Gender, social networks, the rise of Pinterest

I've been hearing more and more about Pinterest: via my Facebook feed, via a field observation study of media use of undergraduate students. Curious, I checked it out and, to the extent that I could understand the function of the site without actually becoming a member, noted some similarities between Pinterest and social media like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and, to some extent, news and entertainment aggregation sites like Reddit. As I understand it, users post images and other users comment or "like" things or re-post them, thereby boosting their overall visibility.

What struck me immediately about Pinterest was the fact that all the users seemed to be female (female user names). I went over to alexa.com and confirmed that, by Alexa's estimates, most of Pinterest's users are female, far more than any of the aforementioned social network or aggregation sites. Also, Pinterest is growing at an astonishingly quick pace, already the 16th most visit website in the US, trebling its traffic in 2 or 3 months.

So, why is Pinterest so popular among only females and what are the implications of this? It wasn't seeded with a particular kind of content. Is there something about the site's design that appeals more to females than to males? If there some kind of network effect where the first users were female, posted things that interested them, told other people about it, and only other females were interested in it because the kinds of content posted only appealed to women?

Is the discourse on the site any different than the discourse on other sites because of this gender difference? At first glance, it seems to conform to the stereotypical norms of female interaction: more supportive comments, less one-upsmanship via crude humor, less hostility (which makes you wonder if the rest of social web is dominated by discourse embodying hetero-male norms if not by actual 14-year-old boys). Of course, maybe we're only looking at a particular kind of female (Alexa indicates that the users are mostly 25-34).

I'm betting that most Pinterest users look at the site as a supplement to their use of other social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. But its interesting to consider the possibility that use of this site, which is essentially a self-selected portion of the overall public, might be eating into time spent on sites that have no gender/race/interest skew like Facebook and Twitter. There are advantages to using "big tent" social networking sites like FB and Twitter, but perhaps as time goes on, they will become places that you feel you have to go to keep up on the goings on of those you know well, those you barely know, and those you don't know. They'll chiefly be tools for social surveillance, places to see and be seen. But they'll stop being the places (or at least the only places) you go to indulge your interests or have conversations and share things with others. Those activities will increasingly become the domain of sites like Pinterest that cater (though not purposefully) to a certain segment of the population that has something in common.

The return to segregated online social spaces isn't simply a recapitulation of the interest-driven message boards of the early internet. These sites will draw people not through people actively deciding, declaring, and seeking out particular sites dedicated to topics, but through much subtler avenues, spreading through social networks that have their roots in the real world. Their content will reflect the collective preferences of their users, which, as strange as it may seem in a technological world in which we were supposed to slough off our corporeal identities, appear to be dictated to a large degree by our physical selves.

More Technology in Our Lives = What, exactly?

This morning, I woke, flipped on the radio, stumbled out of be bed, turned off the radio, cracked open my laptop, checked my email, went to digg, and then remembered an article I'd been meaning to read about how people are using more technology (such as laptops and mobile devices) right when they wake up, before breakfast even.

I've had a lot of conversations like this article: we all agree that the internet and cell phones have changed the ways we live. We spend more time staring at these lil' screens that weren't in our lives 10 years ago, which certainly seems weird. But so what? "Weird" and "interesting" just doesn't cut it for me anymore. Before I can give this topic any more thought, I need to think of plausible positive and negative outcomes of networked technology use.

Let's start w/ the assumption that there are three levels of use: no use, light use, and heavy use.

1: Heavy use strengthens bonds with peers (friends & co-workers) but weakens bonds with family or domestic partners. This will lead to domestic dysfunction, resulting in increased rates of depression in all members of the household and will effect young children in the house especially negatively in terms of their cognitive and emotional development.

This seems to be behind the "technology eats into our family time" worries. Most of what people do w/ these devices IS social, so its not the worry that we might have when someone is playing video games by themselves or watching TV by themselves. To put it in Granovetter's terms, we might say that heavy use erodes our few strong ties and replaces them with many weak ties. For light users, weak ties are simply added to our social mix, but heavy users experience a weakening of the strong ties: less time w/ close ones, less sharing of deeply personal feelings, etc.

2: Heavy use cultivates a new kind of social bond, one that has some characteristics of a strong tie (lots of time devoted to a person, intimate knowledge of that person, tendency to share intimate secrets, similar interests and opinions) and some characteristics of a weak tie (not feeling bad if you can't make it to an important event in their lives, shorter in duration, more plentiful, not as many common links between the two). These new kinds of social ties are, on some unconscious level, easily mistaken for strong ties. The heavy user thinks they are creating a secure, lasting bond, but is actually creating a weak link that is as susceptible to dissolution as any other weak link. Over time, this leads to increased life dissatisfaction and decreased domestic harmony which leads to cognitively/emotionally deprived children.

It is important to note that this claim is not based solely on whether these people met online or IRL, or on whether one uses an online identity that is somehow linked to their real world identity (it is assumed that the online identity is linked to real-world identity in some way, as this is far more common a practice than sustained, anonymous relationships). The real question is: does your brain categorize the person as a member of the relatively small, real life community or as a member of the almost endless online community. I think that is determined in part by whether you met online or IRL, but also by the heavy use of networked technologies to maintain an existing bond, especially if that technology is used heavily in the early stages of the relationship. Part of your brain says, "this person is really close to me. They know things about me that no one else knows. We talk all the time. Our relationship is unique." Another part of your brain says, "there are other people whom I could communicate with in similar ways. Search technology is getting better and better. Perhaps I could find someone who is like this person, but without those annoying flaws and incompatibilities." That part of the brain assembles a composite friend or mate from various blogs, videos, articles, and internet detritus, thinking "these super-cool characteristics exist out there, and they're real. They're not just some fabrication of Hollywood screenwriters. Its realistic to think that there's a person with those characteristics."

This leads to a kind of cognitive dissonance, or worse, an inability to see what is creating the dissatisfaction. Heavy users may start to think of themselves as the kinds of people who weren't meant to have many close friends, as transient, somewhat alienated individuals who are a bit unhappy, but are resigned to their fates and have hope of achieving some kind of domestic bliss in the distant future once they "meet the right person." Really, they are different than a person who has achieved that domestic harmony not in terms of who their core selves are, but only in terms of the ways they chose to communicate and form bonds with others. If a link between heavy use of networked technologies and long-term life dissatisfaction (or domestic harmony, in which kidz suffer somehow) could be made apparent, then a heavy users might have something outside of their own flawed abilities to tell the difference between a strong tie and a weak one, who is compatible and who is not.

3. Those who do not use networked technologies will feel an increased sense of alienation and depression. Because they're not in the social loop, they get the feeling that people are talking about them behind their backs (which may or may not be true), they don't get invited to as many social events, and generally are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to forming strong or weak ties. They meet people in real life, but when they refuse to maintain that relationship w/ networked technologies, the relationship withers, as the other person thinks, "this is just too hard to maintain. Its easier to bond with this other person who is more social." I wonder about this possibility every time I hear someone say "I'm not going to let my kid have a cell phone or a facebook account no matter what his or her friends have!"

So, one important project would be to re-examine what is meant by "strong tie" and "weak tie." Lots of sociological work, including everything derived from Robert Putnam's work, makes certain assumptions about the characteristics of these ties that need to be rethought. And then, how the fuck do we go about measuring any of this? I suppose Putnam's and Granovetter's studies lay the groundwork. Is it just a matter of asking how much you use social media, how happy you are, and including the right moderating/mediating variables? How do you teaste out the personality traits and worldviews that result in low life satisfaction from the use variables? Maybe some focus groups with heavy users in which we discuss relationship satisfaction would be a first step. In any case, this will all take years to play out. Part of my claim is that the duration of strong ties will be shorter, maybe 5 years average as opposed to 10 or 20.

Are Online Communities Sustainable? (or online relationships, for that matter)

Reading an interesting post by Trent Reznor regarding his departure from social media (in particular Twitter, but also his extensive participation in online fora w/ fans). He charts his progress from idealist (hoping that he could make the relationship between artist and fan more intimate and unmediated, no PR people, etc) to cynic. His major problems with social media are trolls and anonymity. Essentially, its the classic problem of anonymity leading to more purposefully disruptive hate speech. Reznor offer a little dimestore psychology based on his discovery of who was behind the trolling. It is more or less consistent with the findings of Mattathias Schwartz in his NYTimes article on trolling: people who troll are looking for a way to get back at the world for hurting them, marginalizing them, or rendering them powerless, and anonymous internet fora provide them with the easiest way to do this.

Reznor's relationship with fans is unlike most social media users' experiences. There's a significant real-world power imbalance between star and fan, one that attracts trolling. Trolling doesn't happen everywhere or in random places; usually, its only highly-trafficked places or in communities that someone has something against. Reznor notes how moderators can use filters to reduce the effects of trolls (and places like Digg and Youtube do good jobs of getting rid of spam and trolls by using collective downvoting to obscure them and render them ineffective) but its still trouble to do this and if the benefits don't outweigh the trouble, then you stop doing it.

Social media as a whole seems sustainable to me. People really want the ability to connect with others who share some of the same values, preference, or beliefs, some who may not be available in the real-world social networks they inhabit. But individual online social networks or applications like Twitter and various message boards seem precarious. Some of their appeal might be in their novelty. Another problem might be the "tipping point" effect when several key members decide to leave or have some real-world commitment that draws them away. As with a real-life party, if a couple of key people leave, that tends to clear everyone else out, even if those people wouldn't have planned on leaving that soon in the first place. Its just group-think and there are no negative repercussions for bailing on an online social scene.

Its possible that online social scenes develop at a point when its members have some down-time, in transition periods in their real world lives. Its not that they're "losers" and can't make it in the real world social scenes (though that might still be the case for many). Its more that they have an appetite for sociability that is underserved at the time they join the social scene. So really, members have two things in common: whatever the raison d'etre of the scene is and the fact that they're all in some sort of transition period (which could include a period of identity questioning, hence popularity w/ teens). Anyway, these scenes don't last b/c the law of averages says that each person's real life will eventually interfere with their participation and the group will splinter.

But perhaps that depends on how much the group is really about the people in the group or whatever the group happens to be "about" (e.g. Nine Inch Nails, funny online videos, hunting, etc). I guess the latter are more informational exchanges or opportunities to share amusement over a subject while the former are something resembling (and perhaps standing in for) real world social scenes. Real world social scenes break up, too. People move away, get jobs, have kids, get divorced, etc. But I still suspect that b/c they are joined during times of real world social transition and there's no negative repercussions to leaving, online social scenes are more apt to disintegrate (or at least cycle through members) than real world social scenes. Really, they haven't been around long enough to say one way or the other.

Hanging out in Ye Olde Towne Square

I was chatting with a friend this evening about the proliferation of cellphones in other countries, specifically Mexico. As is the case with a lot of Non-US towns, many towns in Mexico made the leap from very few telephones to tons of cellphones, skipping the intermediary step of many household land-lines. She was saying that before the rise of cellphones, young people would go to the town square to hang out at night. You could count on seeing your friends and peers at the square, and you couldn't really make plans to hang out in smaller groups at more specific places because you lacked the means to coordinate plans on short notice.

I'd never really thought about it before, but phones and email allow young people the opportunity to make plans to hang out. I suppose you would also see people at school and make plans there to hang out later, but the point is that you'd always have to be somewhere where there were a lot of people in order to see your friends. For older people, the pub or the coffee house were the places where you would see your peers and socialize. Once you introduce phones, you allow people the means to selectively hang out with certain people while avoiding others. Its not that we don't go to public places like bars or malls anymore, but I wouldn't be surprised if hanging out with small groups of friends substituted for hanging out with larger groups in public, especially in places where they went from having no means of communicating with peers to everyone having a device that allows people to coordinate plans on very short notice.

I'd always thought of the influence of cellphones on the public sphere in terms of the actual number of people you talked to, or how long you talked to them for. But now, I'm prompted to consider how phones are used to make plans for meeting in physical space and how those plans are different than the ones you could've made without that device.

What are the implications of this? You'd be less apt to see extreme differences in the US. We've had phones for quite some time, and the adoption of phones was concurrent with the adoption of many other domestic technologies (namely the television) which might've contributed to the destruction of the public square as a social hub. But in a place where they had television, film, and radio already and then suddenly get cellphones, you might see a drastic change in the hanging-out habits of youngsters.

Of course, we now have online equivalents of the public square in the form of Facebook and other social networks and fora. But what about the places where accessing those online public squares is difficult (maybe b/c they've got cellphones that can't access the internet or that make it much easier to communicate P2P but not in groups)? Its important to pull apart these two 21st century technologies - cellphone and internet - and examine their influences on societies independent of one another. If you've got no public space to see your peers, would you have a strong sense of community with those who lived around you, with your town, with your country?