THE BOUNDARIES OF LANGUAGE AND GENDER REVISITED: PERFORMING GENDER IN SOCIAL NETWORKS

Social networks have been evolving throughout time not just as a tool to socialize or interact, but as a fundamental system that helps people develop their lives. Among social network users, adolescents are, without any doubt, those who are more dependent on technology in general terms and social media in particular. They not only use it to connect to each other, but also to update and to evaluate what they hear, read and and female teenagers in order to explore these teenagers’ practices of social networking. More precisely, the main aim of the current study is not only to analyse similarities and differences in the ways male and female teenagers communicate online, but also to uncover the different linguistic strategies they use to relate to others. The analysis gives according to gender when negotiating conversational topics online.