FACEBOOK:
New research discussed in Forbes Magazine says women are more social on facebook than men are. I personally feel like men socialize a great deal online — perhaps even moreso than in other analyzed social spaces — but Google Ad Planner (sidenote; there’s a strong possibility that Google is Big Brother, so take this research with a grain of salt, Winston) says ladies just love to facebook-like things that much more:
According to BrianSolis.com and Google Ad Planner, the 400-million member site is 57% female and attracts 46 million more female visitors than male visitors per month. Plus, women are more active on Facebook. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says women on Facebook have 8% more friends and participate in 62% of the sharing. “The social world is led by women,” she concludes. And they’re leading that charge online.
Women are the majority of users on many of the biggest social networking sites, including Twitter, MySpace, Bebo and Flickr. Men, meanwhile, are most active on sites like Digg, YouTube and LinkedIn, which are more content-oriented and promotional than discussion-based.
They also list the ten most popular sites for women and the only ones I’ve even heard of are MySpace, Classmates, Facebook, Twitter & Flickr. Gaia? WTF is Gaia? I had a friend named Gaia, she smoked a lot of pot. Anyhow, “experts” chalk up the girly gift for gab thusly (and they do eventually also acknowledge that these social behaviors are learned, not inherent):
Experts believe the difference between how men and women operate online mirror their motivations offline. While women often use online social networking tools to make connections and share items from their personal lives, men use them as means to gather information and increase their status.
This may or may not be total crazy talk but also though? If you are or have a married friend who’s had a f*king baby or if you’ve spent any time on sftu parents you know that MARRIED STAY-AT-HOME MOMS LOVE FACEBOOK. America contains 5.5 million married stay-at-home parents; that’s 5.1 million mothers and 158,000 fathers. Also, LESBIANS LOVE THE INTERNET, THIS IS A PROVEN FACT. 75% of GLBTs are heavy online users, compared to 61% of the general population. Probs a lot of those are ladies. Hey ladies.
Pingdom.com made this infographic with the aforementioned data, and it’s interesting to see which sites are heavily MALE dominated (moreso than any of the investigated sites are female-dominated) and how many dudes haven’t bothered deleting their Friendster account yet.
Thoughts? Do you think the gender variance is inconsequential (whereas Forbes states equivocably that Facebook is female-dominated, pingdom states, based on the same data, “Twitter and Facebook have almost the same male-female ratio.”
Also WTF is Bebo.
PLASTIC SURGERY:
Hollywood to Actors: No Surgery, Please: “In small but significant numbers, filmmakers and casting executives are beginning to re-examine Hollywood’s attitude toward breast implants, Botox, collagen-injected lips and all manner of plastic surgery.” (@nytimes.)
SPAIN:
Queering Spanish Culture: Bad news for my trip to Spain: “It continues to be the “terra incognita” female sexuality was for Freud some 90 years ago, the reason being that, like in most other European countries, lesbian voices continue to remain silenced and lesbianism hardly visible in Spain.” (@ndsm observer)
IMMIGRATION:
“Public While Brown” – “Rep. Bilbray’s efforts to deflect from the state’s racisms by locating the “trained” apprehension of “illegality” on clothes, on behaviors — rather than skin — do not constitute any sort of departure from race discourses that target the body as a continuous surface of legible information about pathology, capacity, and so forth.” (@jezebel)
PRIDE & POWER:
Prom Flap Highlights Alliance of Pride and Growing Power: “The episode isn’t the first to flag common discrimination against people with disabilities and those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. Solidarity between both communities has grown, reflected in a recent appointment to the federal panel on fair employment practices and the signing last fall by President Obama of a landmark hate-crimes law.” (@huffpo)
TRUCKS:
A Guide To Navigating Hell’s Kitchen’s Food Trucks There’s even one called the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck. And it won an “Eat Out” award. heh heh. (@time out new york)
TOPLESS:
Gender Equality March Angers Residents: Even though you don’t actually find out what the march is about until the last paragraph, this article is very informative. For instance, I learned that “the promotion and presentation of public nudity is a staple of the homosexual rights movement.” Who know? (@kjonline)
GO MAGAZINE:
Check out Time Out NY’s coverage of GO Mag’s Nightlife Awards Party!
AS's Miss April and GO on-air talent Sarah Croce with Kim Stolz, photo by Syd London
BUSINESS:
Nice Girls Finish Last – “By the time I realized, as a young working woman, that being a classic good girl was going to land me in more work for slightly less pay, there wasn’t much I could do to alter my fundamentally conscientious, perpetually guilt-ridden, grateful-for-a-job sense that I should always be working harder than I was, and that I was probably already being overcompensated for whatever I was doing.” (@salon)
PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY:
Mind Over Meds: “Psychiatry has been transformed from a profession in which we talk to people and help them understand their problems into one in which we diagnose disorders and medicate them.” (@nytimes)
For some reason i was not aware that public nudity was a defining characteristic of the LGBT movement.
Also anyone named Gaia is bound to be very herb inclined.
Have you been to dyke march in SF ever?
Then you’ll know it’s true. In the best, tittyfied way ever.
My sister is addicted to Gaia its like this online doll that u dress up after posting in forums and u get money to buy it clothes after posting and stuff. Its big among preteens and teens.
Yeah, I have a friend who’s on Gaia Online quite a bit. It’s got an RPG-ish element to it, and it is largely manga-oriented.
and I feel like all the “WTF is this site” qs could have been answered with Google.
yeah but it’s more entertaining to have commenters explain it. people who use social networking sites are much better at describing what it really is than any google search result can. people are sources too!
Bebo was Ireland’s biggest social network back when you guys were using Myspace, with almost one forth of the population using it. Then Facebook came along and most of the older people left bebo which is now mainly used by young teenagers in addition to Facebook. Recently they announced bebo might be shut down because its losing money and so there’s lot of Irish people who are now making “bebo pictures” photo albums on facebook which is making everyone realise how loserish they looked 2 or 3 years ago.
So there ya go! :)
oh that’s really interesting about the bebo pictures photo albums. So Bebo was invented before facebook? How is it different from facebook or myspace? Just that it was specific to Ireland?
Bebo was big in the UK too. Although Facebook seems to be the dominant force now in the English-speaking nations, there’s a bigger mix out in the rest of the world that might escape people’s attention.
For example, there’s Orkut, which for some reason is absolutely huge in Brazil. I read an article (and just found loads more) about the random popularity of different ones in different countries, though I can’t find anywhere that really explains why. This little article with nice map on Gawker makes a sensible point that once a network gets bedded in somewhere, it can be hard to shift the users because you have to shift all their friends too.
Businessweek also has some interesting words and pictures on the subject.
That’s funny, “orkut” is finnish slang for orgasm… As to why there are so many rogue social networking sites, I think they might be older than the dominant (american) ones. That is at any rate the case with our own irc-galleria.net (founded in 2000), and somehow still around even though I left many years ago.
Well Facebook was around but you used to have to have a college email address to use it and it wasn’t very popular. Where as bebo was the thing that pretty much all the teenagers were on.
It wasn’t exclusive to Ireland but it did seem to take off here more than anywhere else. It’s sort of like myspace and it has a much younger and colourful (read ugly) look than facebook. You could choose your own skins and add bands and quizzes and all that sort of stuff.
Can’t you tell I’m a multimedia student. :P
oh hey. nice avatar.
I like to ‘like’ things on Facebook, but I don’t particularly like Facebook anymore. It’s gotten really annoying lately with all it’s changes and ‘eff your privacy’ policies. I prefer Twitter and Tumblr.
I can’t stand Facebook lately, either. Every time I turn around they’ve changed their privacy settings — I’m glad my grandma gets to see pics of me drunkenly making out with people before I frantically change the settings again.
It’s getting beyond ridiculous…of course, abandoning FB would be like abandoning my social life, so it’s hard to get rid of it altogether. Everyone and their grandma is on it, now, which is what they’re betting on.
I fucking hate facebook! It never works! Ever!
thank you emily! I still don’t get why it’s so addictive, mine never fucking works! i can look at like four pictures before they stop loading, it’s just like not that exciting.
I can’t quite bring myself to quit facebook because I’m slightly addicted to Mafia Wars, but now my father, uncles, cousins etc. are all on there so I’ve had to restrict my drunk-posting to twitter. Sorry Barack Obama, I know when you followed me you expected so much more.
And this may be over-generalizing, but it’s always females that send those stupid “JOINN TIS FAECBOOCK GROUP AND STOPP PUPPIES GETING KILED LOL!!” requests. So I’m all for more blokes on FB.
psychopharmacology is one of my favorite words! i did read the article but as usual have 3,280 thoughts about it none of which will slow down long enough to form into a relevant sentence aaaaand then there’s anxiety about posting badly edited comments! is there a pill for that?
xanax
RT
I still don’t understand how people can get *addicted* to Xanax. I used to be prescribed it for anxiety and it got to the point where the smallest dose possible – half a .25gram one – made me feel overdosed!
LiveJournal will always be the shit to me, but judging by my friends list, no one agrees. T_T
I used to be on LJ quite a bit! But then I left after all the Russian mob/censorship/etc stuff scared me away. I only really have an account for Brisneyland since it’s pretty active. A lot of people have moved on to Dreamwidth now tho you need a code.
I think that men spend as much time socializing online as women do. It’s just that these stats don’t include information about games like WoW, which are generally dominated by male players. It’s just that men socialize a little differently and their socializing is likely to be more activity-centred than that of women. Women often talk just because they want to, but it’s not often that we see men on the phone for hours talking about their personal lives with other male friends. They’re more likely to do it at a bar or something.