Sometimes it drives me nuts that we (women) have to wait for the craze to clear to be recognized as the true long-term commited user of technology. Remember the digital photo craze? Ooooh, it was all about the digital camera and mega pixels, and the pc, and the technology, and the geeky software. It was a matter of time and iterations of the software before the hobby was returned to the real user, there was a slow realization that the memory keepers of family and society were the women, and it was lucrative to put the story telling technologies back into the hands of the women.Well, I'm pleased to find this research (USC Annenberg, School for the Digital Future) but the results aren't surprising to me that after the social networking craze has been around for a while its possible that men are tiring of the connections. In 2005, 77% of men under 40 years old (in their study) said their online community was very important, this number has now dropped to 39%. They also find that in 2007 69% men felt as strongly about their online communities to their offline communities but in 2010 this number has dropped to 38%, meanwhile the percent of women feeling that way has risen from 35% in 2007 to 67% in 2010. In the study internet communities don't just mean facebook and myspace but also hobbies, politics or other communities. Michael Gilbert, senior fellow at USC comments that while women are often slower to adopt new technologies they often catch up and then surpass men in terms of enthusiasm.
Look forward to reading the report on this research, and commenting further.
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