Abstract
This study explored the extent to which student emotion management factors and normative orientation (belief that chat rooms have normative standards of conduct similar to face-to-face interaction) circumscribe the sending of hostile messages within electronic relay chat rooms on the Internet. A questionnaire survey collected data from 114 undergraduate and graduate students from a large university in southeastern Michigan. The results of the survey revealed statistically significant differences between African American and Caucasian chat room users in terms of how the emotion management factors of shame, guilt, and embarrassment affect communication. The normative orientation of the chat room users was shown to have an inverse relationship regarding the flaming messages between both ethnic groups. This article describes how these factors are influenced by gender and ethnicity/gender. Findings regarding the perceptions of racism within electronic chat rooms are also discussed.
Highlights
The utilization of information technology, such as the Internet and its ancillaries, including the World Wide Web, is increasingly becoming an icon symbolizing economic and social well being, technological literacy, and employability in the information age
With the exception of studies that cite the statistical disparity between African Americans and Caucasians in Internet utilization (Nielsen Media Research, 1997; Novak, Hoffman, & Venkatesh, 1997) few researchers have systematically examined the ways in which ethnicity influences behavioral differences found in cyberspace
The first is that the extent to which hostile type communications is displayed in a virtual communication environment is affected by the user’s normative orientation
Summary
The utilization of information technology, such as the Internet and its ancillaries,- including the World Wide Web, is increasingly becoming an icon symbolizing economic and social well being, technological literacy, and employability in the information age. Given the saliency that has been recently attached to Internet accessibility among the Black population (Clinton, 1997), there seems to be a parallel need for research that explores social psychological dynamics occurring within the inchoate and amorphous structure of computer-mediated communication environments. This type of research is expected to provide a broader perspective of Internet behavior than the previous descriptive studies of Internet utilization
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