Tag: socializer

Studies show the genders really are different online.

For Jonathan and Michelle Opp of Chapel Hill, N.C., the Internet, like electricity and indoor plumbing, is an indispensable part of their lives. Always armed with their iPhones, they regularly check travel information and weather forecasts, and even use their devices to find answers to offbeat questions. But there are also major differences in the way the married couple use their devices and Internet connections.

“Michelle probably does more functional things like shopping or paying bills. I like to spend more of my spare time reading music reviews and checking soccer scores,” says Jonathan, a marketing communications manager.

In fact gender, more so than race, ethnicity or economic status, determines how and what we peruse online. According to a recent study by eMarketer, slightly more women say they use the Internet than men. However once logged on, male Internet users tend to spend more time surfing the Web than females.

Meanwhile, in a separate report, eMarketer estimates that U.S. marketers will spend 37.2 billion dollars on online advertising by the year 2013. Clearly understanding what gets the genders ticking makes economic sense for any business buying ad space on the Web.

Internet Protocol addresses, however, don’t come in shades of pink and blue. So companies eager to reach men tend to focus ads on sports, technology and news sites. Businesses concentrating on women often center on stereotypically female-oriented sites, like parenting Web sites.

“Smart companies use behavioral targeting to try to reach their desired target demo online, but even then, they can’t tell who exactly is behind the IP addresses they are following,” says Lisa Phillips, an eMarketer senior analyst and author of the report “Men Online.”

So what, businesses may ask, is keeping the genders glued to their computer screens? For one, men are much more interested in watching online videos than women, notes Phillips.

The presumption that online images are more appealing to males should hardly come as a surprise: men have long been touted as the more visual sex. Other gender stereotypes seem to carry over to the online world as well: Women, who are often seen as caretakers of a family, tend to click on health care Web sites more frequently than men do.

However companies should be aware that not all Internet tendencies mirror offline generalizations.

“I would say for every situation where you think a trend may be confirming a stereotype, there seems to be another counterintuitive trend that might emerge as well,” says Mary Madden, a senior research specialist at the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

For example, women are often dubbed the more verbally adept sex. However they are no more likely to use online communication tools like e-mail, blogging, or social networks than men are.

And although women are sometimes pegged as more avid shoppers, men are just as keen as women to make online purchases. But their shopping behavior may differ.

“Men generally have the attitude, I’m going to go there, I’ve got to get it and get out,” says Phillips. “Females like to go online and socialize and shop around – much like going into a store.”

Furthermore, Phillips says fathers are just as voracious as mothers about finding online information to improve their children’s health or education. Like Web-savvy moms, they also tend to buy products with their families in mind.

Companies should also be wary about making generalizations on how the genders manage their finances. For years, men have been considered financial authorities in many families. But nowadays women are just as likely as men to bank online, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

And though men are more likely to search the Internet for stock quotes or mortgage interest rates, Phillips says the dwindling economy has more women visiting online job sites. This is despite the fact that men have been hit harder by rising unemployment.

Meanwhile Michelle Opp, a software developer, has no problem admitting she shops online more frequently than her husband. But she insists it has nothing to do with gender.

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This is a very interesting article and I have found that it is true in my case as well. I am adding it here for conversation. And actually, are we not all finding that blogging is becoming the next print media and that twittering and facebooking is quickly taking bloggins place for those of us not totally devoted to the written word world?

Thoughts…
d

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The way we communicate is changing at a breakneck pace. And don’t expect it to slow down.

I’m not blogging as much as I used to. Part of it probably has to do with the job – it’s just tough to find the time. (Despite what J.J. Cale might tell you, it’s not easy to let it all hang out after midnight.) But I think a bigger reason simply might be that I have literally been Facebooking and Twittering (some say frittering) all my content away! I get a thought, I meet someone interesting, I go somewhere cool, and then snap crackle pop, I put it up. Crazy right? But more than that, what are the implications? As Joni Mitchell might say: “Well something’s lost, but something’s gained.”

Of course it’s more complicated than that. First this whole deal has been going on for ages (well for nearly 12 months at least.) Go back to “Is Google Making us Stupid” (The Atlantic July/August 2008.) What are the implications of more short bits of information and shorter attention spans?

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Former AOL executive Ted Leonsis was frustrated: He’d produced a critically acclaimed documentary called Nanking, a film that looked at some Westerners who had protected Chinese civilians during a brutal, six-week attack by the Japanese army in 1937. But he was pretty sure the film, which premiered in 2007 at the Sundance Film Festival, would reach a relatively small audience.

Only a few hundred movie theaters in the U.S. will even show documentaries, and even those cinemas don’t always give non-fiction films prime spots on their schedules. Distribution is a source of aggravation for many documentarians.

Unlike most filmmakers, though, Leonsis, who stepped down from day-to-day management at AOL at the end of 2006, had the wherewithal to do something about the situation. Last year he launched Snag Films, a company that aims to distribute documentary films via the Internet. But rather than just stream its library of 650 titles through the Snag Films site, the company is enabling portals, news sites and individual fans to share the movies through their own Web sites, blogs, Facebook home pages and other sites.

“Everyone talks about user-generated content,” says Leonsis, who also is majority owner of NHL’s Washington Capitals. “Let’s talk about a new category called user-distributed content,”

Leonsis’ Nanking, which will be available online for the first time Memorial Day weekend, is the centerpiece of an eight-film slate Snag is presenting during the holiday; each of the movies commemorates the heroism of soldiers and civilians during periods of war and conflict.

For films released in theaters Snag provides an opportunity for the documentaries to find new audiences. A blogger who is writing about alcohol abuse on college campuses, for example, might seek to embed in her blog a Snag video player that shows the movie Haze, a look at a drinking-related hazing incidents.

Filmmakers who make their movies available to Snag benefit in a few ways: For each film it includes a “Buy DVD” button that takes a viewer immediately to the documentarian’s DVD distributor. Leonsis contends that many Snag users will only watch a portion of the film via the Internet, and that true fans will end up purchasing the film to watch on their home televisions.

Snag also sells advertising in the documentaries, and splits the ad revenue with the filmmakers. “We are writing checks to filmmakers,” Leonsis says. “They’re not big: $10, $25, $100. But they’re checks.”

Finally Snag offers users a chance to make an online donation to a cause of the documentary maker’s choosing.

But for most directors who work with Snag, the main benefit is the opportunity to reach more people. “Filmmakers have never had this kind of opportunity before,” says Steven C. Barber, whose film, Return To Tarawa, is part of Snag’s Memorial Day slate. “I can get my film to every single country this way.”

Barber’s film has already run on Discovery’s Military Channel, and many of the films in Snag’s library have traveled a fairly conventional path for documentaries (film festival, theatrical or television premiere, DVD) before landing at Snag. But Snag CEO Rick Allen says the company is looking for more documentaries to launch on Snag, a concept that would upend the traditional theatrical distribution model.

(Entrepreneur Mark Cuban has also sought to disrupt theatrical release windows, showing films on his HDNet Movies channel two days before the film appears in theaters.)

Allen says it is too early to know if Snag’s Internet-distribution efforts will cause major movie studios to think differently about their current models, but he does believe the film industry will go through lots of experimentation in the coming years.

“I think everybody believes that digital distribution is the wave of the future and they’re all trying to figure our how it affects content delivery and content creation,” Allen says. “I think people in large media organizations have seen the success of something like Hulu and its broadened people’s ideas about how to get content out there and consumed.”

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Hey Everyone,

I am adding this because it is SO TRUE!!!! Don’t be decieved friends. BE CAREFUL with your hearts. These things can be so very devisive. The internet is NOT REAL! I love and miss all my old friends, but Facebook and other sites are not long-lasting real life connected REAL communities.

Be careful with your heart and don’t waste your lives!

Love you guys!

pd
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When she joined the social network years ago, she wasn’t sure what to do with it. One night, she and her cousin started seeking out people from Hefner’s past: old friends from high school, old co-workers, even ex-boyfriends.

At the same time, Hefner’s life and marriage began to fray at the edges. She had just given birth and recently lost her mother to illness. She began using MySpace’s blogging feature to express herself and seek support.

“Suddenly, I was part of a group of people who were all going through the same thing as me. They were moms and wives, and they were doing all these really exciting things, and I had come to realize that I kind of wanted more from my life. The blogging had really drawn people to me. I wrote about the frustration I was having with my husband and my marriage, and so many people wrote back to support me and make me feel better,” she said.

About the same time, an old friend from high school, “D” (she’s requested that we don’t use his name) popped into Hefner’s online life and started lavishing attention on her. They eventually began to talk on the phone. He would call her from Texas for advice on how to deal with his divorce and kids.

When D came to California for a vacation with his children, they made plans to see one another.

Eventually, they became romantically involved. Even though Hefner was still married, she became deeply committed to D — so much that it eventually pushed her husband to go forward with their divorce.

More than one-third (35 percent) of U.S. adult Internet users have a profile on a social networking site, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s daily tracking survey of 2,251 adults. As more people join social networks like MySpace and Facebook, getting back in touch with old friends and lovers is becoming increasingly easy.

A search on both networks turns up a handful of groups dedicated to lost loves and first loves. Although neither site formally tracks the number of groups dedicated to the topic, MySpace spokeswoman Jamie Schumacher says it’s common for users to meet on the site and fall in love and end up together.

“Hope Winters” had a different social networking experience .The former lawyer who blogs under the pen name Winters on “Here’s the Thing DC” recently had a Facebook encounter with an old crush. The two of them had been in student government together in college and always had an attraction but never did anything about it.

After six months of e-mailing almost daily and sharing her unposted work with him, her college crush removed her as a friend on the social network, blocking her from seeing his profile and cutting off communication for what she says is no apparent reason. She was upset, but she’s taking it in stride.

“The thing is, online they can be anything they want. You e-mail a lot and talk about your lives effortlessly, since you already knew them back then, and you really feel a connection. But it’s not real,” she said.

Many experts argue that it’s this aspect of social networking that is dangerous to real-world relationships. People often present whatever image they deem appropriate on the Internet, and it’s easy to keep e-mail communications private.

B.J. Fogg, director of the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford University and editor of a book called “The Psychology of Facebook,” has been studying the social networking phenomenon for years.

He argues that what we are doing on Facebook and other social networking sites is a lot like “primate grooming.” We are building “social solidarity” by publicly flirting and socializing online.

“I think you get out of Facebook what you want to get out of Facebook. It’s like a Rorschach Test. If you want to go onto Facebook to look for someone else to be with or look for a support system to leave your current relationship, then you will find that,” he said.

Many people try to reunite online because it’s so easy, says Nancy Kalish, a professor of psychology at Cal State Sacramento and author of the book “Lost & Found Lovers: Facts and Fantasies of Rekindled Romance.”

Kalish says most people go looking for lost loves, initially, out of curiosity. First loves in particular are most often sought out online, she says, and they pose the most danger to real-world relationships for two reasons: biological and emotional.

First, she says, when two people meet in the adolescent years (between 16 and 22), they start to form their identity together and break away from family. In those formative years, “you define what love is and what you want from a partner, and when you lose that, you lose that piece of yourself.”

This combines with the hormones that are encoding in your brain at that age as “emotive memory” and creates a biological imprint of that person.

On top of all this chemistry, the adolescent years are typically the years when humans start to reach their reproductive maturity and look for biologically compatible mates. Kalish argues that this in turn causes problems because people are delaying marriage. She says, “we are so far away from marrying our first love because people are waiting until later in life to settle down. When they do settle down, oftentimes, the chemistry just isn’t the same.” iReport.com: How are social networks affecting your personal life?

Her advice to the social networking crowd is simple: “It’s not enough to have a good marriage. My rule is, if you are married or in a serious relationship, you are not available. Don’t contact your lost love. Understand that these are old feelings and that who your lost love was years ago is not who they are today.”

Some spouses agree. In the Pew survey, of the adults who had removed their profile from a social networking site, 3 percent said they did it because their spouse or partner wanted it removed.

Now moving forward on her divorce, Hefner says she doesn’t have any regrets about her MySpace experience.

“I didn’t even understand how it worked when I started my account. When I actually started meeting people, I realized it was a way for me to grow, and I hoped my husband would grow with me. Many of my friends have a theory, though. We don’t think MySpace caused our marriages to fail. Rather, something lacking in those marriages made us look to MySpace in a way we might not have if we were truly happy.”

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Facebook turns back to their old privacy policy as the new SCARY policy raises concern from the 157 million member social network that’s population is almost as large as Brazil!

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Is there anyone else out there that is just a little scared by the fact that this company is SO FREAKIN’ large and knows so much about all of us and the fact that they could possibly “own” your personal information even after you leave?!

Read on for the entire article…

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