Are Social Platforms Simply For Women To Do"Girl Talk"?
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A few months ago, I wrote about how social media presents women with increased opportunities for influence and professional development. In the comments, I found a number of commenters (both men and women) who relegated women's interest in social media to superficial reasons like "girl talk" or women's natural abilities as "connectors." I pushed back against those characterizations because I thought they were too superficial and limiting only to have one commenter suggest that there was no shame in women's natural social skills.
Among the (roughly) 90 million active female Internet users in America, close to 68 million of them are engaging in social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. This phenomenon shows, despite the doors opened by social media to encourage online interaction, that must be some special reasons for women, in particular, to be so happy and comfortable with socializing online. And it would be rather superficial to relate everything to genetics.
Wominnovation
What I discovered might surprise you. It turns out that sociolinguists have found women to be innovators when it comes to communication, especially with new forms of languages. The shift from "ye" to "you" in 15th Century England? Women were behind it. Common phrases such as, "Like, ohmigod," known as Valley Girl uptalk, were started by young women from California. And in the mid-20th century a group of young women from Oberwart, Austria shifted the primary language of a bilingual community from Hungarian to German, which was a powerful move in a community that had resisted the influence of the German language for close to 400 years. Today, women are continuing this linguistic innovation by adopting social media, a sort of hybrid of written and spoken language, and a perfect example of the kind of new linguistic form that women flock toward.
Women are keen on using social media and create new modes of writing, possibly for the obtainment of modern, innovative identities. Such an identity helps establish a image of someone who is willing to disclose information, open-minded with an international sense, which is something to be yearned for by women.
The other reason is more pragmatic: social media offers benefits and improvements to a woman's quality of life. Whether it's adding convenience to a work arrangement, harnessing information for decision-making, managing relationships, or juggling a variety of other responsibilities, social tools provide a convenient and efficient way for women to manage the various aspects of their lives. The practical benefits that social media affords, combined with its emotionally fulfilling features make it likely that women will not only continue to engage with social media, but with future related innovations, as well.
By now, you're probably thinking that the emotional and practical benefits that women find attractive about social media are also attractive to men, and you're right. These factors explain, at least in part, why women are engaging with social media, but we'll need to go further to understand why more women than men are using social media. To answer that question, we'll need to revisit the issue of social change.
Social Media & Social Change
Sure, social media provides platforms for both men and women to voice their opinions, but being the dominants in most societies, men wouldn't need these new opportunities. The new portals are not really that "golden" in men's eyes since they have had enough channels to express their viewpoints. As for women, social media grants them the freedom they have never had to say what they want to say. Their interest, therefore, in social media is reasonable.
Just like every man, every woman is a unique individual. Each woman carried a certain ethnicity, family background, literacy, interests and so on. Now that we have taken the social factor into consideration, we can better understand why women are fond of social media and high tech gadgets, without making generalization out of some theories of evolution. It's time for the smart ones to recognize the common features of women and develop marketing strategies on target groups.
Article Source: Articlelogy.com
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