If you hadn't noticed, our media climate generally provides a very distorted mirror of our lives and of our gender. And I think that's going to change. Now most media companies -- television, radio, publishing, games, you name it -- they use very rigid segmentation methods in order to understand their audiences. It's old-school demographics. They come up with these very restrictive labels to define us. Now the crazy thing is that media companies believe that if you fall within a certain demographic category then you are predictable in certain ways. You have certain taste, that you like certain things. And so the bizarre result of this is that most of our popular culture is actually based on these presumptions about our demographics.
- Cyber Wanderlust
from Bookmarklet
All the people who participate in social media networks belong to the same old demographic categories that media companies and advertisers have used in order to understand them. But those categories mean even less now than they did before. Because with online networking tools, it's much easier for us to escape some of our demographic boxes. We're able to connect with people quite freely and to redefine ourselves online.
- Cyber Wanderlust
But they get a lot more information about what you do online, what you like, what interests you. That's easier for them to find out than who you are.
- Cyber Wanderlust
Suddenly our taste is being respected in a way that it hasn't been before. It had been presumed before.
- Cyber Wanderlust
So when you look online at the way people aggregate, they don't aggregate around age, gender and income. They aggregate around the things they love, the things that they like. And if you think about it, shared interests and values are a far more powerful aggregator of human beings than demographic categories.
- Cyber Wanderlust
If you look at the statistics -- these are worldwide statistics -- in every single age category, women actually outnumber men in their use of social networking technologies...Will the next big-budget blockbuster movies actually be chick flicks? Could this be possible, that suddenly our media landscape will become a feminist landscape?
- Cyber Wanderlust
But I think women are actually going to be -- ironically enough -- responsible for driving a stake through the heart of cheesy genre categories like the chick flick and all these other genre categories that presume that certain demographic groups like certain things, that Hispanics like certain things, that young people like certain things. This is far too simplistic. The future...
more...
- Cyber Wanderlust
So imagine a media atmosphere that isn't dominated by lame stereotypes about gender and other demographic characteristics.
- Cyber Wanderlust
@EjDD I agree with much ideas brought up here, and i think this gender barrier in SW is diminishing by next generation of web and SM.
- Danica Radovanovic