Friday, July 29, 2011

Lesbian No More

In the movie Splash, the late John Candy tells Tom Hanks that he has had his letter published in the (hardcopy of) Penthouse Forum:   They published my letter. Here it is, "A lesbian no more".
Well apparently this will be the case with Twitter soon.
Rebecca Greenfield, The Atlantic Wire, 27 July 2011. (Hat tip NC).
Anonymous tweeters may have just become a little less anonymous. Researchers have put together an algorithm that can predict the gender of a tweeter based solely on the 140 characters they choose to tweet.
The crux of the research relies on the idea that women use language differently. "The mere fact of a tweet containing an exclamation mark or a smiley face meant that odds were a woman was tweeting, for instance," reports Zax. Other research corroborates these findings, finding that women tend to use emoticons, abbreviations, repeated letters and expressions of affection. Linguists can even detect the tweeters' true identities by how they use the word "my."
I realized very early on that dry-humor did not work well on the internet, so you had to signal your intent, or people thought you were an AO mistakenly.  People may think I am an AO at times, but I want the foundation for their belief to be legitimate, rather than based on a mistaken perception of intent.  I used to use the colon-parenthesis for a smile face, but when the computer started turning it into “J”, I gave it up.
The article I quoted above gives a number of words that women use.  Such as: yummy.  Well that is a show stopper there.  Just typing the word gives me the same hives as walking into a knick-knack gift shop.
All of this is relevant (barely) as we continue our plunge into the matrix, rather than face the dire reality of our situation -  See Orlov.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is a strange new world. I've noticed the ads following me. I looked at a 12 volt frig and had trucker ads for two weeks. Now it is "Protect your investments with this simple plan". It perverts your view of the world.

russell1200 said...

I wonder what stopping by this post will do for you? LOL.