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The possibility of relatively anonymous communication involving no physical proximity means that Internet discussion forums offer opportunities for cross-gender communication that do not necessarily violate Saudi Arabian rules for behavior. This article studies participation in a public discussion forum for expatriate Saudi students. Building on a previous article that established the extent to which participants disclose their gender in the forum, it investigates the extent to which participants take advantage of the opportunity for mixed communication online, their attitudes towards it, and their reactions when it occurs. It analyzes in detail the cross-gender exchanges that occur in the corpus, together with remarks made by participants about this issue, in order to determine the circumstances under which mixed communication is seen as appropriate in this forum.

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Internet discussion forums provide opportunities for largely anonymous communication among participants. The extent to which these opportunities are taken up is of particular interest in cultures where gender relations are highly regulated and cross-gender communication is strictly limited, such as in Saudi Arabian society. This article studies participation in a public discussion forum of expatriate Saudi students. It focuses on the nature of information (whether accurate or not) that participants choose to reveal about themselves, and its effect on the forum participation. Particular attention is paid to whether and how the gender of the participants is revealed. The analysis demonstrates that few participants take advantage of the possibility of not revealing gender. Rather, gender is emphasized in most usernames and can usually be deduced from the message content. Although there is no pressure to reveal name, age, marital status, etc., reactions to the rare messages Abeer Ahmed Madini is from the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies, where the gender of the writer is not indicated show that clues to gender are considered essential to all but the briefest exchanges. This encourages participants to limit contact with participants of the opposite sex, as a result of which the forum communication remains largely gender segregated.

Although a good deal of research exists both on computer-mediated communication (CMC) and on cross-cultural communication, rarely are the two areas brought together. In practice however, extrapolation from one context to the other is common, with the internet and email being increasingly used to teach cross-cultural communication. What assumptions about the transfer of culture into cyberspace inform these practices? And are these assumptions well-founded? This paper explores practices of discussion on French and British internet media sites to determine the extent to which they reflect communicative practices elsewhere in those cultures. The case studies underline the importance of attending to the interaction between culture and genre, and have pedagogical implications for the use of such sites in the teaching of cross-cultural communication.