Taking a stab at this again, because I was a bit, erm, vague in the first attempt:
For my final paper, I want to take a look at the digital divide w/r/t gender and access, specifically being female and how this may or may not impact one's use and access (and perhaps gender dominance) of digital and social media.
An article I found recently asks, essentially, do ladies dominate Twitter? And the blog writeup that accompanied the link argued, "No, they don't. But they dominate other sites." How is this so? And how, exactly, is this accounted for? If not Twitter, where do women dominate? What about ChatRoulette? It's a social medium (ladies!) with a gambling- and voyeur-type preface (dudes!), so who are you most likely to "next" upon? Early statistics show it's more likely to be a guy, but why?
Do societal expectations of domesticity hurt or help women in the digital divide? Does it depend on the area of technology that determines how adept (or inept) women may be? Does it depend on cultural values and where they live? Do women see less of a divide in social media, but more of a divide when it comes to video games or programming? If so, why? Where do forums, generally social in nature but more text based in execution, fall along the social media spectrum, and does this affect how many users are of the female persuasion?
These are all topics that I hope to address in my paper, and perhaps a few more that I haven't touched on that may come to me in a "Eureka"-type moment.
I anticipate that research on ChatRoulette will be sparse because of how new it is, but I also imagine that what I do find with be pretty helpful in the long run. Though limited in number, amounts of data and reports I've seen so far seem to be surprisingly in depth.
Suggestions? Tips? Questions I maybe haven't considered that I should? Leave it in the comments.
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3 comments:
"specifically being female and how this may or may not impact one's use and access (and perhaps gender dominance) of digital and social media." well, that would be a super huge research project for which you do not have the time, access, or resources. I also reckon several of those have been done over the years.
This is a short paper. You have time and space for one thing.
Here you've asked about a zillion different questions. What you need to do is pick one, and answer it. The answer to that question would be the argument.
For instance, "Z states women's work dominates site A but not site B. This is because site A does X and site B does Y, through 1 and 2" or whatever.
Everyone can write a paper that asks a bunch of questions. The purpose of this essay is to answer something.
My revised revised paper topic, then, is the digital divide as it pertains to Twitter. Does Twitter serve to bring some semblance of equality among its users, or does it serve to further remind us of how wide the gap in the digital divide is?
Twitter is supposed to be this huge community, but really the only main connecting factor is that we're all limited to 140 characters, regardless of class, creed or education.
However, I'm going to argue that Twitter serves as a reminder of how wide the divide is. Yes, anyone can use it, but to what extent, and how well?
Time providing, I want to see if I can find information that will present insight on how "educated" the majority of users are now as compared to how educated the majority were when it wasn't such a huge part of social media (before it went mainstream), and if this information lends support to Twitter being a divider more than a "uniter" among its users.
I have noticed on a timeline, in certain topics women dominate the twitterverse. I didn't think much of it until I read it might be something more. Can't wait to hear it.
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