War of the gender reborn on the internet: Women socialize, men gather information

I’ve seen it coming for some time, and now I’ve documented it: while men and women are equally represented online, both in terms of the number of users and the amount of time they spend, you find significant differences when you scratch the surface.

In my new “digital view”-report (se below) I find that 1,3 million Danish women spend nearly 14 million hours updating and reading status messages in August 2009, while 1,1 million Danish men spend nearly 7 million hours in the same period. And I find that men used a little more than 8 million hours keeping themselves up to date on news-site, while women spend only nearly 4 million hours.

The analysis clearly draws up the image of a divided internet, in which women networks while men gather information.

It’s almost like taking a time-machine back in time to the first human societies, where men went out hunting, while the women stayed back home taking care of bringing up the kids etc. The differences are so huge, it’s bound to create conflicts of some kind. And they’re so significant we’ll have to ask ourselves what this means both to the way we conduct business and arrange our society.

Read on:

War of the gender reborn on the internet: Women socialize, men gather information

[Download as pdf]

Facebook crosses the generation gap, spreads transparency

Just published my new “Digital view: Life on the Danish internet august 17-23 2009″, and this is fascinating I think: Half of the Danish population are using Facebook. More specific: 2,47 mio Danes visited facebook at least once during the month of June (June, 2009 – research carried out by Gemius).

What’s more: Facebook apparently catches all age-groups – even the youngest, who have left their hitherto preferred native and front-running Danish social networking site, arto.com. Even the eldest: Almost half of Danes over the age of 60 who are online uses facebook! (numbers are all there in the report)

This has lots of implications. The perhaps most important is that Danes in this way are building a shared knowledge about the (increasingly digital) world in which we live. Paving way for a more homogeneous Danish society, I’d say! Not being fragmented into diverse sub-cultures, but knitting the diverse subcultures together in an online meta-community.

Don’t get me wrong: off course we’re not all sitting there, talking and updating and networking each other. But: While you may not be online-friends with your teenage-boys, and while you may not know the exact substance of their social activities (what photos they upload, what they write in their status-mentions), you do know what it’s all about, you’ve been there, tagged that, commented this and this gives you a chance to adopt real-world conversations on how they’re doing. It enables you to reach out, it offers you to build bridges between yours and their worlds.

And what’s more: chances are one of their connections is also a connection of yours. Or a connection of a connection of yours. And that you in this way would be informed should they ever show signs of distress, of a character deemed socially important for you. (This has been a worry of a lot of parents: what if my kids are being harassed by their peers – or even worse: are being approached by seemingly innocent characters who turns out to be pedophiles or the like).

These are all perspectives from an individual point of view. In the world of business, perspectives are almost stumbling over each other. Read a few of them in the analysis.

Social networking sites are more than social – they’re media!

Up until today I’ve thought of Danish Arto and k-forum, Facebook and the like of social networking sites as sites distinguished more by the relation between the peoples connected, than by the actual content itself.

Surely the relation between you and you’re network is a cornerstone of social networking sites.

And surely enormous powers are vested herein. The story of Facebook bears witness to this: from a starting point only a few years ago, the latest figures from FDIM shows, that Facebook today reaches 1/3 of the Danish internet population in one month – more than 600.000 facebook profiles are members of the Denmark-network, and more than 1,2 mio Danes over the age of 15 visited facebook in July – each of whom spend nearly 4 hours in average using the site.

With this kind of figures and reach, however, another characteristic of social networking sites has become increasingly clear to me.  Facebook not only gives you a glimpse of the lives of a few of your friends. It gives you glimpses of the lives of a lot of your friends – and relatives and neighbors and of your kids teachers at school and… It actually gives you so many glimpses it turns itself into something more than a social network. It takes on the role of a media. A media keeping you informed of hyper-local, hyper-networks news. Of what’s going on right now in even the far outskirts of your social sphere.

As a media social networking sites stands out from the traditional understanding of what constitutes a media. Take politics for example: You typically won’t find regular coverage of eg. general elections at social networking sites. You won’t typically find objective, well-reasearch journalism. You can’t be sure to get a fair overview of the relevant candidates (actually you can be pretty sure not to find this). If you find anything of the kind, it’s because you have befriended a politician running for office. If you do this, however, you will have a fair chance of being dragged into the campaigning live of this politician – as I did, when Danish PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen invited me for an evening run (se my post My week at facebook with Anders, Helle, Ellen and Margrethe)

No, social networking sites are not media in the classical sense. They don’t keep you informed of politics or of culture. Lots of established media doesn’t do this either however: Magazines on interior decoration, fashion, cats, dogs and pets and haute cuisine doesn’t. TVshows with quizzes or talents or (wanna-bee) moviestars doesn’t. And lots of newspaper coverage doesn’t.

Social networking sites are media in this sense. Media focusing and bringing you news of what’s going on in the lives of the persons that means most to you: the ones you know, and who knows you.