Sister, you’re getting a Dell
by Justin
I decided to check out digg.com this evening as is my custom every 2 minutes, and here’s what I found at the very top:
“3 out of 4 women now prefer a plasma tv to a diamond… THANK YOU GOD”
“The study found 77 percent of women surveyed would prefer a new plasma television to a diamond solitaire necklace and 56 percent would opt for a new plasma TV over a weekend vacation in Florida.
Even shoes lost out. The study found 86 percent would prefer a new digital video camera to a pair of designer shoes.”
Wait — women enjoy TV shows and taking pictures of things? Yep! Apparently women got tired of voting and birth control, and they turned their minds to more modern things.
But it turns out that even women haven’t noticed their newfound nerdiness. Another study reveals that women are just as good as men at using the internet, but are convinced that they’re much worse.
‘When all the data was assembled and analyzed, Hargittai uncovered “no statistically significant difference between men’s and women’s ability to find content on the Web,” after taking into account external factors such as income, education and years of online experience.
Yet, Hargittai wrote in the June issue of Social Science Quarterly, “Men are more likely to think of themselves as better skilled than women. In fact, not one woman thought of herself as an ‘expert’ user, and not one man thought of himself as a complete novice.”’
You don’t have to think too hard about black and white dolls, Stanford Prisons, and allegedly smart kids to understand what’s going on here. The shocking thing is that women, despite thinking they aren’t very good at internets, did as well as they did.
But even if modern women don’t know that they’re nerds, today’s young girls are smart and they know it. Heck, it is looking like women don’t need men for much of anything anymore. Maybe we shouldn’t be thanking our deity of choice quite yet, men.
I, for one, welcome our new female overlords, and I recommend that you other male readers of Haduken do the same if you don’t want to find yourselves mining diamonds in Africa for pretty necklaces when the revolution comes. Or, you know. Maybe they’ll make us work in plasma TV sweatshops.
Dude that mouse thing is weird / crazy.
Also we we’re just talking about designing a web app for women and there was talk of “we must make it very easy to use.” And in my mind, it was just as you say. Not because women are worse at using the intertron, just they would be turned off more quickly at something more complex.
I mean maybe it has something to do with them realizing that their time is better spent do something other than figuring out unnecessarily complex web apps. Either way simpler pages/apps are a good thing for all of MANKIND.
I heard this on the radio the other day, and while I am not trying to discredit the study I would like to know how many diamond neclaces (and/or diamonds in general) the polled women already own vs. how many plasma tvs they own.
nic: the article said women owned 6.6 digital devices vs. 6.9 for men. So that is one thing.
Also, on the other study, maybe the internet tests were too easy. I mean if you take me and Ross and ask us to find movie times on the internet, we’ll both be able to do it equally well, and maybe we can both use IRC pretty easily. So maybe you’d conclude that I’m just as good at using the internet as Ross. But if you asked us to code a web mashup, Ross would crush me. I wouldn’t know where to start.
Another thing the article said, which I believe, is that when something goes wrong with their computers, women are more likely to blame themselves while men are more likely to blame the machine for not working right. The thing is, when using a computer, it’s more likely that you would cause an error than that the computer would.
(btw that last comment could be interpreted as: “Nic, the article kind of said a thing about that, but really didn’t, so you might be right.
“Also, the other study I cited might have a stupid flaw.
“Here is another unimportant thing I also thought about.”
I just want to make sure it isn’t interpreted as disagreement with nic, because I kind of agree that that would be an important thing to ask)
easy applications sometimes don’t go well. Remember Microsoft “BOB”? I know its an OS, but still.
also, Robin has chosen the TV over the diamonds, she doesn’t have either.
I was reading an article in Time Magazine this week and the female author was lamenting the female’s new status in romantic comedies (hey it was a long metro ride). Apparently, women now have the better job, are decidedly more sophisticated and are more mature–much the opposite of their male counterparts. She referenced the new movie the Breakup and others. In the end, she wanted women to be just as slobbish as men, or at least HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE.
All this to say, us men will probably be coming home any day now to the phrase, “hey honey get me a beer since you’re up.” As they sit in front of their plasma. yikes.