New Issue of JCMC

Thanks for the tip--it's very helpful, and a great additional source for the chapter I'm working on now in my dissertation. It's interesting that they found that the adolescent boys used emoticons more, stating that "Because females are traditionally more emotionally expressive than are males, we expected females to use emoticons in their blogs more often than males. Contrary to prediction, there were no overall gender differences for how often emoticons were used. Surprisingly, of those who used emoticons in their blogs, there was a trend for males to use more emoticons than females." As a preliminary thought, it could connect to the gender split Gannett (1994) points out about journal-writing, with males tending to use the space as a terse log of activity. With that in mind, the emoticons become a helpful shorthand, and much less personal than a description.