I am currently developing an online form for a social networking website, used to retrieve users' personal data. Name, Surname...these are all fine, what troubled me was when I had to decide how to get the user's gender.
Some of you will probably come up with the female/male binary option either as radio buttons or drop-down menus.
This solution would have been appropriate when gender from a legal point of view was determined by the birth certificate: to avoid getting too mixed up with so much diversity in definitions, we could always safely claim to refer to the law.
However after 2004, at least in the UK, this is not the case anymore. The Gender Recognition Act which was approved three years ago, allows 'acquired genders' to be legally recognized.
Internet is usually at the front in social change, but a quick skim through web pages , seem to indicate the contrary in this case: many forms still only offer the female/male options, few include a form of cross-over, none to the best of my knowledge, give you free choice.
A possible solution
As I wanted to acknowledge the problem, I tried to find some kind of regulation that we could use in order to develop appropriate input fields in gender, but nothing official seems to be around. Therefore I opted for the freest solution: use a text field.
References
The Gender Recognition act can be found online at:
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/ACTS/acts2004/40007--a.htm#1
Monday, 8 October 2007
Friday, 28 September 2007
The internet is a woman's medium
I've recently come across a paper entitled ‘Gendering the Internet: Claims, Controversies and Cultures’ [1], which reports that in the late 90s some reputed feminists, such as Sherry Thurkle, regarded the Internet as a woman's medium, in the convinction that
My little experiment
The paper was published in 2000, which in "Internet years" is almost prehistory.
Therefore, I've decided to rerun the same experiment in order to find out if this is still the case.
Here's a summary of the results for the first page:
Google.co.uk : wikipedia, a girl club, flickr photos tagged with 'girl', thank girl (a famous comic book with a female heroine), a magazine for girls, girl scouts and even a blog from a girl geek!
Yahoo: the two top results are for Amazon products tagged with 'girl' and a dating site, but then we get girl led sites, like "Girls Only", "A Girl's World", "SmartGirl.org".
It looks all very positive, both search engines have come up with loads of info targeting girls and no porn was found in the first page of the results.
Then I run the search with the Italian translation of girl, "ragazza", on Google.it. The majority of the results in this case regarded crimes against girls, followed by three sites for males (one porn site and two with advices on how to pull girls). Apart from wikipedia, only one 'girl' site was returned (RagazzaModerna.it).
What is the verdict?
From the results above, we can clearly see that there has been a huge improvement since Zoonen's search, at least in the UK. Both Google and Yahoo UK return almost for all the results in the first page, sites which target girls and most of them are not commercial and girl led.
A quick look to the Italian version though of Google, showed another picture: here the focus was on crime and sex, with only one site explicitly directed to girls.
Maybe this means that there aren't as many girl users in Italy or even if there are, they are not very "techy", they don't write blogs or give visibility to their associations through websites.
However, the shift from the preponderance of porn material to girl related/led informative material, suggests that the young Internet population has a strong presence of female users and this presence is changing the Net to acknowledge and reflect their values.
References
[1] Zoonen, Van L. (2002), "Gendering the Internet: Claims, Controversies and Cultures", in European Journal of Communication, 2002, 17,5, p.9-10.
[2] Turkle, S. (2005), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, in Zoonen, Van L. , "Gendering the Internet: Claims, Controversies and Cultures", in European Journal of Communication, 2002, 17,5, p.9.
one needs an ethic of community, consensus and communication on the Internet and this is what [..] women are particularly good at[2]The author of the paper challenged this claim with a simple and yet powerful observation. By running a search of the term "girl" on the main search engines, she noticed how the majority of the results were related to porn or other information which clearly targeted a male audience.
My little experiment
The paper was published in 2000, which in "Internet years" is almost prehistory.
Therefore, I've decided to rerun the same experiment in order to find out if this is still the case.
Here's a summary of the results for the first page:
Google.co.uk : wikipedia, a girl club, flickr photos tagged with 'girl', thank girl (a famous comic book with a female heroine), a magazine for girls, girl scouts and even a blog from a girl geek!
Yahoo: the two top results are for Amazon products tagged with 'girl' and a dating site, but then we get girl led sites, like "Girls Only", "A Girl's World", "SmartGirl.org".
It looks all very positive, both search engines have come up with loads of info targeting girls and no porn was found in the first page of the results.
Then I run the search with the Italian translation of girl, "ragazza", on Google.it. The majority of the results in this case regarded crimes against girls, followed by three sites for males (one porn site and two with advices on how to pull girls). Apart from wikipedia, only one 'girl' site was returned (RagazzaModerna.it).
What is the verdict?
From the results above, we can clearly see that there has been a huge improvement since Zoonen's search, at least in the UK. Both Google and Yahoo UK return almost for all the results in the first page, sites which target girls and most of them are not commercial and girl led.
A quick look to the Italian version though of Google, showed another picture: here the focus was on crime and sex, with only one site explicitly directed to girls.
Maybe this means that there aren't as many girl users in Italy or even if there are, they are not very "techy", they don't write blogs or give visibility to their associations through websites.
However, the shift from the preponderance of porn material to girl related/led informative material, suggests that the young Internet population has a strong presence of female users and this presence is changing the Net to acknowledge and reflect their values.
References
[1] Zoonen, Van L. (2002), "Gendering the Internet: Claims, Controversies and Cultures", in European Journal of Communication, 2002, 17,5, p.9-10.
[2] Turkle, S. (2005), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, in Zoonen, Van L. , "Gendering the Internet: Claims, Controversies and Cultures", in European Journal of Communication, 2002, 17,5, p.9.
Tuesday, 18 September 2007
The Oxford Internet Institute has recently published the latest Internet Surveys for 2007.
The surveys aim to give a picture of Internet usage in the UK. The statistics reveal the different users' profiles, which are the most popular online activities, who is digitally excluded from the online world and why exclusion still occurs.
What follows is a summary of the findings I found more interesting, as I skimmed through the 87 pages report.
The typical user is still the same as the previous surveys, that is, male, student with a high level of education, enabled, from the highest income (>£50,000) background. However, gender and income are becoming less determining.
Trust on the reliability of the information on the Internet remained steady between 2005 and 2007, but it slightly decreased in comparison with 2000.
Among newspapers, television and the Internet, the Internet is the most trusted media by users, followed closely by television. The viceversa is true for non-users, while newspapers are the least trusted media for both groups.
Spam and junk-mails are the least tolerated activities, especially for people in employment. Employed people are also the users who are more likely to take action against these activities.
Both users and non-users increasingly feel that society is hard to understand, but for non-users this feeling is much more prominent.
The most popular place where Internet gets used is by far the home, followed by the office. Internet cafés are the least popular.
In comparison with 2005, less people feel that loosing access to Internet would be a problem.
Between 2005 and 2007 emails, chat rooms and phone calls over the internet are more widely used, but blogging decreased.
Not even 20% of internet users has a profile in social networks and the large majority are students, with males outnumbering females.
Retired people are most likely to meet in person someone met online, while students are the least likely to do so.
Individuals increasingly feel that their online social networks influence their offline networks, although this influence is very weak and it is restricted to the circle of friends and family.
They do not believe that Internet use has an impact on other social activities or on their use of other media.
People increasingly see that Internet's main purpose is to help them to keep in contact with the others.
In 2005 having a personal website was as popular as putting pictures online, while in 2007 the latter largely outnumbered the former.
Video downloading also outnumbered Music downloading, as an increasing number of users listen to music online.
The civic partecipation of users online is still well below their participation offline.
References
Dutton, H. W. and Helsper, J. Ellen (2007) ' The Internet in Britain 2007 ', accessed by 2-08-2007.
url: http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/oxis/OxIS2007_Report.pdf
Saturday, 8 September 2007
group online identity
facebook case study
Yesterday evening I went on an informal meet up about Facebook Apps, its capabilities and its possible future uses.
Coming back home from this relatively short and relatively alchol-free night, I felt quite inspired :P about it and had more thinking through. So that's what this post draws from.
What are group identities
Group or collective identities refer to the set of characteristics associated with a particular group. By becoming members of a group, we take on these traits, which therefore become part of our individual identities [1], but at the same time as members and individuals we can also challenge those traits, thus contributing to reshaping them over time.
Group identities therefore work two ways: from the collective to the individual and viceversa.
Group identities and Facebook Groups
With social networking taking off, we now have the possibility to reflect our offline, individual identity, online, by creating a user's profile and writing some stuff about ourselves, our tastes, our preferences and so on. However, I find that collective identities in social networking websites are not equally well represented, although present in other online environments (mailining lists and Google groups are two examples).
In particular, I'd like to point at the "groups" feature in Facebook, which is arguably the most or one of the most popular social networks available these days.
Facebook allows you to join an existing group, or create a group on about anything you want to. As a member you can do some typical operations of an individual Facebook profile, such as putting some pictures in it or writing on the group wall.
Current limitations and ideas for the future
However, it seems to me that Facebook is missing the biggest point: the two-way communication between the group "entity" and its members.
For example, there is no way of putting an application on the group profile, so that every member can share it and upload stuff on it for the other members to have. Another limitation is that there is no common space where to edit information, such as a wiki kind of interaction. In short, Facebook treats groups as entities which merely connect some people together but it does not empower them so that they can also be effective contributors of those groups.
As a consequence, users end up joining lots of different groups to state something about themselves, eg. supporting anti-global warming or being fans of a particular football team, but they cannot take action or at least not do it easily, like, following the examples, sharing a list of to-dos in order to reduce global warming and reorganizingthem through member ratings or collaboratively setting up and writing a group newsletter.
As a Facebook user, I do hope that the potential of this social networking website will be fully exploited, increasing the complexity of the social relations represented, while retaining its usability and easiness to use. I hope therefore that Facebook developers will soon add functionalities to the "groups", instead of leaving them as little more than flags of our believes and values.
If this is not the case, with the exponential growth of third party applications which can now be interegrated within the system, I am sure someone will come up with a brilliant widget to improve these poor, empty, group profiles!
Notes
[1]For more information on how group identities can influence the formation of individual identity, see Turner’s theory of self-categorization in:
Turner, J.C., Hogg, M.A., Oakes, P.J., Reciher, S.D. and Wetherell, M. (1987) Rediscovering
the Social Group: A Self-Categorization Theory, Oxford, Basil, Blackwell.
Yesterday evening I went on an informal meet up about Facebook Apps, its capabilities and its possible future uses.
Coming back home from this relatively short and relatively alchol-free night, I felt quite inspired :P about it and had more thinking through. So that's what this post draws from.
What are group identities
Group or collective identities refer to the set of characteristics associated with a particular group. By becoming members of a group, we take on these traits, which therefore become part of our individual identities [1], but at the same time as members and individuals we can also challenge those traits, thus contributing to reshaping them over time.
Group identities therefore work two ways: from the collective to the individual and viceversa.
Group identities and Facebook Groups
With social networking taking off, we now have the possibility to reflect our offline, individual identity, online, by creating a user's profile and writing some stuff about ourselves, our tastes, our preferences and so on. However, I find that collective identities in social networking websites are not equally well represented, although present in other online environments (mailining lists and Google groups are two examples).
In particular, I'd like to point at the "groups" feature in Facebook, which is arguably the most or one of the most popular social networks available these days.
Facebook allows you to join an existing group, or create a group on about anything you want to. As a member you can do some typical operations of an individual Facebook profile, such as putting some pictures in it or writing on the group wall.
Current limitations and ideas for the future
However, it seems to me that Facebook is missing the biggest point: the two-way communication between the group "entity" and its members.
For example, there is no way of putting an application on the group profile, so that every member can share it and upload stuff on it for the other members to have. Another limitation is that there is no common space where to edit information, such as a wiki kind of interaction. In short, Facebook treats groups as entities which merely connect some people together but it does not empower them so that they can also be effective contributors of those groups.
As a consequence, users end up joining lots of different groups to state something about themselves, eg. supporting anti-global warming or being fans of a particular football team, but they cannot take action or at least not do it easily, like, following the examples, sharing a list of to-dos in order to reduce global warming and reorganizingthem through member ratings or collaboratively setting up and writing a group newsletter.
As a Facebook user, I do hope that the potential of this social networking website will be fully exploited, increasing the complexity of the social relations represented, while retaining its usability and easiness to use. I hope therefore that Facebook developers will soon add functionalities to the "groups", instead of leaving them as little more than flags of our believes and values.
If this is not the case, with the exponential growth of third party applications which can now be interegrated within the system, I am sure someone will come up with a brilliant widget to improve these poor, empty, group profiles!
Notes
[1]For more information on how group identities can influence the formation of individual identity, see Turner’s theory of self-categorization in:
Turner, J.C., Hogg, M.A., Oakes, P.J., Reciher, S.D. and Wetherell, M. (1987) Rediscovering
the Social Group: A Self-Categorization Theory, Oxford, Basil, Blackwell.
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