Men vs. Women in Cyberspace

       The women and men of society use technology differently. This is interesting, but also expected, as women and men do everything differently. Men use technology in order to be powerful where as women use it in order to socialize. Men want to dominate and control everything around them in order to feel powerful and they use technology to boss people around. Women love to socialize and feel involved within their social network. They use technology in order to maintain current relationships as well as develop new ones.

       This different use of technology is important when looking at the difference between the way men and women blog. Men’s blogs are more impersonal and they do not try to connect with their readers. They just want people to read their opinions and take them in. They are not worried about receiving responses and engaging in conversations. Women on the other hand enjoy blogging and tend to reveal more personal information about themselves and therefore tend to make connections with some people who read their blogs. They sometimes even have conversations through the posting of comments on blogs as well as response blogs.

       Reapleaf conducted a study in 2008 that looked at the difference in the connections of men and women in the online world. They studied online social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr and Hi5. In this study they found that women have more friends than men, however men tend to have more contacts. They also discovered that women had more interactions and conversations going on within these social networks than men did. This demonstrates that men tend to use these networks for business and women tend to use them to form relationships.

       It is not shocking that men and women use technology in different ways, however it is interesting to study how they use it differently in order to make generalizations about men and women in cyberspace.