helpful. One woman, a 42 year old single woman from Kentucky, wrote a frantic post about her cat who was sick and not eating food. She asked the other members if this was normal or if she should take her beloved pet to the vet, and the advice might have saved her cat’s life because the other users recommended she take him to the vet to get checked out. However, many of the postings are also light-hearted, as the members share stories about, for instance, funny things their cats do around the house.
As I read a lot of these postings, I thought about the demographics of the users. By looking at the list of user names, almost all of the postings were done by women. I clicked on a few of their profiles, and saw that a lot of them were women from the Midwest and South, between the ages of 30 and 60. I was curious as to whether or not any of the users are male, because a group about cats would generally be stereo-typed as a woman’s place to chat. Many of the user names were not first names, but nicknames instead, so that made me wonder as to whether or not there were males in the group who were trying to post without everyone knowing that they were a male in a predominantly female group.
As stated in Brenda Danet’s article “Text as mask: Gender, play and performance on the Internet”, the ability to use a gender-neutral nickname “guarantees to those who type that they will be ‘heard’ without having to compete for the floor” (Danet, 136). This problem usually applies to females in a male dominated forum, like sports or cars, where the men often times overlook what females have to say because they believe that women are less knowledgeable in the subject. But in the cats group, the opposite problem exists. Since women are stereotyped as the ones raising and caring for cats, men might feel like if they post something, women won’t take them seriously or will wonder why they are posting here, and are not interested in something more “manly” then cats and kittens. But the ability to remain gender-anonymous on Usenet groups gives men the ability to post without hesitation. “Because people can type in their pajamas in the middle of the night, it is easy for them to pretend to be someone else!” (Danet, 136). The anonymity of the Internet allows men to participate in this group without having to reveal their gender if they do not wish to.
In this particular group, I thought it was interesting because there are not a lot of males, and there was not a lot of spam or free-riding. Almost all of the postings were legit and on-topic. I wonder if that is because males are more likely to post spam messages than females are. But regardless, I feel like the lack of spam made the group a lot more enjoyable. It felt like a little community of people who got together to make friends and discuss something they are passionate about- their cats or kittens- aka their beloved babies! It is nice to know that other people are out there who share the same interests you do, and you can come online and chat and have conversions with people from around the world about a common interest. That’s why Usenet groups, especially like this one, are become more popular all the time.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Danet, Brenda (1998). Text as mask: Gender, Play and Performance on the Internet. Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting computer-mediated communication and community, 136.
Link to the Group: http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/catsandkittens/
