Abstract:
The objective of this research is to explore the image of Thai women in World Wide Web by using content analysis as the major methodology to analyze 50 Web sites resulted from keying "Thai Women" as key word to capture the samples via 5 popular search engines; Yahoo, Alta Vista, Infoseek, Lycos and Excite. The analysis on Thai women's images via this medium includes web presentation formats, content types and directions. In addition, Depth interview was used in order to understand the Web masters/message senders' objectives, opinions and directions. The study reveals that there are 4 different key categories of web site resulted from the search engines ; 1) Matchmaking services and Pen Pal introduction 2) Sex site 3) General roles of women and 4) Others, not directly involved Thai women. The formats vastly used are text mentioned Thai women and still photo of the Thai women especially inthe above first 2 web site categories. The maximum content type presented is women in sex services (total 20 sites). The second runner up is women in family appeared in 10 sites. Other contents presented in almost the same numbers are women in society, women with general careers, women with health and women with learning. The study also discovered that the most Thai women direction presented via World Wide Web is the negative direction which appeared in both Sex site and Matchmaking services site.