Online

This week´s task was to observe the sites where we frequent and pay attention to the gendered differences in them. During the past week there has actually been somewhat many articles / debates over gender differences, I don´t know whether they have increased or have I just paid more attention to them. In the Helsingin Sanomat "sunday debate" was an interesting take on the wage differences between men and women.

For me, propably, the most prominent source of online interaction is the Facebook which is the reason for choosing it to take the examples from. These following remarks are only my own and furthermore they rely mainly on my "gut feeling" rather than any actual data.

I would say that I have about the equal amount of men and women as "friends", and in this respect women are more active on the Facebook, most of the status updates are written by women as well most of the commenting. Women use more smileys and support each other. I didn´t notice any negative updates from my male friends where other male "friends" would write supporting comments. Both genders used humor in the updates. I have the feeling that women use the chat on Facebook more than men, but this is only due to my own limited experience.

I would also say that women tend to post more pictures depicting themselves, in addition I would say that the updates posted by women are longer than that of the male posted. I guess women are more daring and outgoing online than men at least on the more public forums where you don´t use an alias. I almost got in to a predicament because of my female nickname on the poker sites, when an American (says the person´s detail shown to other players) guy started talking to me and I was trying my best to ignore him. I didn´t feel like chit chatting with a guy (or a girl for that matter) when I expected that he thinks that I´m a woman...

Boyd´s article was interesting and what caught my attention was the choosing of those first options in msn profiles and she wound up as male, executive, higher education etc... Quite an coincidence. However I think it is realistic to gather info for the advertisers, since we live in a market economy. Why would I want an ad about e.g womens clothes or something. I didn´t see the same harm as the writer did - if the information stays for these purposes only. It´s going to beinteresting to hear the discussions at class today...