Gender domination online

It's been said several times in lectures, supported by statistics, that the majority of gamers are male. Yet, according to this, the gender distribution of the American internet population is firmly skewed towards females. More women are currently online than men, and future projections show that the gap will only widen, and women will outnumber men online by over 8 million in 2012.

So, where are all these women?

Apparently, they are the driving force behind the success of blogs, journals, and other such social networks found online. OpenSocial and Facebook Stats from Rapleaf, posted in 2007, revealed that Facebook and MySpace users were 63% female, and other social networking sites such as Friendster and Plaxo were also significantly dominated by female users rather than male users. Livejournal is also female dominated, where 66.4% of users are female.

I've experienced the last first hand, as LJ is my virtual community of choice. I've had my LJ account for over five years now, and have several friends that I've never met physically, but trust and confide in as much as I do my friends who live near me. I'm a member of several communities, where I've seen the gender domination in action. The default assumption by many in these comms seems to be that all the users are female, except the ones who clearly state their male gender through their username by attaching "-boy" (or "-man" or "-guy") to the end.

Over the years, there have been several instances where users in a comm have, in the midst of a discussion or a debate, had to say specifically, "Um...I'm a guy." Almost inevitably, the response is something along the lines of, "Wha? You're a GUY?" And then another user will add, "I'm a guy, too." Then a few more will chime in with the admission that, yes, they too are males, to which they get something like this in reply: "I didn't know we had guys in here. Hey, guys!" Males on LJ are like the bunnies and squirrels on campus: they're there, and we know they're there, probably in more numbers than we suspect - but we don't register their existence until they come into our line of sight so we can marvel at their presence. (Or, you know, we run them over with our cars...but that was only the once and I felt horrible about it.)

So, yes, while guys may dominate virtual games like WoW and Ultima, us girls are out there, too, only in different places. Just something I thought I should throw out there. :)

How about, "Anthro"Centrism?

Quoting from the "Victorian Internet" epilogue in regards to the hype created from the birth of the Telegraph and the Internet,

"They are direct consequences of human nature, rather than technology." (212)

I read this line once, twice, and thrice and found that this statement the author proclaimed is deeply thought-provoking.

The world we live in right now is only shaped towards what we humans make it to be.
I.E. A "chair" is a "chair" because we have defined the object in such a way that we understand it to be, well, a chair.
We humans are biased to the symbols we arbitrarily choose to create meaning to an object; but to a further extent, we also create a sort of preference of how we use the object.
When we give preference to how and what objects should be use, what can you call this? Anthrocentrism?

This idea of Anthrocentrism is hard to imagine because, we (our species) are at the top of the food chain. There is no one on the same level with our species. Consider however, if they were another species who are similar to the human species that co-exist with us today..
How would they use the Internet had it been new technology to them? How would the world be?

What we create the world to be are the reflections of our own human nature.
Can we say we are anthropoligically biased then?
I wonder then...what other factors in the world are dead obvious to us if we weren't human.

~Ej Cruz (Student)