If recent reports are to be believed, women all over the world have found a new fetish. The first craving of the day is not just chocolate, a fix of coffee or even some good loving, but a visit to their Facebook homepage to check the updates that they might have missed while they played catch with their beauty sleep. Between the ages of 18 and 34, one third of the women confess to checking their Facebook accounts even before brushing their teeth! According to recent surveys, women confess not only to loving Facebook but being addicted to it. A whopping 39% have confessed to this dreaded Facebook addiction while a larger percentage of 57% seem to prefer online contact through Facebook over personal face to face conversations. These findings are based on a study by Oxygen Media and Lightspeed Research taking a decent sample of 1605 women.
The Numbers Are In…
Well, it’s all in the numbers here! As per the study, 21% of women age 18-34 access Facebook during the night, 79% are good with kissing in photos uploaded on Facebook, 42% would be fine with photos of themselves in a less than sober state finding their way to Facebook, 50% don’t mind being friends with complete strangers while a whopping 58% consider Facebook a good way to keep themselves updated about exes and enemies. 63% confess to using Facebook as a networking tool. There are even some women out there who are completely fine using Facebook as a forum to break off a relationship but mercifully, these women are heavily outnumbered with 91% women being dead set against the idea.
Dating and Privacy Issues
“The world’s gone social. And women are more social than men”, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was quoted in the Forbes Woman. 57% of Facebook Users are female and as such, they seem to use social networking websites and media in a different way as compared to their male counterparts. Sharing information, updates and other relevant information seems to be the motivation for the women using networking sites like Facebook whereas men seem more intent on increasing their prestige and status. Social networking sites have become hotbeds for the online dating game and more people are okay with dating individuals that they have met through Facebook. This raises a privacy dilemma as people begin indiscriminate information sharing so as to attract potential love interests.
While it would be too easy to fall into quoting age old stereotypes and marketing gimmicks, it wouldn’t be fair to conclude too much from the statistics put forth. Generalizing the needs and supposed addictions of women is an area fraught with peril. The conclusions that can be drawn logically from these is simply that women seem to enjoy social networking via social media more in comparison to men on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Men, on the other hand, enjoy usage of sites like LinkedIn and Digg, where statistics show them as the more proficient and addicted user segment. Another conclusion that could be arrived at is that women are more open as compared to men when it comes to information sharing on websites like Facebook.
