Girls In US And UK Command Remarkable Web Usage Numbers - SendMeRSS
Posted by elveston priory at 1:44 am
Found in Sunday's edition of The Times of London, an article by Kate Spicer and Abul Tahrreport documents a trend of increasing Web adoption among girls and young women in both the US and UK. This finding does not only pertain to blogging. It includes most all common and habitual tasks: shopping, social networking, referencing educational material, etc.
This transition to a Web populated with an increasingly active female usership is undoubtedly directly related to the advent of intuitive, easy-to-use software. Whereas software of years past took a substantial amount of technological know-how - of which the knowledge attainment process seemed to traditionally appeal to the majority-male geek crowd - today blogs, social networking accounts and retail shopping sites for physical and digital goods is no more complex to create and/or utilize than filling out very simple, straightforward registration and payment forms and navigating well-evolved user interfaces. This change to a more user-friendly industry environment has made for a mass migration of girls and women of just about all ages from a firmly offline existence, entirely uninterested in dealing with convoluted interfaces, to one very much connected, whether it be through iTunes or MySpace or countless other sites and services.
The most surprising revelation to be made about this trend to a new era in which women saturate numerous channels of the Web is that it has happened within such a small window of time. The movement has been only several years in the making, a timeframe far shorter than one marked by male interest in both localized and cloud-based technologies.
According to a recent Pew Internet Project targeted at teens, 35% of American girls have registered blogs, and 32% have multifaceted websites. (For boys, it is 20% and 22%, respectively.) Though those two segments can presently be taken as one and the same, the fact that a full third of all girls in the youth and young-adult demographics are chronicling their lives and maintaining online profiles is something that really does calls for celebration - especially celebration of Web designers and engineers, whose work has, after all, now been guaranteed fit for true mass consumption. Which is good news for, well, everyone. Men, women, boys, girls, geeks, non-geeks, etc. (more…)