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?
It's not every day that a high school student gets some advice on social networking from a president.
So it was interesting to hear where President Obama's focus lay Tuesday when talking to 40 students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., before his nationally broadcast speech to America's schoolkids.
There he was in the school library. Books abounded. Yet his focus fell on Facebook. According to the Associated Press, President Obama asked the 40 assembled kids, all sitting politely on nice wooden chairs, to think very carefully about their socially-networked content.
"Be careful what you post on Facebook. Whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life," he told the kids.
Now you can see that the president, himself the father of two girls, is worried about the future consequences of present actions.
Is the president right to worry about kids' Facebook postings?
(Credit: CC SEIU International/Flickr)He is concerned, no doubt, that practices such as sexting and other possibly absurd types of openness on social networking sites might lead to some future calamity.
But I wonder if this is entirely true. One of the strange effects that time has on human life is to render somewhat meaningless the actions of the past.
Once, people might have been concerned if their employee, or, indeed, their president, had smoked pot at some point in their flailing youth. Now, it seems almost a rite of passage. If you didn't at least try it, you seem just faintly peculiar.
Once you reach a certain age, does anyone really care what you did when you were 14? So isn't it fair to wonder just what effect kids' socially networked indiscretions might have 20 years from now?
Might it be that by then social networking will seem so ridiculously normal, that you will seem strange not to have some something embarrassing in your younger days, available for all to see?
Might it be possible that those who eschew a life exposed online will be seen to be the odd ones, rather than those who let what seems to be a little too much hang out?
I know it may be difficult to imagine, viewing it from our current perspective. I know that employers these days often search the Web for incriminating evidence of the misdeeds of potential employees. ("Aagh. He got drunk at a party three years ago! I'm not employing him!")
But it's extraordinary how quickly the apparently abnormal becomes the norm, especially with the accelerated change created by anything Web-based.
Of course, there will be those of you who will have had your heads turned by another aspect of the president's talk.
Why did he say "Facebook"? And not "MySpace"? And not "Twitter"?
I know there will be at least two boardrooms Wednesday where everyone will be terribly concerned about this apparent endorsement of Facebook's ubiquity.
I wonder if the CEOs of MySpace and Twitter will blog about it, or at least slip some bons mots of concern onto their Facebook pages.
Speeches, like plays, are sometimes more interesting to read rather than see live.
So I have spent some time staring at the words of a speech recently given by Danah Boyd, from the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, titled "The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online."
In the speech, given to the Personal Democracy Forum, Boyd picked up utopian views of technology, pinned them against a wall and asked them for a little more than their name and rank.
"For decades," she said, "we've assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with 'access' and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine."
She then used the example of Facebook and MySpace to suggest that perhaps people's behavior online absolutely mirrors enduring social divides.
Many Americans use Facebook and MySpace, she said. But which Americans?
Using teens as the indicators of where the world is heading, Boyd described some of her research among them and took the words of one 14-year-old, Kat from Massachusetts, to describe her central thesis:
"I'm not really into racism, but I think that MySpace now is more like ghetto or whatever, and Facebook is all...not all the people that have Facebook are mature, but its supposed to be like oh we're more mature...MySpace is just old."
For Boyd, the sites we go to reflect our idea of what "people like us" do. Another teen, 17-year-old Craig from California, put it extremely baldly (especially for a Californian):
"The higher castes of high school moved to Facebook. It was more cultured, and less cheesy. The lower class usually were content to stick to MySpace. Any high school student who has a Facebook will tell you that MySpace users are more likely to be barely educated and obnoxious."
Boyd, who is also a researcher at Microsoft Research New England (Microsoft being a prominent investor in Facebook), described the migration from MySpace to Facebook as being akin to white folks setting up their own communities. Yes, the places that spawned the allegedly desperate housewife. This wasn't that Facebook was newer or cooler. This was "modern day 'white flight.'"
The wealthier, the whiter, the more suburban left MySpace and, if they went anywhere, they went to Facebook for a "more peaceful, quiet, less-public space."
In an observation that might echo the private views of quite a few who might be watering their lawns on a summer's evening, Boyd noted far greater condescension by Facebook users toward MySpace users than vice versa.
Here's the fear as Boyd sees it: governments, commercial organizations, and others will see the likes of Facebook as being the whole community, whereas in reality they are representing the status quo, traditionally occupied by "educated, wealthy, white, straight men." (Although, some would say that both political parties have certainly shown that at least one of those descriptors is a myth.)
Speaking to a mainly white, liberal audience, some of whom are involved in politics through their work, Boyd challenged them to go to MySpace, try to log in, and see if they could make any sense of it. She then asked her audience to imagine how some outsiders might feel when confronted with Facebook or Twitter.
The issue of race and class defining certain social-networking spaces online is not limited to the U.S. In India, Boyd noted, Orkut and Facebook users represent very distinct professional and caste memberships.
Two years ago, Boyd began developing these themes in her work, describing MySpace members as "'burnouts', punks, or alternative-scene teenagers whose parents likely didn't go beyond a high school education."
But the more important point that she makes is surely that when we go online we are propelled by assumptions about the world, ones we don't bother articulating. Our behavior is automatic. It was learned in a few instants, sometimes from others in our immediate social world.
We somehow fool ourselves that we're looking and participating in one big, happy world family. We're not.
When we go to Digg, for example, to see what's worth reading today, do we stop to think "worth reading by whom"? Do we wonder who actually are the 250 people who thought an article was worth Digging? Do we notice, for example, just how male Digg's front page seems to be? Do we care?
And that's what Boyd is ultimately getting at. While we talk of the Web being the great equalizer, the uncontrollable stage upon which democracy happens before our very eyes, whose version of democracy are we really looking at?
When you're going through difficult times, perhaps it's wise to reach for a gay foreigner in a mesh T-shirt.
This, at least, seems to be the strategy for MySpace.
The company has divested itself of a considerable number of employees in the past week and is, perhaps, hoping that Sacha Baron Cohen and his extremely tight hot pants will sprinkle a little glitter where the sun has not shone for a while.
"Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt"--the "fake working title" Cohen gave his latest movie--represents a considerable investment on the part of MySpace.
MySpace will feature prominently in the movie, according to a report in AdAge. Indeed, the "Bruno" trailer was launched on the site, and the hilarious meinspace.com/bruno has brought a new dimension to social-networking profiles.
While it is delightful to learn from MeinSpace that Bruno is currently looking for "a guy whose skin colour is between butterscotch und camel," you begin to wonder whether Cohen's snigger is hissing happily in MySpace's direction.
The beauty of Cohen's characters is that they are wonderfully forthright and, well, jerks. You laugh at them and with them. Through them, you're laughing at how baldly stupid so many things in life (and so many people) are.
"Borat" was the most vivid incarnation of the Cohen method. But, as "Bruno's" publicity itself declares: "Borat was so 2006." Cohen also did a deal with MySpace when "Borat" was launched. There were special advance screenings, for example, that were open only to MySpacers.
However, it's hard to see that MySpace's image has done anything other than slide like the Kazhak economy over the last three years.
Of course, one movie isn't going to reverse strategic missteps and Facebook's tolerant, cheery coffee bar of friendship.
I can't help wondering, though, whether "Bruno's" embrace of MySpace might leave you with the notion that of course Bruno would be on MySpace. After all, he's ein person you wouldn't exactly want at your first-born's christening.
Cohen, you might think, has the upper hand in the relationship with MySpace. The deal certainly hasn't excluded the current darlings of social networking. On MeinSpace, you can still link to "Bruno's" Facebook page. Indeed, he somehow managed to nab facebook.com/bruno in the recent vanity raffle.
MeinSpace also lets you link to Bruno's Twitter feed, the fabulous Twitter.com/brunovassup. Here's just one Bruno tweet: "Just back from uncle's funeral - had fight mit egomaniac priest - apparently it's rude to ask for ze church wi-fi password during a service."
Bruno's social-networking numbers to date are very interesting. While on MeinSpace he has more than 330,000 freunds, he has only 53,768 on Facebook and 18,515 on Twitter. Might that trend change as he gears up toward the July 10 launch? I suspect not.
One can hardly wait to see how Cohen has inserted MySpace into his opus. However, as always with his movies, whom will the joke be on?
Do you think better of Eminem after Bruno welcomed him at the MTV Movie awards with his bottom?
In fact, don't Eminem and MySpace have quite a lot in common? Put it this way, Eminem's Greatest Hits album was so 2005.
Miami-Dade police believe that a dog-loving class clown who joined the "Catch the Cat Killer!" Facebook group may be the alleged cat killer himself, according to a report in the Miami Herald.
The Miami-Dade cat killer had been terrorizing neighborhoods, especially the towns of Palmetto Bay and Cutler Bay, since May 10, when the first two carcasses were found, mutilated in a such a way as to cause maximum horror for whoever discovered them.
(Credit:
CC Higgy STPFC/Flickr)
The man police arrested on suspicion of the crimes, 18-year-old Tyler Hayes Weinman, is known as a "dog-loving class clown and a swim class instructor," according to the Herald.
The police told the paper that they arrested Weinman after taking a close look at his Facebook and MySpace postings. While not revealing more about the specific postings, police noted that Weinman had joined the Facebook group "Catch the Cat Killer!"
The group, with over 1,600 members, has since become a closed group. Organizer Brittany Barton said in a posting on the group's page that she had been forced to restrict activity.
"I will be opening up the comment wall and discussion board only once a week so that I can keep some control over the 'disturbing comments' that some people have made. And no, I cannot delete EVERYTHING that some of you may not want to read- I simply don't have the time," she wrote.
She appears to have been shaken by the sheer venom that was expressed on the group's wall. And she cautioned members to allow due process to occur before leaping to judgment.
"This is a very stressful situation to us all, but wait for the judge to bang the gavel before you go around saying things you may regret," she said.
Weinman has been charged with 19 counts of felony animal cruelty, 19 counts of improperly disposing of an animal body, and 4 counts of burglary, the Miami Herald reports.
Caroline Wimmer was found strangled to death with a hair dryer cord in her apartment March 30.
Mark Musarella was allegedly one of the EMTs who arrived at the scene of the crime.
According to FOX 5 in New York, Musarella decided to take a photograph of Ms. Wimmer's body. He then posted it to his Facebook page.
(Credit:
CC Jay Cameron/Flickr)
Richmond University Medical Center officials saw the posting and fired Musarella, but refused to give reasons for his dismissal. However, the Staten Island DA is investigating the matter, according to Fox 5.
Wimmer's family believe that she was murdered (Calvin Lawson, 28, has been arrested and charged with the crime) because her alleged killer was fed up with rumors on MySpace that he was cheating on his girlfriend with Wimmer, rumors he attributed to Wimmer.
It seems difficult to keep social networking out of the (bad) news these days.
You will, along with many millions of others, likely make an emergency appointment with your psychologist this week.
After all, the words of Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College in Oxford, England, have probably slapped their syllables against your very core. Social-networking sites, she said, like Facebook (it's interesting how Facebook seems to have come to symbolize all social networking), are infantilizing the human mind.
The definition of infantile behavior appears to span such horrific traits as sensationalism, short attention spans, and a need to urinate in the middle of shopping malls. (Perhaps I inadvertently slipped that last one in.)
However, Lady Greenfield's worries are clearly weighing upon her mind. She told the Daily Mail, for example: "My fear is that these technologies are infantilizing the brain into the state of small children, who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span, and who live for the moment."
And she was quoted in the Guardian as telling the United Kingdom's House of Lords (old people in strange costumes who love a heavy lunch and a massage for dessert) that the experiences children have on social-networking sites "are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance."
My 4-year-old mind is seized with this response: how does she know that these experiences have no long-term significance? Is her mind so developed, adult, and able to focus for days on end on one subject that she can see into the future and declare all hope lost? Isn't it conceivable that those who network socially come to be more active socially in the real world too?
Well, not according to Lady Greenfield. "Real conversation in real time," she declared, "may eventually give way to these sanitized and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning, and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf.
Perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror at the messiness, unpredictability, and immediate personal involvement of a three-dimensional, real-time interaction."
And perhaps they will get to know each other better before they waste each other's time in the deeply meaningful live social chit-chat so beloved by attendees of cocktail parties at the British Embassy. ("Looks like rain today." "Oh, yes. My begonias really need it. Don't yours?")
At the heart of Lady Greenfield's depressing, sensationalist, and stunningly self-centered analysis is this theory: My (adult) way of life is good. Your (childish) way of life is bad.
So why is it that adults so often venerate the honesty of children? Why is it that they delight in children's ability to express their emotions fully, clearly, and without holding a grudge? Why is it that they remind children that their childhood days will be the happiest of their lives?
What, in short, is so screamingly wrong about being infantile?
It's not children who start wars, destroy financial systems, struggle for power, create Ponzi schemes, and release their recently ingested vodka and Coors Light on the sidewalk.
And it certainly isn't children who have created a world of such uncertainty that living for the moment is, quite often, the only philosophy that keeps one from taking a running leap at the nearest cathedral wall and banging one's head as hard as possible against it.
Perhaps Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Twitter and their other brand buddies will, indeed, change the human brain.
But can we really only imagine they will change it for the worse?
Biology is an extremely messy thing. It makes you do things you regret in the morning--and sometimes things you regret seconds after you've been arrested.
Yet according to psychologist Dr. Aric Sigman, biology may be a crucial reason why too much time on Facebook and MySpace might leave you at greater risk of deathly diseases like cancer and dementia.
Apparently, if you spend too many hours interacting (socially) alone, your immune system, your hormone levels--in short, the whole chemical box of your entrails--gets just a little messed up. And when the chemicals start to misconcoct, bad things can happen.
Dr. Sigman believes that society as a whole has experienced a significant reduction in face-to-face time over the last 20 years. Writing in Biologist, the journal of the Institute of Biology, he is very clear about the cuddle chemical.
Its technical name is oxytocin (not to be at all confused with OxyContin). And it's a fine hormone that, in your fellow man's physical presence, encourages you to hug him, your fellow woman or, indeed, your fellow rottweiler.
Dr. Sigman insists that cuddle chemical levels radically change (not for the better) when you're agreeing to send your life savings to Ludmila, the Deland, Fla., native you may have just met on MySpace.
"There does seem to be a difference between 'real presence' and the virtual variety," Dr. Sigman told the Daily Mail.
This is what happens when your cuddle chemicals desert you. (That's what I imagine, anyway)
(Credit: CC R Marin)I am not in a position to question Dr. Sigman. I am alone in a New York hotel room, praying that my Golden State Warriors can somehow force the Lakers' Phil Jackson to regrow his mustache live on TV. However, my evident chemical imbalance has allowed me to discover some more of Dr. Sigman's work.
In 2005, he appears to have penned a piece for the Daily Mail entitled "How TV is (quite literally) killing us." Reading it made my cuddle chemicals curdle, as the doctor declared that watching "even moderate amounts of television" may lead to "damaged brain cell development and function."
Dr. Sigman also points out that TV "is the only adult pastime from the ages of 20 to 60 positively linked to developing Alzheimer's disease." (Ah, that had slipped my mind.)
Oh, and it seems quite clear that it's also "a direct cause of obesity--a bigger factor even than eating junk food or taking too little exercise." (I will run all the way up Madison Ave., straight after the game.) And let's not forget that TV "may biologically trigger premature puberty." (Too late.)
I suddenly want to cuddle Dr. Sigman for a prolonged period of time. It may be the only way to prevent him from altering my chemicals (not for the better) any further.
If you thought the British Army's upper lip was always stiffer than its bayonets, then you might be jolted upright by a new development.
The British Ministry of Defense has expressed its concern that soldiers might betray the nation's secrets on Facebook and MySpace. Many British newspapers are relaying soldiers' dismay at a new directive that appears to prevent them from networking socially.
A serviceman enjoying the winter in Afghanistan told the Sun: "The fun police have taken over. I can't talk to my wife and kids or even play Call of Duty 5. Do they really think we're going to give away secrets?"
Perhaps you, too, are wondering why someone trudging through a battlefield of dead bodies and opium would entertain himself by playing Call of Duty 5. Wouldn't that be a little like the owner of an Outback Steakhouse franchise having dinner at Burger King?
And here's how the British Army trains for its missions. (No, this picture was not on Facebook.)
(Credit: CC John Spooner)The chaps at the ministry have been swift to deny that there is an outright ban. They claim they are merely reminding soldiers not to put any sensitive information onto their news feed.
However, a swift perusal of the directive brings out the ministry's true intentions: "Service and Ministry of Defence civilian personnel are encouraged to use self-publishing on the Internet or similar channels to communicate with the public directly, but should ensure that the rules on prior authorization, conduct and behavior, collective and personal security, use of official IT, data protection, and communicating in public are followed."
Perhaps we all read officialese differently. My interpretation is that soldiers can post whatever they want on their Facebook pages. They can poke the president. They can upload dirty limericks and areola-free photography. There is only one teeny-tiny catch. They have to ask Daddy first.
They don't have directives like that on Call of Duty 5, do they?
Chances are, many of you will be going next weekend to see He's Just Not That Into You.
Some will see this, already America's No.1 movie, willingly, even enthusiastically. Others will perhaps grimace and bear it in the commitment to a higher cause.
However, while you are enjoying "I'm a Mac" icon Justin Long channeling his inner Vince Vaughn with the aim of keeping women at torso's length, you might also notice that MySpace plays a role in the movie. One that might best be described as the sleazy character that no one loves and everyone wishes would just die.
I don't want to spoil the plot too much for you (because it has so many surprises, you'll have troubled maintaining consciousness), but I was persuaded to spend a couple of hours in the company of He's Just Not That Into You this weekend. And rarely have I seen a brand so tersely derided on the wide screen.
(Credit:
CC d70Focus)
One of the characters, Mary, played by Drew Barrymore, is an ad sales lady looking, as all ad sales ladies seem to be, for love. She is attempting to find it by meeting people on MySpace. However, she is advised by her nearest and very dearest (yup, gay co-workers- this is a Hollywood movie) that MySpace is something of a sleazy joint in which to be casting for pearls.
Then, near the end of the movie, I could have sworn that she finds her ultimate love liberation in closing her MySpace account.
Which led me to wonder (only for a moment or two, but still) whether MySpace was aware of this shining portrayal in advance. Perhaps it's a post-post modern attempt at self-irony. Or perhaps whoever wrote the script had a difficult and perverted experience on the site and needed to eke out his or her pain.
Of course, there's also the extremely cynical idea that the movie was produced by New Line Cinema, a division of Warner Bros, while MySpace is the full brother of 20th Century Fox. But I can't believe anyone would stoop so low merely for commercial reasons.
I am sure you all have your own views of MySpace. Just as you will all have your own views of this star-crossed filmic homage to Jane Austen by next Sunday morning. (Saturday's Valentine's Day. What do you mean you didn't know?)
