Why women dominate social networking
Should you be one of those who believe that men are neanderthal, socially awkward hairy animals while women are socially aware, smoothly sensitive beings, then I have some statistics that might increase your estimation of your own superior judgment.
According to research by Brian Solis, sourcing his data from Google's Ad Planner, the majority of functioning beings on almost all social networking sites are women.
Published on Information Is Beautiful, the numbers might create an encouraging belief that if social networking is the future, then the future is female.
Solis's figures suggest that there is only one major social-networking site that is predominantly male: Digg. I know you'll recoil uncontrollably when I tell you that Digg appears to be 64 percent male.
(Credit:
Information Is Beautiful)
On the other hand, LinkedIn and YouTube seem to enjoy an equality of fraternity and sorority. While Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Flickr and MySpace, to name but a few, are all, like the population of Brazil, queendoms.
Perhaps the most extraordinary numbers come from MySpace. Somehow, the rather messy nature of the site, the tradition of an excess of spam and porn, might suggest that this was a male-oriented (slightly sleazy males, some might imagine) haven.
These numbers, however, suggest that MySpace is 64 percent female. Which makes one ruminate as to why the home page currently has so much blue and so little fuchsia.
It will be tempting, indeed, for many to put these figures down to traditional psychological differences between the sexes: women like people and men like, well, peeing in public.
However, one might also conclude that women simply resort to more virtual contact because their real world physical everyday life leaves them rather more dissatisfied than it does men.
Lately there seems to have been much evidence that women are increasingly miserable.
Celebrated and, one might have imagined, happy women such as Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post (The Sad Shocking Truth of How Women Are Feeling) and Maureen Dowd of The New York Times (Blue is the New Black) have lamented the lot of Lot's Wife, Mother, Sister and Daughter.
Might misery be driving women to MySpace?
Chris Matyszczyk is an award-winning creative director who advises major corporations on content creation and marketing. He brings an irreverent, sarcastic, and sometimes ironic voice to the tech world. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 
Notice that the two examples offered are the Huffington Post and the NYT--about as far from balance or objectivity as you can get. Both profit heavily from the perpetual-victimhood mindset, so of course to them women are poor miserable oppressed creatures.
I for one am glad that more women are getting into computers, it used to be a male dominated thing in the 1980's and 1990's and women were afraid of computers or just not that into it. With the Internet and Social Networking sites, it gives women a more woman friendly environment to hang out on and make friends and share information and status updates. Before that, there was no appeal to women to even use a computer as we brainless boys played video games on them and write programs and talked via BBSes, IRC channels, Newsgroups, and Internet Forums. Never really seeing the true potential to computers and the Internet social networking.
Also there is no true test to see if the user on a social networking site is a real woman, or just some guy pretending to be a woman to get more attention from men via social networking and stole some real woman's picture from some other web site or profile. Some of the fake woman profiles are spammer accounts for dating web sites, mail order bride services, pornography web sites, and are either run by a man pretending to be a woman or a robot pretending to be a woman, and he/it posts links to the web sites they are spamming for.
Women are becoming the majority on the Internet now, as even cell phones have Internet web site and one doesn't even need a computer to use a Facebook or Mysapce etc profile and updates. But we don't have a true number because we don't know which ones are faking to be women or robot spammer accounts pretending to be women.
Maybe men only talk to be heard, but women have conversations. So men dominate forums just to put in their 2cents as if the whole world needs to step back and listen and women are happy to hear other views?
Really looking forward to seeing more about these stats though & very happy that some of the conversation about them manages to get beyond "Hey! Marketeers! Use social networks to sell stuff to women!"
"Hear, hear!" is saying "Hey! Listen to this!"
"Here, here!" is a corruption of that phrase, and doesn't make sense.
When Edison invented the telephone he gave the first one to a woman.
He made a second phone and gave it to another woman. The woman who got the second phone tried to call the first woman and the line was busy.
It was a different Italian named Meucci who had some sort of telephone device before Bell. Also in the USA a fellow named Daniel Drawbaugh got into a patent fight with Bell over the invention of the telephone; From what I understand taking monetary inflation into account it was the most expensive patent trial to date.
Marconi? Some Russian fellow supposedly had some radio device before Marconi, Tesla as well I think.
Not to take away from Bell and Marconi, we all follow in the footsteps of others and learn from them.
Only if I'm drunk and it's either that or in my pants.
I think it's just common sense that women are more social. If families and people weren't the highest things on their scale of importance then I doubt if we would have the type of civilization (if any) that we do have. I say bless their nosy, yackety little hearts.
We are more efficient and faster at it. :)
I think they are jealous. Here lady's, feel the thrill of public urination!
http://www.shewee.com/
What would be far more interesting, would be to compare the genders of people who leave comments on different news websites.
I'm speaking in general here. Obviously there are exceptions, this doesn't apply to everyone. But think about girls with fashion, and guys with video games. It all clicks into place.
Guys who play video games tend to want to be really good at video games. They're not uncaring about others' opinions. XBox Live and PSN both have their own version of a mine-is-bigger-than-yours ePenis. Look at the various fanboys, and I think you'll see that they are anything but uncaring about what other people think. And it's true of the men I know IRL, too. Personally, I think it's a myth that men don't care.
I think that it's more likely that men congregate in smaller groups, or more focused ones, so don't get counted as easily in online social sites. I have many boards that I'm part of where the majority of users are men, while all the places mentioned above are larger scale everyone's-there type places, and the ones I'm part of, yes, they're mostly girls.
(Kind of surprised Gaia's there at all though. I mean... tweenage city!)
Girls want to stand out but guys just don't care - so that is why this forum is dominated by guys? Is that why you posted? Because you don't care? I suppose, me posting is wanting to stand out but you posting is not caring.
Your double standards are showing.
Girls want to stand out but guys just don't care - so that is why this forum is dominated by guys? Is that why you posted? Because you don't care? I suppose, me posting is wanting to stand out but you posting is not caring.
Your double standards are showing.
You also forget the extreme competitiveness of men in games etc, wanting their name at the top - oh but that is them not caring, sure.
You over generalise to suggest that a) women only post on social sites about mundane things and b) your general assertion that guys are laid back or 'don't care' (the violence stats would say otherwise) whereas girls are needing constant reassurance about the simplest task. This is not the case. The male ego is a famous one, one that you yourself just asserted.
Naaa! Man just don't know how to express in words... Look at the St. Johnsworth usage would tell the truth. What a MANLY conclusion. you wish..
I can throw in my own little sexist quip here just for your amusement. In reference to women needing to work three times harder & produce three times better results than a male just to be considered equal to him - good thing for us it is easy to do. Funny huh?
You know, there are inequalities everywhere between men and women. Sometimes it's in the woman's gavor (gasp!). I would point you to draft law, which states only men need register for the draft, and divorce law. Statistics show that most divorces, especially no-fault divorces, are initiated by women, and the woman gets most of the estate, including the children, an exorbitantly high amount of the time.
And women are made fun of by men. Well, look at the media for a second. I put it to you that in the vast, vast majority of television shows, especially comedies, the woman is shown to be the superior sex, whereas men are shown as fat slobs who only care about sex and beer. Man, if there was a show that showed the man as the "breadwinner man of the house" and the woman as the "wife who spends all the guy's money, much to his chagrin, and to HILARIOUS CONSEQUENCES) there would be cries of sexism so loud the show would be pulled off the air. I can't think of ONE show in which the woman is not more intelligent than the man.
There's sexism in the world, and it goes both ways. Stop screaming "GLAAAAAASSSSS CEEEEIIIILLLIIIINNNGGGGG" and get on with your life. Ain't nothing and nobody stopping you from doing what you want to do but yourself. This is 2009.
I'm not sure if there are stats in the US regarding this, but there are entire branches of government trying to deal with this in Australia.
"Sometimes" the inequality is the the women's direction? Are you kidding? No, I don't feel sorry for the poor white male struggling in a world that gives him every opportunity and says screw you to everyone else. I am a very successful woman in the work force but the statistics still say that I am an anomoly. Pay rates are still drastically uneven. Women around the world are oppressed and ignored by the international community - I do not just speak of the US (although the US has some of the most appauling rates in the world).
In balance, I do agree that there is some sexism out there against men (eg the lack of paternity leave arrangments that exist for men although women suffer this too where they are forced to quit their jobs) but it is not the constant bombardment women get . Much the same as there is some racism against whites but it is not the same as minority groups.
That being said, I am very worried about the young white boys/teens growing up in this world, it must be very confusing... albeit only as confusing as the 12 year old girl who thinks being a ***** is a positive thing thanks to hip hop and Britney...
What I'm trying to do, revengeofthecow, is add some balance to a very biased, male dominated discussion due to a very biased article. Sometimes to balance a scale you need to shift your own balance.
The idea of a heroine is a new one, and still not the norm (despite its popularity). Even then, the heroine is almost always sexualised.
Men usually get social when they want to do "guy things" or pick up women.
Love. Your choice
I dunno about you, but while all these chicks are busy typing up blogs and chatting with friends, we men are socializing in a different way... ONLINE GAMES! Try making statistics about the % of men that play online games, socialize in online games, and you will see why we men are not wasting our time with socializing network pages like the ones mentioned above! LOL!
- by digg1er October 5, 2009 2:28 PM PDT
- these are mostly fake female spambot accounts for dating/porn which are skewing the numbers. come one dude, get with the program.
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- by aaron_van October 5, 2009 3:16 PM PDT
- And you have proof of there where? How?
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- by EdCenter October 5, 2009 5:18 PM PDT
- I think digg1er has a point here. If you consider all the spambot accounts you've encountered (like for example in MySpace), it's almost always a female. And if you run a spambot and want attention, which gender would you choose? I wonder if the analysis above took into account fake accounts, probably not.
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