The construction of gender through discourse on the social network Badoo: exploring virtual interaction

Nowadays many meetings and conversations take place through social networks. Badoo.com is one of the best known, with more than 102 million users in 2010. This article concentrates on communication through the chat in Badoo between 150 men and the author. The study analyses the main linguistic characteristics in the conversations (orthography, use of capital letters, emoticons and strategies of courtesy and discourtesy) in order to observe how gender is constructed in interaction. The analysis shows that the conversations have characteristics of oral discourse. Moreover, the author prepared five questions as a survey in order to observe what men expected from Badoo, what their values and hobbies were, if they would like to marry and the characteristics they value in women. The analysis of the survey results shows how the participants in the virtual interactions investigated here, negotiate their gender identities.