The Conversation Starter, one of the blogs of Harvard Business Publishing, recently took a look at Twitter usage patterns and found some “surprising” findings.
Co-authors Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski found that men have more followers than women and that men have more “reciprocated relationships.” They also found that women “are driven less by followers than men, or have more stringent thresholds for reciprocating relationships.” And while men and women tweet at the same rate, men are followed more regularly than women in the Twitter world, results they describe as “stunning.”
Stunning, because the gender bias on Twitter is not consistent with other social networks, where, the authors write, “most of the activity is focused around women.”
As far as usage goes, 10% of Tweeters account for 90% of the Tweets out there. And “a typical Twitter user contributes very rarely,” indicating that a small percentage of people keep Twitter a happening place, which leads the authors to the interesting conclusion that “Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.”
I find this study interesting - primarily because these issues seem to have different results in different media. In virtual worlds, gender is more fluid, and identity can be both obscured and influenced by avatar appearance.
Also intriguing is the question of whether it’s the audience or the media. Maybe Twitter attracts geeky male coder types who like to bond and be followed, and socialite females who like to be connected (but primarily as observers). Wow….how tribal is that?
Second Life on the other hand feels to me like it attracts all types, there probably IS no one culture, but it certainly doesn’t preclude cross-gendered coders and a lot of sharing and collaboration, plus a massive inability to follow ANYONE because friends lists suck, and a lack of one-to-many ANYTHING because group chat is borked.
Yes, and I got a full ration of Twitter-hate when I explained that the reason why this is so is because Twitter was dominated at the start, and still dominated by middle-aged white male tekkies, especially the A-list bloggers with their special FIC-like set-asides of the autofollow function, which the devs gave them to blast their way to the top followers list, making the rest of us have to gain followers manually, and putting the rest of us at a 2000 cap.
I was just writing on Fred Wilson’s blog today that there is as much media concentration and ideological tilting in the soi-disant new media “freeness” as there was in old-fashioned old media.
And people hated on me for saying this because they find some example of some girl on Twitter from some famous mommy-blog and they think this is the cat’s meow. But it isn’t. Because males dominated the tekkie field — but the tekkie culture isn’t really so much about gender as it is about culture.
And that culture is in fact slavishly conformist, with loads of sheep just following leaders in tribes. Do something like search on Twitter for something Fred Wilson or Scoble or AJ Keen have said, and see the droves — the hordes — the mobs! — of people merely dutifully re-tweeting them *without even adding a comment*. It’s really scary. Not even a thought — nothing.
This leader-tribal following meme is hugely popular and viral and comes out of a corporate culture spawned by Silicon Valley in ways that other business culture in American doesn’t always have, i.e. it’s not as cuthroat and deadly in smaller business or family business or in business that depends on traditions and customer service far more than the constantly innovative and cutting-edge and destructive environment of Silicon Valley.
There’s also the very, very real problem of these male asswipes on Twitter of this insolent Internet culture who hate and stalk women, especially if they voice an opinion. I often find, especially if someone has found that I have an opposite-gender avatar, that I get the most vile and hateful DMs and even open tweets even worse than SL, with ugly tech nerds telling me they will come to my house in RL and beat me up, or telling me to “put that big mouth of yours to good use” on their privates. Honestly, you have to have nerves of steel to stay the course in this sort of setting. It’s the sort of thing that got an awful lot of attention with the Kathy Sierra case, but there are a thousand lesser-known stories.
And that means that women on Twitter don’t seek out followers, don’t reciprocate, lock their twitters, don’t talk, and tend to stay out of view.
Take a blog like TechCrunch or AVC or Scobleizer and you will find many days there isn’t a single woman uttering a peep — and many insolent males creating a climate that is intolerable.
That’s not to suggest that we need to make a forced Mr. Roger’s Neighbourhood, vet all speech, and force men into sensitivity training. I think they become more insolent the more fake politically correct crap like that is done. I think it’s more about making it possible for women to fight back — which I, for one, am willing to do : )
I think Twitter, which is really a virtual world when you get down to it, is really a lot more like Second Life than you do. After all, this power curve of 10 percent making the content for the other 90 percent fits Second Life, or the Sims Online, or anything where the few entertain or create for the many, to a T.
I disagree that Second Life is this wonderfully gorgeous mosaic of freely-transitioning genderless or cross-gendered creatures flying around and just living fabulously.
If that were the case, I couldn’t get almost daily hate mail, and vicious, nasty comments constantly, just because of a cross-gendered avatar. This is a definitely a double standard.
But even for those who do live the fabulous life, it is a bubble. It’s the Slintelligentsia.
The culture elsewhere is a lot about following and doing what everybody else does. Say one half line of criticism on the Concierge List or the SLB6 list or the forums, and find a deluge of conformists descend on you like a ton of bricks doing the Lindens’ dirty work for them handily, telling you to shut up, you are off-topic, if you don’t like it you can leave, etc.
In fact, some endeavours in SL, I find, require having to battle your way across very determined battalions of Lindens and worse — Linden fanboyz — to get to your goal. If you don’t fit in the hot-house orchid culture of these techlibs, you are exiled into the abyss.
In fact, what Harvard is finding is the dirty little secret of modern life. There isn’t any gender equality. There is in fact a worse inequality that is all the more awful precisely because it is buried deeper and more hatefully under a very thin veneer of civility.