Re: [atlarge-discuss] FYI: New Pew Report on the digitaldivide in the U.S.

[espresso@e-scape.net]

At 20:19 -0700 2003/04/16, Sotiris Sotiropoulos wrote:
>I have one word for these "studies" and their "conclusions":  HOGWASH!
>If
>you ask me where all the women are online, I'd advise you to visit
>singles
>chat rooms and dating/personals sites...

No, thanks! It's not my thing, though I certainly don't dispute
that many women do use chat and visit personals sites. But it
seems the majority of women, for one reason or other, don't
do much dating online. Amongst the possible reasons, which the
studies of online bahviour don't go into:
- many women have partners and aren't looking for others
- many women have jobs and kids and housework and elderly
  parents to look after, and simply don't have the time
  and energy to go out with anyone
- many women are blessed with a full life and a wide circle of
  acquaintance and would prefer to hang out with them rather
  than look for unknown quantities in a chat-room
- any women who is not actually repulsive and doesn't spend
  all her time in a convent gets hit on pretty often in the
  real world. (Take my word on this -- I'm over 50 and it's
  slowed down some but it hasn't stopped, though I really
  wish it would.) It's harder for men since our culture
  puts the onus on them to make the first move but doesn't
  provide most of them with appropriate situations for doing
  so.

>Such "studies" do nothing more than poison the well we all need to
>drink
>from as a species, Judyth.  They are nothing more than POLITICALLY
>>motivated attempts at further emasculation of males.  The program has
>been >uncovered, Judyth. Some time ago.  Men are not as stupid as many
>women >would like us to believe.

Begging your pardon, Sotiris, but data does exist showing that
women do indeed make more use of e-mail for personal correspondence
with friends and family, still write most of the e-mailed business
correspondence out there, spend proportionally more of their
online time looking for health information than men, etc. while
men *in general* spend more time in multi-player game and gambling
sites than women, and so on.

Frankly, I don't know what "program" you mean and I worry about
the psychological health of any man who thinks it's "emasculating"
that women correspond more with relatives than men by e-mail
(just as they did when it all went by snail-mail) or spend more
time helping their kids with term papers, or generally don't
gamble as much. Good grief!

Please, take it from a woman who's old enough to be your mother
if not quite your granny that these statistics are not some
vicious conspiracy to make men feel bad about their online
habits or make women feel good about theirs. People gather
empirical data on how different categories of people --
teenagers versus seniors, working people versus the unemployed,
men versus women -- use the Internet because they want to
understand human behaviour, because they want to encourage
e-commerce or Internet use in general, because they want to
know who likes what on Web sites, etc., not as part of a
plot against men.

Women were much less likely than men to be online ten years ago;
that has changed already in the developed world, and the women
have (naturally enough) still behaved somewhat differently from
men while online even as they still behave somewhat differently
from men in the real world. Where you may see some horrible
feminist conspiracy to castrate men, what most of us see is
the normal conduct of the social sciences in an effort to
determine what people do when, how and why.

Once again amazed,

Judyth

##########################################################
Judyth Mermelstein     "cogito ergo lego ergo cogito..."
Montreal, QC           <espresso@e-scape.net>
##########################################################
"A word to the wise is sufficient. For others, use more."
"Un mot suffit aux sages; pour les autres, il en faut plus."
##########################################################



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