For this project, I am observing the linguistic qualities of adolescents online, specifically in the context of computer mediated conversation (CMC) in virtual communities. I am looking at this through the website, Habbo Hotel, which targets users ages 13-18 years old. My observations and subsequent conclusions are important because youths in this day and age are raised as technological natives for whom technology has been an integral part of their education, socialization, and development. By looking at differences between male and females of this demographic, I can illuminate how gender socialization manifests through CMC.

         I am looking specifically at the proportional use of things like capital letters, profanity, laughter representatives (haha, lol, etc.), and emojis (also known as emoticons). I think it is relevant and important to look at capitalization because it is representative of yelling online, which is often characterized as aggressive, assertive, stereotypically male behavior. Profanity is worth observing for similar reasons, it is typically ascribed to males, and considered historically to be marked behavior in women. Looking at laughter representatives is important because humor and laughter are used to establish power in conversations, which is stereotypically used in mixed-sex conversations to subordinate the women involved. Finally, I am looking at emojis because of their emotive nature, with the stereotype that they are more frequently used by women because of what is perceived to be their more emotional nature. By observing these things in adolescents online I hope to see if these gendered perceptions of language are displayed by Generation Z in the online world they surround themselves in.

         I am also looking at the number of lines contributed by each gender in chat rooms. By "line" I am referring to each individual message contributed every time a user presses the “enter” key to submit their text, length is not relevant to the line count. By observing this, I hope to be able to make observations about conversational dominance between genders with the expectation that I will observe more lines contributed by the males than females in the conversation.

         To summarize, this project is important to see how gendered socialization in Generation Z is manifesting in the virtual world through CMC by looking at how linguistic features like emojis, laughter, profanity, and capitalization, as well as conversational dominance, is exercised by males and females on Habbo Hotel. I predict that on average males will use more capital letters and profanity and submit more lines of text on average and females use more laughter representatives and emojis because this aligns with the linguistic gender norms that have been recorded with older demographics outside of CMC communication.