The electronic locker room

I need to start by saying: I am a woman. If you don’t already know this, it is important that you should, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment.

I know, infuriating, aren’t I? Sorry.

I’m waffling a bit, because I’m afraid this could be the most redundant blog post ever written. You’re here on Blogger, aren’t you, so the chances are you’re on Facebook too, and quite possibly other online places like Twitter and MySpace and YouTube and Flickr and Wordpress. There’s probably not much I can tell you about the online world that you don’t already know.

We like to hang out online these days, don't we, keeping in touch with old friends and making new ones. Social networking, it's called... Though you probably already knew that!

I wonder, though ... Have you ever thought about social networking and gender? About the different ways that men and women use sites like Facebook and Twitter?

I’m sure there’s a Ph.D. in the subject, but don’t worry, I’m not going to pretend to be erudite here. I just want to share a few idle and unscientific thoughts…

I joined Twitter a few weeks ago. (If you’re interested, and you haven’t already found me, you can follow me @gogowiththeflow). And being a thoughtful and reflective sort, I noticed fairly soon that most of my followers are men. It’s not that I don’t have women friends – I do – it’s just that hardly any of them are on Twitter. They’re all hanging out on Facebook.

I was interested in this apparent gender difference, so I started looking for some figures. And it’s

Officially True that Facebook has more women users than men. It’s much harder to be sure about Twitter, because you’re not asked to identify your gender there, so anyone who tries to work it out has to guess from the usernames.

(Would you have guessed I was female from the name @gogowiththeflow? What about @scribblemoose? Or @syzygy or @steeluloid or @irevdrdab?)

Anyway, that’s a diversion… My point is this: It seems to me that Facebook is as full of female chat as my corner coffee shop, while Twitter is a sort of electronic men's locker-room!

There's another difference too: the people who are my Facebook friends are (mostly) my real-life friends and neighbours. But on Twitter, my followers are much more likely to be people I know through work or even total strangers. So while idle chat is going on in both places, it has a different audience: the Tweets I see tend to be updates, information and fairly neutral comments about what's going on, all self-policed to make them 'safe' for any audience; while the Facebook status updates seem much more intimate.

Then a colleague of mine made an interesting observation. He's off to a conference soon, where he'll meet lots of people he's previously 'met' through Twitter, and he'll be able to start conversations with them easily because he knows something about their lives. And it reminded me that men have always been comfortable linking their work lives and their social lives in this way - building relationships in smoke-filled clubs and in five-a-side football teams.

While the women I know usually keep their work lives and their home lives very carefully separate.

Now I've crossed this line, and people who are my collegues and acquaintances but not my friends know something about my personal interests and my weekend pursuits. It's not entirely comfortable to be hanging out in the electronic locker room ... But at least I can't smell any sweat!


Flow x


P.S. I dunno whether this is just a strange peculiarity, true only for my friends and followers, or whether it’s true for you lot too. Let me know what you think!