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Gendered Social Media Consumption: An Introduction to our Research and a Response to “Gender: How the World Changed Social Media”

How does social media consumption change based on the gender we have been socialized into? Do women follow more women? Is there a difference between the type of female influencer followed by men and women? My group has chosen to focus on the ways in which our genders impact our behaviour and consumption on social media, arguing that the impact is very different than in real life. With an abundance of accounts to follow and interact with, why do some men mostly follow as male athletes and female models? Does social media reinforce gender stereotypes already attributed to various professions and interests?

In order to analyze said questions, our group has chosen the following research questions: “To what extent does gender socialization impact social media consumption? Does social media reinforce gender stereotypes already attributed to various professions and/or interests?” In order to respond to this question, we wish to look at the top 20 most followed accounts on social media, and whether or not the type of account differs by gender. Already having looked at various sources, there is definitely a documented difference between what women and men interact with on social media. In addition to conducting netnographic research, we also wish to study the case at SciencesPo, by looking at the “following” sections of our classmates’ Instagram profiles. Students of the English Introduction to Digital Culture class will serve as our study population, and all data will remain anonymous. Our goal is to analyze if trends at the global scale also apply to our SciencesPo bubble. In these students’ “Following” sections, we will pick out verified accounts and categorize each account by gender and a few additional variables to sort through the content type. These categories will provide an additional element to the gender to see if certain types of accounts are more associated with certain genders, depending on the gender of the follower.

Since our project combines an analysis of sociological theories, existing literature, and new literature, it made the most sense to search for a piece focusing on such an interdisciplinary overlap between gender and social media. “Gender,” a chapter from How the World Changed Social Media written by Daniel Miller, Elisabetta Costa, et. al., focuses on the multifaceted impact of social media on “gender relations, gendered norms and identities” across the field sites studied as part of their research. They mark that, early internet research often emphasized and “marvelled at the uniqueness of online social spaces in which personal characteristics such as gender, race, age and also apparent physical aspects of the body could seemingly be erased, as you could adopt an entirely distinct online persona.” Feminism then emphasized the role of digital media in female empowerent, and the opportunity to “escape from the oppressive gender norms of the offline world.” Yet, just as in our own initial research and hypothesis, the reality of gender-social media relations and the current related literature is no longer so optimistic. In the words of the authors, “these notions of free-floating online identities, detached from real-world bodies, have proved short-lived.” Nonetheless, the authors are careful to highlight that the internet or social media cannot be seen as “neither patriarchal nor liberating in and of” themselves.” Indeed, their book is called How the World Changed Social Media, and not “how social media changed the world” — clearly implying that humanity brought its various norms, whether gendered, racialized, or classist, into the online world throughout its evolution over the years.

The title How the World Changed Social Media as opposed to “how social media changed the world” may and perhaps should remind readers of this website of my first reading response on the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. Barlow saw potential for an inclusive, free, transnational society in the online realm, and Miller, Costa, et. al. also record that early internet scholars had high hopes from a seemingly neutral world where people could theoretically be detached from any baggage relating to their physical self and all the socialized baggage that came with it. Yet cyberspace did not turn into a matriarchy, and it certainly did not erase patriarchy. Indeed, it maintained the very social order existent in real life, and according to our hypothesis as well as Miller and Costa’s research, it deteriorated conceptions of certain gendered norms all while improving some.

The content that users interact with and post also differ by gender.reinforcing our hypothesis that gender does indeed impact genders’ consumption of social media. Miller, Costa, et. al. conducted many field studies in their analysis of how the world impacted and socialized social media. In one, they analyzed social media users in southeast Turkey: “men tended to portray themselves as successful professionals, while women emphasised their aesthetic qualities, or rather their adherence to Muslim values of modesty and purity; they all ommitted those aspects of their lives that do not reflect the dominant values of female and male honour and Muslim moralities.” Further, women’s interactions with men were rarely represented on Facebook, despite the fact that “conversations between young women and men in secular and gender-mixed settings … are routine.”Evidently, women and men engaged in the media by exaggerating both their gender identities conforming to sterotypes, as well as their religiosity pertaining to Muslim ideals. Miller and Costa concluded that “gender segregation and conformity on Facebook is thus even tougher and more extreme here than it is offline,” implying that the online spaces created or encouraged even more extreme and seemingly “perfect” ideal types of both genders stereotypes.

While our research will look specifically at the ways in which online spaces have made women and men forcibly conform to their stereotypes and in many ways enforce policing of these gendered norms, whether online spaces have overall helped or hindered the project of gender equality can still be debated. Indeed, social media has provided both women, men, and LGBTQ+ with a plethora of resources and spaces for activism. It has undeniably brought people together — this has occurred in the interest of both those in pursuit of a common good and those with arguably worse intentions. Through our research we will only be getting a glimpse of this and only making better informed guesses about the influence of social media on our own community here at Sciences Po, but I believe that the project offers a great opportunity to recognize the enormous impact of the patriarchy on our lives nonetheless.