I’m super, ridiculously excited you’re reading today, bestie!
OMG! Yay! I’m soooo happy!
Love you. xoxo.
That - plus a lot of joyful emoticons like this :) and lovey symbols like this 3 - we recognize as female social media speak. And now it’s scientific.
The online Journal Plos One has published Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach, by a team of authors from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge who studied the linguistics of Facebook.
The abstract begins: “We analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers.”
Right away these researchers should have our respect. And pity. After all, we can always click to “hide” correspondence or “unfriend” our 4,000 “friends” - of which we actually know only 100 and like only 22. Meanwhile these sciency folks had to suffer through and scrutinize all those lame inspirational quotations, superfluous selfies, pleas for compliments, unnecessary weather updates, passive-aggressive rants and political tirades (then again, they got paid for it when we do it willingly for free). On that last item, at least these researchers completed their work before the government shutdown.
What’s the value in examining some 19 million Facebook statuses (which really is only three more than a few of your more needy Facebook “friends” post daily )?
“Online social media such as Facebook are a particularly promising resource for the study of people, as ‘status’ updates are self-descriptive, personal, and have emotional content,” the study says. “Language use is objective and quantifiable behavioral data and unlike surveys and questionnaires, Facebook language allows researchers to observe individuals as they freely present themselves in their own words.”
To summarize results, the study includes a bunch of graphs, and more interestingly, word clouds to show words, phrases and topics broken down by age. The 13- to 18-year-olds are sharing about school and homework. The 19- to 22-year-olds discuss (expletive) college and (expletive) studying and getting (expletive) up. The 23- to 29-year olds mention work, work, work, yard work and beer. The 30- to 65-year-olds’ Facebook focus is family, friends and spirituality(perhaps in repentance for all that - expletive - stuff they did as 19- to 22-year-olds).
The study also includes clouds for personalities (determined by a questionnaire). Extroverts post stuff like “party” and “love you,” whereas introverts talk “anime” and “computer.” Emotionally stable people discuss “success,” “blessings”and “beautiful days.” Neurotic people are more likely to be “depressed,” lonely” and “sick of” stuff … like everyone else’s parties, love, success, blessings and beautiful days.
Most interesting to me was the breakdown by sex. The women’s and men’s word clouds looked quite different.
See for yourself the female’s happy little cloud of delightful expressions: “can’t wait,” “aww,” “so happy,” “yummy,” “ sweetheart,” “chocolate,” “lovely,” “cute,” “adorable,” etc. in the above graphic. Oh, and “shopping,” that got a big, bold billing.
We can’t print the dark, stormy, potty-mouthed male cloud due to its fondness for foul language - mainly the f-word - and we don’t mean football, but that was there too with “season,” “league” and “players.” Speaking of playing, “Xbox”also popped up. But guys do care about things besides sports and video games, like the (expletive) “government” and“economy.”
Also, they care about women. The researchers pointed out that men were more likely to use “my” more often when referring to their significant others, for example, “my wife” and “my girlfriend.”
“Aww!” “Adorable!” “So happy!”
Well, sort of. Note the study authors: “On the other hand, females were more likely to precede ‘husband’ or ‘boyfriend’ with ‘her’ or ‘amazing’ and a greater variety of words, which is why ‘my husband’ was not more predictive than ‘husband’ alone.”
So we’re posting how “wonderful” men are, when they’re not returning the favor and fussing about athletics and civics?
Aww, expletive!
I <3 your email: [email protected] What’s in a Dame is a weekly report from the woman ’hood.
Style, Pages 29 on 10/08/2013