eJournals Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 40/1-2

Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik
0171-5410
2941-0762
Narr Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The aim of this article is to give an answer to the question posed in the title. We will investigate whether there are any gender-typical aspects of privacy by taking a closer look at women’s and men’s privacy concerns and management when communicating on the social web. A special focus will be on young adults and the potential threats to their privacy. We will try to find explanations for web users’ attitudes and behaviors and an empirical study on gender and informational privacy which was conducted at the University of Passau, will be presented and included in the discussion.
2015
401-2 Kettemann

Digital Communication and Privacy: Is Social Web Use gendered?

2015
Daniela Wawra
Daniela Wawra 220 websites. Prototypical for the social web, however, i.e., its best example, are the social networking websites. I will mostly concentrate on them in the following discussion. Currently, among the best known and most popular social networking websites are LinkedIn (2003), MySpace (2003), Facebook (2004), Twitter (2007) und WhatsApp (2009). Flickr (2004) and YouTube (2005) started the trend of putting user-generated content on the web and sharing it with others (cf. Appelquist et al. 2010). The social web consists of communication which is often interpersonal. For many people it has become a taken-for-granted part of their everyday lives that fulfills various purposes: It is used for entertainment, as an information source, to establish and maintain relationships, to share interests and as a discussion platform (cf. also Thelwall 2011: 1). Following Storey (2014: 39), we could speak of a ‗mediatization‘ of our lives in the sense that media use has increased and that media have become more visible - in all areas of our lives. This view can be supported by empirical data that show an exponential increase of media use during the last few years. According to statista, out of 2.92 billion internet users worldwide (Anon 2015, ―internet users worldwide‖), 1.4 billion users have a Facebook account in 2015 (which is about equivalent to the total number of social network users worldwide in 2012) (cf. Anon 2015, ―social network users worldwide‖). The social web is an integral part of companies‘ communication strategies today and is, for example, used for marketing purposes. Social web platforms have also started to commercialize user data (Appelquist et al. 2010). In politics as well, social media have become a standard means of communication. Not only our public but also our private lives have almost become ―unthinkable without media‖ (Storey 2014: 40): Storey speaks of the mediatization of our lives also in this sense: […] media are increasingly part of the very fabric of everyday life […]. But this does not mean that media determines or controls everyday life - this is not or should not be another version of technological determinism. Rather what is being suggested is that media are now fundamental to how we live the everyday. (Storey 2014: 40) Appelquist et al. (2010) see great potential for innovation of social networking sites and user-generated-content services, but only if - among other things - the privacy of users can be protected and if they are left in control over what kind of information about themselves they are prepared to reveal. And this is currently a major problem: The social web threatens our privacy in that people often give away information about themselves, regretting it later. Often, the social web does not forget, and the damage is irreparably done. Social web enterprises sell personal data to third parties and technological innovations, such as data mining, allow for the automatic linking and processing of big amounts of data. These Digital Communication and Privacy: Is Social Web Use gendered? 221 data are used, for example, for marketing purposes in order to make wellinformed guesses about what people are interested in buying in the future and to make corresponding offers (cf. Anon 2014, thefreedictionary; Anon 2014, webopedia). These examples give an impression of the various ways in which our privacy is threatened by social media. More precisely, it is our informational privacy in particular that is in danger. Rössler defines informational privacy as the right to be protected against unwanted access to personal information or personal data (Rössler 2001: 25). It is thus about control over who can have access to personal information. Personal information on the social web comprises anything from a photograph of yourself and your contact details to your communication with others. Informational privacy on the internet also includes control over the contexts in which information can be used (cf. Altman 1976 and Nissenbaum 2004 in Thelwall 2011: 1). This is important as web-contents can be recycled or forwarded (cf. Thelwall 2011: 1f). The purpose of the following discussion is to find answers to the questions of  how men and women use the social web,  whether they are equally affected by invasions of their privacy on the social web,  whether they feel equally threatened regarding their privacy,  how they generally deal with privacy issues,  what their general attitude is towards privacy and  what kind of explanations there are for the findings. The discussion will be based on large-scale empirical (meta-)studies and our own study that was conducted at the University of Passau, Germany. The following section gives an overview of empirical data with regard to women’s and men’s uses of the social web. 2. Is social web use gendered? 2.1. A global perspective Do men and women use the social web differently? Who uses the social web how, i.e., is the social web used more by men or by women and which offers of the social web do they use predominantly? According to the Global Web Index (2012; cited after World Newsmedia Network 2013: 12) people’s use of social media differs depending on country, gender, age and other factors. Social media engagement consists of three parts: participation, content generation and product related activities. The field of ‘participation’ covers the use of social networks, reading and commenting on micro-blogs, posting on platforms and commenting on them. ‘Con- Daniela Wawra 222 tent generation‘ includes uploading photographs and videos online and writing blogs or news stories. ‗Product related activities‘ concern evaluations of products online. Among the countries with the highest rate of social media engagement are China, Indonesia and India. In China, for example, almost 90% of male internet users and more than 80% of female internet users are engaged in social media activities. The Japanese are the least engaged with social media: Only about 20% of male and female internet users use the internet in this way. Globally, younger people are more engaged with social media than older people. Only in Saudi- Arabia it is the middle-aged group between 35 and 44 that is more engaged in social media than the youngest age group (ranging from 16 to 24). In Malaysia, the oldest age group is even slightly more active than the middle-aged group. A more specific look at selected countries renders the following: In Germany, about 25% of internet users between the ages of 55 and 64 engage with social media. Among those aged 35 to 44 it is 40%, while a little less than 60% of those aged 16 to 24 do so. Considering all age groups, slightly more than 40% of social media users are male and 35% are female. Only in Sweden is the rate of women who use social media lower than in Germany. In the USA, social media engagement by women amounts to slightly over 40%, while it is 35% for men. The numbers are thus just the reverse of those in Germany. In most countries, men‘s social media engagement is higher than that of women. The USA is thus an exception in this respect, as are Japan, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Taiwan and Thailand. The data clearly show that the use of social media differs according to culture, age and gender. A global tendency - according to this study - is that more men than women use social media and that younger people use it more than older people. The study says nothing, however, about the intensity of the social media use by men and women and about which kinds of social media they prefer. Social media engagement that was analyzed in the study cited earlier covered very heterogeneous aspects of social media use - from the uploading of photographs to the use of social networks and the writing of blogs. We have already seen in the introductory section to this article that ‗social web‘ is often defined differently to inor exclude a variety of activities on the internet. This alone can lead to considerable variation in the results of empirical analyses. In general, we also need to consider the fact that the analyses often do not take into account how active the users are and that they might include fake and inactive accounts as well. A striking result of the study on social media engagement is that social media use among internet users is considerably higher in China, Indonesia and India than in Germany or the USA. These last two countries are even among those countries where social media engagement is lowest. A follow-up research question would thus be to explain these considerable cultural differences. We need significantly more of such empirical grand- 223 scale research which at the same time addresses more specific questions, such as similarities and differences in usage patterns and the reasons for them. So far, we have access to the most detailed data for the USA. They include surveys that differentiate more and address more specific issues of social media use. We will therefore mostly concentrate on US-American data in the following overview of men‘s and women‘s typical social web usage patterns. 2.2. A US-American perspective According to Nielsen‘s Internet-usage index (cited in Garber 2012), US- American women use the social web more than men. This finding supports the results of the Global Web Index (2012) for the USA, while ‗social web‘ is not as broadly defined in the Nielsen index: Women (aged 18 and older) wrote or maintained a personal blog with an 8% higher probability than the average user. For men, this was 9% less likely than for the average user. More women than men are fans and followers of a brand or a famous person on the internet. Women had one or more social networking profiles with a 6% higher probability, while it was 7% less likely for men. The probability of women buying a product on the internet which had been advertised for on TV was 12% higher, while there was a 14% lower probability for men doing so (cited in Garber 2012). In line with the findings of the two studies cited so far, a PEW survey that was conducted in September 2014 (N=1597) (cf. Duggan et al. 2015) shows that Facebook is ―by far the most popular social media site‖ (Duggan et al. 2015: 2) and that women dominate on Facebook: 77% of users are female, 66% are male. These percentages are very stable: In 2013, 76% of Facebook-users were female and 66% were male (cf. Duggan et al. 2015: 5). The survey also renders more detailed information on the intensity of media use: Facebook has the highest number of users - 70% use it daily (in comparison to 36% daily Twitter users and 17% daily Pinterest users, for example) (cf. Duggan et al 2015: 10). According to a PEW study from 2012 (N=2255) (Hampton et al. 2012) ―the average female user made 21 updates to their Facebook status in the month of observation, while the average male made six‖ (Hampton et al. 2012: 4). A report by Rebtel (2011) shows that 68% of the women who want to stay in contact with acquaintances, friends and family, do so via social media but this is only true for 54% of the men (cited in Garber 2012). We can summarize following Garber (2012) and say that there is a ―Digital (Gender) Divide: Women Are More Likely Than Men to Have a Blog (and a Facebook Profile)‖. Bennett (2012) also comes to the conclusion that US-American women dominate social networks online. According to a survey based on Google Ad Planner (cf. McCandless 2012), women have 62% of all Twitter pro- Digital Communication and Privacy: Is Social Web Use gendered? Daniela Wawra 224 files, 58% of Facebook profiles and 72% of Pinterest users are female. Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are used considerably more often per month by women than by men. A minority of social web services is dominated by men: Men use, above all, social bookmarking sites 2 more often than women: 74% of Reddit users, 66% of Digg and Spotify 3 users, 64% of Google+ users and 61% of Soundcloud users are male. Reddit - ―a type of online community where users vote on content‖ 4 - is a blend of the words ‗read‘ and ‗edit‘. It is meant to sound like ―read it‖ (‗read‘ in the participle form as in ―I‘ve read it‖). Users are able to provide contents consisting of links and text. How prominently they are displayed depends on the community‘s feedback and on how old the contributions are (Anon 2015, ―reddit‖). Digg ―is a news aggregator with an editorially driven front page, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues‖ (Anon 2015, ―digg‖). According to their advertising message, it ―delivers the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet right now‖. 5 google+ advertises with statements such as ―share and discover all across google‖, ―get closer to family and friends‖, ―get more into the stuff you love‖ and also tries to attract clients with messages such as ―Make a great first impression‖, ―Show the world a little about who you are and what makes you tick,‖ ―Expand your audience‖, ―Share publicly and build a following as people discover +1 and re-share your posts with others around the world.‖ 6 The major difference between google+ and Facebook is that google+ advertises more with the offer to go public while Facebook puts emphasis on the possibility of a private space in which you can exchange personal information with people you trust. Correspondingly, Facebook‘s slogan on the German website is: ―Facebook ermöglicht es dir, mit den Menschen in deinem Leben in Verbindung zu treten und Inhalte mit diesen zu teilen.― 7 (‗Facebook allows you to connect to people in your life and share contents with them‘ (my translation)). The US-American Facebook website advertises with the sentence ―Connect with friends and the world around you on Facebook‖. 8 YouTube, google+ and Badoo are used significantly more often monthly by men than by women. Badoo is a networking site like Facebook which brings together people who share the 2 ―Social bookmarking websites are centralized online services which allow users to store and share Internet bookmarks. Such sites typically offer a blend of social and organizational tools, such as annotation, categorization, folksonomy-based tagging, commenting, and interface with other kinds of services like citation management software and social networking sites.‖ (Anon 2015, ―social bookmarking websites‖) 3 Spotify is a platform for music (cf. https: / / www.spotify.com/ de/ (18 May 2015)). 4 http: / / www.reddit.com/ about/ (18 May 2015). 5 http: / / digg.com/ about (18 May 2015). 6 http: / / www.google.com/ intl/ en/ +/ learnmore/ index.html; http: / / www.google.com/ +/ learnmore/ features.html (18 May 2015). 7 http: / / de-de.facebook.com/ (18 May 2015). 8 http: / / www.facebook.com/ (18 May 2015). 225 same interests. Badoo advertises as follows: ―Meet new people. With over 246m users, Badoo is great for chatting, making friends, sharing interests, and even dating! ‖ 9 According to Pingdom‘s social media study (2012) (quoted in Koetsier 2012), more than half of US-American users of social media are aged between 25 and 44, only 5% are 17 and younger and only 2% are 65 and older. 71% of the social media sites that were included in the Pingdom study are dominated by women. This is particularly true for Pinterest, where women‘s share is 79%. On this platform, users can share pictures including commentaries about personal interests with other users. Only websites like Slashdot and Hacker News, forums for computer nerds and freaks (according to Koetsier 2012), are dominated by male users, whose share is 70 to 90%. Reddit, Quora and Orkut also have more male than female users. Quora advertises with the slogan ―The best answer to any question‖ 10 , ―Quora aggregates questions and answers to topics. Users can collaborate by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users‘ answers‖ (Anon 2015, ―quora‖). Orkut was a social networking and discussion site for people with similar interests. It was closed down in 2014 and was until then popular mostly in Brazil and India (Anon 2015, ―orkut‖). An earlier Pingdom study from 2009 rendered comparable results to the study from 2012 which illustrate that they are relatively constant. McCandless (2013) also comes to the conclusion that social websites like Pinterest, Myspace, Twitter and Facebook are used more often by women than men. Lenhart et al. (2010) found that US-American female teenagers aged between 14 and 17 use Twitter almost twice as much as male teenagers (quoted in Thelwall 2011: 1). Consistent with the studies cited above, it is again the social websites google+, Digg and reddit that are used more by men than by women. A study that was conducted by Advertising Age (Carmichael 2011) shows which kinds of interests and character traits men and women list on Facebook. It is remarkable that clearly more women than men give information about their personal circumstances and private details like their date of birth, the fact that they were married for less than a year or that they are parents. Sports in general are of interest to both genders - with women clearly in the lead. Many more US-American women than men say that they are interested in football, while more men are interested in baseball. Cats and cooking are other areas of interest that are strongly dominated by women while ‗alcohol‘ as a field of interest is somewhat more dominated by men (Carmichael 2011). A study by Vision Critical (cited in Stadd 2013 and Cohen 2013) again confirms that Pinter- 9 http: / / badoo.com/ en/ (18 May 2015). 10 http: / / www.quora.com/ (18 May 2015). Digital Communication and Privacy: Is Social Web Use gendered? Daniela Wawra 226 est and Facebook are used more by women. Only with regard to Twitter do the results diverge from the other studies in that it is said to be used more by men than by women. Among all social platforms, Facebook clearly is the one that is used most frequently: 75% of users state that they use it daily. Unfortunately, the study did not differentiate according to the users‘ gender. So far, we have seen that empirical data on the use of the social web are relatively consistent and show a clear overall tendency, at least for the USA. We can therefore summarize by quoting Garber (2012): ―Girls may not run the world, but they dominate on the social web‖. We can thus answer the question that was asked at the beginning affirmatively: Men‘s and women‘s social web use is gendered. We could also speak of a ―digital gender divide‖ (Garber 2012, see above). The genders‘ preferences regarding different social media platforms that have been documented illustrate a tendency for women to use social media predominantly for private purposes, for example, in order to stay in contact with people they already know. Men, in contrast, seem to use the social web more in order to make new contacts and to display themselves publicly (cf. e.g. Herring 2011 and Martin 2015). This conclusion is supported by a PEW survey that was conducted in 2011 (N=2277) (Smith 2011): When asked about their motivations for using social websites, 72% of female users stated that a major reason was to keep in touch with family members, while 55% of male users gave this answer (cf. Smith 2011: 3). Also, slightly more women (70%) said they used social websites to stay ―in touch with current friends‖. 63% of the men gave this answer. In contrast, more men (56%) than women (44%) said that it was to ―connect with others about a hobby or interest‖ (Smith 2011: 4). These data show that there is an enormous overlap concerning men‘s and women‘s reasons for using social websites with distinctly gendered preferences. 2.3. (Young) women’s and men’s privacy management 2.3.1. The privacy management of male and female adults How do women and men manage their privacy on the social web? This was investigated, among other things, by the PEW Internet Project 11 on ―Privacy management on social media sites‖ (cf. Madden 2012). PEW‘s survey about privacy management among women and men in the USA revealed that 67% of female respondents had at least once deleted somebody from their social network, while 58% of men had done so. 67% of female users but only 48% of male users were using the highest possible privacy settings, i.e. their profiles could only be seen by friends. 23% of men and 16% of women chose partial privacy settings. The profiles of 11 http: / / www.pewresearch.org/ about/ 227 26% of male users were completely public whereas this only applied to 14% of female users‘ profiles. Lewis et al. (2008: 94), who investigated college students‘ privacy management in online social networking sites, also come to the conclusion that female students have private profiles significantly more often than male students. This indicates that women tend to protect their informational privacy more than men. 2.3.2. The privacy management of male and female teenagers The topic of privacy in social media is a particularly sensitive issue regarding teenagers, who might be in danger of handling their privacy carelessly online because of a lack of experience and knowledge concerning this matter. They can become especially vulnerable victims of privacy violations. One of the worst possible consequences is teenage suicide. This can happen when young adults are desperate after having been attacked or insulted online, i.e., cyberbullied by their peers for some time. Therefore, we will take a more detailed look at this particular age group. Within the PEW Internet Project on ―Teens, Social Media, and Privacy‖ (cf. Madden et al. 2013) a survey was conducted in 2012 among US- American teenagers regarding their behavior on the social web. The results that are relevant for our topic of discussion will be presented below (if not indicated otherwise, all data are taken from the report by Madden et al. 2013): In general, the number of teenagers and adults who use social networking sites has increased during the last years. 81% of US-American teenagers aged between 12 and 17 use social networking sites like Facebook. 75% of the girls and 60% of the boys use it daily. In a very recent PEW report (Lenhart/ Page 2015: 27) that also looked into teenagers‘ use of Facebook, boys and girls were about equally likely to use it (72% vs. 70%), while older teenage girls (aged 15 to 17) were slightly in the lead in comparison to older teenage boys (81% vs. 78%). Which personal information do teenagers share? Older teenagers (aged between 14 and 17) post a photograph of themselves on social networking sites more often than 12and 13-year-old teenagers. They also give the name of their school more often (76% vs. 56%), state their relationship status (66% vs. 50%) and their cellphone number (23% vs. 11%). 84% of the teenagers post their personal interests like favorite movies, music and books. There is no gender difference in this regard and neither is there one when it comes to information concerning a teenager‘s birthday. Often, this information is obligatory when registering, so that there can be no gender difference. Remarkable gender differences can be found in the following areas: 94% of the girls but only 89 % of the boys said that they posted a photograph of themselves on their profile. Their place of residence was revealed by 73% of the boys and 69% of the girls. 57% of the boys posted Digital Communication and Privacy: Is Social Web Use gendered? Daniela Wawra 228 their e-mail address but only 49% of the girls did so. Videos of themselves were uploaded by 27% of the boys and by 21% of the girls. Their cellphone number was revealed by 26% of the boys but only by 14% of the girls. Among the teenagers aged 14 to 17, it is even 32% of the boys and only 14% of the girls, while both groups owned mobile phones about equally often: 83% of the boys and 82% of the girls had a cellphone. Earlier US-American studies with adults also come to the conclusion that women are less likely to post their telephone number and address on the web (a summary can be found in Thelwall 2011: 2). With the exception of posting photographs of themselves online, teenage girls thus protect their informational privacy more than teenage boys. A first answer to the question of why girls post photographs of themselves more often than boys can be found in the following commentary of a 15-year-old girl who took part in the PEW study: And there‘s something that we call ‗like whores‘ because it‘s like people who desperately need ‗likes‘ so there are a couple of things they do. First is post a picture at a prime time. And I‘m not going to lie, I do that, too. So it seems that teenage girls try to present a favorable photograph of themselves on social media sites in order to be liked by others. This suggests that looks are more important to girls than to boys in connection with their desire to be appreciated by their peers. Many of the examined teenage attitudes and behaviors do not show any gender differences. The authors of the study explain this with the fact that some personal information is obligatory on social platforms or that these websites are composed in a way that make it very likely that teenagers will give this kind of information voluntarily. 12 Let us return to the PEW study. Girls have more Facebook friends than boys. A majority of teenagers feared third-party access to their personal information only ―somewhat‖ to ―a little―. Boys considerably more often (25%) said that they did not mind at all if third parties were able to see their personal information; only 19% of the girls said this. Reputation management was more important to girls than to boys: 58% of the girls had at some time already deleted comments by others about them but only 48% of the boys had done so. Also, 58% of the girls had already removed a photograph of themselves but only 33% of the boys had done so. This supports the claim made above that girls seem to be more concerned about their appearance in relation to their reputation than boys. 35% of the girls and 27% of the boys had already deleted an account completely. All this points to the 12 The following difference concerning ethnicity that was revealed in the study is also notable: African-American teenagers are less likely to give their real name in their profiles (77%) than white teenagers (95%). 229 conclusion that their reputation is more important to girls and that they are therefore more concerned about what others think about them. Girls (67%) blocked their profile for others much more often than boys did (48%). Girls (82%) deleted others more frequently from their network than boys (66%). Insider jokes and codes were also used more often by girls than by boys. Girls more often posted false information about themselves. All of this underlines the fact that girls control access to their informational privacy more than boys do. The PEW study shows that since 2006 it has become increasingly common to share personal information with others on social media platforms. A clear trend can thus be observed that informational privacy is less protected than in previous years. What are the reasons for this? According to the study, it is above all the design of the social media platforms which increasingly encourages users to give away more and more personal information. The frequent changes undertaken on these platforms and new technical possibilities like, for example, the possibility to use social platforms via smartphones and similar mobile devices, also play a role. Furthermore, an increasing number of adults, including the teenagers‘ parents, use social media. It has thus become more widespread and common to give away personal information. Also, parents‘ attitudes towards privacy issues on the social web are often careless, meaning that they do not worry about it and consequently do not raise it as an issue with their children. What kind of privacy settings do teenagers have? Girls (70%) more often than boys (50%) have private profiles that are only visible to friends. Boys on the other hand, more frequently have a completely public profile (20% of boys compared to 8% of girls). The reasons for their chosen privacy settings can be found in the following representative comments from the teenage respondents: A male teenager (aged 16) said: ―I have privacy settings I just don‘t really use them because I don‘t post anything that I find private.‖ An interesting follow-up question here would be about where he would draw the boundary between private and public matters. A female teenager (aged 15) explained: ―I don‘t think I have mine [profile or account] as private. I think mine‘s public. I really don‘t care. I don‘t really have anything to hide.‖ A female 13-year-old teenager stated that she filtered what she put on the social web: ―I feel like I kind of just have a filter in my brain. I just know that‘s not a good idea [to post revealing content].‖ As is to be expected, those teenagers with a public profile tended to say that they did not care if strangers had access to their personal information, while teenagers with private profiles were less likely to say so (41% versus 20%, respectively). Digital Communication and Privacy: Is Social Web Use gendered? Daniela Wawra 230 2.4. An empirical study among German students We conducted an empirical study at the University of Passau among German students in order to see whether the findings of the studies cited above would be confirmed or whether there would be cultural differences. 74 female students, the great majority of them from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and 57 male students, most of them from the Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics, completed a questionnaire 13 concerning their attitudes and behaviors with regard to their informational privacy online. The respondents were aged 18 to 34 and most of them were in their early twenties. Some of the results that are relevant with regard to our earlier discussion will be selected in the following. Students were asked to indicate on a scale from 1 to 10, whether they felt in control of how much of their personal information (i.e., information about themselves) was revealed to others online. 10 indicated the highest level of control, 1 the lowest. The average result was 5.9 for the female respondents and 6.28 for the male respondents. The female students thus felt slightly less in control of their privacy when being online than the male students did. The results of the Passau study are in line with earlier findings which show that women are more careful in giving away personal data than men: 37.83% of female respondents but 45.61% of male respondents stated that their e-mail address was available on the internet for others to see (not just friends and family). For 10.81% of the female students and 21.05% of the male students this was true in the case of their home address. 12.16% of the female respondents answered the question affirmatively with regard to their home phone number, while the score was 15.79% for male respondents. 8.10% of the female students stated that their cellphone phone number could be found online, whereas 12.28% of the male students said so. Only 2.7% of the female students had information about their party or political affiliation on the internet but this was the case with 7.01% of the male students. Of 13.51% of the female students, a video can be found online while this is the case with 29.82% of the male students. The groups or organizations they belong to were revealed online by 32.43% of the female and 57.89% of the male students. Only with regard to the following questions did women answer affirmatively more often than men: Whether a photograph of them could be found online was answered positively by 95.94% of the female respondents and by 85.96% of the male respondents. This supports the results of the PEW study cited above. Also, 68.91% of the female students 13 The questionnaire was compiled on the basis of the Princeton Survey Research Associates International for the Pew Research Center‘s Internet & American Life Project (2013), http: / / www.pewinternet.org/ 2013/ 09/ 05/ anonymity-privacyand-security-online/ (23 May 2014). 231 said that their date of birth was available online, whereas this was the case with 52.63% of the male students. A further finding of the Passau study is that considerably more male than female respondents said that there were things they had written with their name on it to be found on the internet: 45.61% of the male students said this but only 24.32% of the female students did so. This is in line with the conclusion drawn above that men tend to display themselves publicly more than women. It is also supported by recent studies: Martin (2015) researched ―online news commenting in the UK, US and Australia‖. 14 She found out that even in moderated comments sections, men dominate the posts. [The study] also suggests women commenters may be adopting pseudonyms to avoid gender stereotyping and abuse. […] It found that contributors with female user names generally make up less than a third, and as low as 3% (in the case of the Guardian) of the top commenters. They were also less likely to be represented among those who posted most often. The findings were consistent across digital native sites, as well as legacy print and broadcast-based services. They applied to international, metropolitan and local publications. […] The findings tally with a recent study done by Oxford statistician Emma Pierson but also with sociological accounts of men‘s control of public debates. 15 Bennett (2015) reports about a study on tweets that had been conducted by Allison Shapp and which also supports the finding that men display themselves publicly more than women on the social web: For a study on gender differences in hashtag use, Shapp pulled together a library of tweets that included 1,633 hashtags, which she then divided into ―traditional‖ tags (people, places, subjects, and events) and ―expressive‖ tags (used to express feelings, tell jokes, or otherwise offer a personal take). About 14 ―The research involved the capture, computational and content analysis of 9m comments made on homepage news and opinion stories from 15 news services, including the Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post and Sydney Morning Herald, public service broadcasters, the BBC, NPR and ABC, and newer sites like the Huffington Post, the Conversation and Texas Tribune.‖ (Martin 2015) 15 In an earlier study, Herring (2011) states: ―I was not surprised to read that 87 percent of contributors to Wikipedia are men. I‘ve been researching gender dynamics in Internet communication for 20 years, starting with mailing lists back before there was even a World Wide Web, and the Wikipedia gender imbalance is consistent with observations from my research, dating back to my very first study on the topic in 1992. In that study, I investigated the reasons for women‘s low rate of participation in an online discussion list for academic linguists. Linguistics is a field in which more than 50 percent of the Ph.D.s are earned by women, and women made up close to 40 percent of the subscribers to this particular list. The fact that they contributed less than 15 percent of the content to the discussions, even on topics of broad general interest to professional linguists, seemed anomalous.‖ Digital Communication and Privacy: Is Social Web Use gendered? Daniela Wawra 232 59 percent of female users‘ hashtags were expressive. Males‘ hashtags, however, leaned dramatically in the other direction—77 percent were traditional. The men in Shapp‘s sample seem to be prioritizing function over expression—using tags to try to get their tweets seen. 16 Men‘s tweets then are in fact seen more, they have more followers on Twitter and are all in all more successful in influencing public opinion than women‘s tweets: […] although roughly equal proportions of American men and women use Twitter, women appear to trail male users in terms of influence. Back in 2009—admittedly an eon ago in social-media terms—a Harvard Business Review study found that both men and women were significantly more likely to follow men on Twitter. Today, men dominate lists of influential Twitter users, and recent analyses using the tool Twee-Q suggest that they are approximately twice as likely to be retweeted as women are. (Bennett 2015) With regard to their reputation management activities, female students from Passau were more active than their male counterparts - which confirms earlier findings: 90.54% of the female and 89.47% of the male students said they had deleted or edited something that they had posted in the past. 77.02% of the female and 49.12% of the male respondents stated that they had asked someone to remove something that had been posted about them online. The male and female students were also asked, on a scale from 1 (not at all important) to 10 (extremely important), how important it was to them that they were in control of how much of their personal information was revealed to others on the internet. The results from both female and male students are almost the same. Their personal privacy was only slightly more important to female students than to male students: The average score for female respondents was 8.54, for male respondents it was 8.4. The study thus shows that the students feel that they are less in control of their personal privacy than they wish they were (cf. the results above for the question of how much in control they felt of their personal information: the score was 5.9 for female respondents and 6.28 for male respondents). A slightly higher percentage of male respondents were worried about how much information about them was available on the internet: 82.21% of the male students said this and 79.72% of the female students. In this respect, the Passau study did not confirm earlier findings. With regard to their reputation, more men than women said that they had had their reputation damaged before because of something that had happened online: 17.54% of the male students answered affirmatively in this regard, while it was 13.51% of the female students who said so. Ob- 16 My emphasis. 233 viously, the more thorough reputation management of the female students (see above) pays off here: Women seem to watch out more in the first place, put less potentially damaging information about themselves online and generally avoid activities more that could be potentially damaging to their reputation. Male students took measures to hide their identity more often than female students did: 85.96% of the male students said they had tried to hide or mask their identity online from certain people or organizations before, while 66.21% of the female students said so. 81.08% of the female respondents said they used their real name when posting comments, questions, or information on the internet while this was the case for 66.67% of the male respondents. Fake names or untraceable usernames were used more often by male than female respondents (77.19% compared to 70.27%, respectively). Also inaccurate or misleading information about themselves had been given more often by male than female students (70.20% compared to 51.35%, respectively). We do not know, however, in which contexts these anonymizing practices occur. They could be used to protect oneself against harassment and cyberbullying but also to stay anonymous when attacking others online for example. Contradictory to what might be expected according to the studies cited earlier, more male than female students in the Passau study said that they had tried before to keep people who might criticize, harass, or target them from being able to see their online activities: 56.14% of the male respondents gave an affirmative answer and 41.89% of the female respondents. Also, more men than women said that they had experienced something happening to them online which put them in physical danger: 12.28% of the male students and 5.4% of the female students had experienced this. A higher percentage of female respondents (20.27%) has been stalked or harassed online - in comparison to 19.3% of the male respondents. According to the Passau study, therefore, the male students clearly hide their online activities more than the female students. The reason for this could be that most of the male participants taking part in the study were students of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science. They might have a greater knowledge of how to go about it technically than most of the female students from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. This is supported by answers that were given to the question of whether they had ever tried to hide their identity from certain people or organizations on the internet. If the answer to this was ―no‖, the follow-up question was asked: Was this because they did not care or because they lacked the technical competence or would have known how to do it but it would have taken too much time. 16.22% of female respondents said they lacked the technical competence (of 22.97% ―no‖-respondents), while only 3.5% of male respondents (of 10.53% ―no‖-respondents) said so. In addition, 78.95% of the male students (in comparison to only 32.43% of Digital Communication and Privacy: Is Social Web Use gendered? Daniela Wawra 234 the female students) said that they had used services that allow you to browse the web anonymously, such as a proxy server, Tor software, or a virtual personal network. Furthermore, 57.89% of the male respondents had sometimes encrypted their communications before, but only 22.97% of the female respondents had done so. When asked about whether they thought the law provided reasonable protection of people‘s privacy online, a clear majority said that they did not consider legal protection to be sufficient, with women clearly in the lead here: 87.83% of the female students said that current laws were not good enough to protect their privacy online while 68.42% of the male students said so. Women thus express a greater need than men for protection of their personal privacy online. 3. Explanations for the gendered use of the social web 3.1. Explanations for women’s and men’s preferences of different social web platforms and activities How can the results of the studies presented above be explained? Let us first address the question of why some social websites are dominated by women and others by men. Those topics that are being searched for most frequently on social networking sites, can give us a first hint: The gendered usage patterns reflect men‘s and women‘s major interests, which obviously differ (see above). Pingdom (2009-2012) 17 directly asked its users in a survey starting in 2009: ―Why do you think certain sites attract more males than females and vice versa? We‘d love to hear what you think, so please let us know in the comments.‖ The following selection of typical answers can indicate plausible explanations for a gendered social web use: ‣ ―These statistics are interesting. I was surprised to see that females actually dominate facebook, myspace and twitter, but like one of the comments stated: women do converse more‖ (Loren Jaslyn, Jan 21, 2010). ‣ ―I guess women have more "sharing needs" than men. Most women like to tell how the day was, and to say what they want, like, talk about their feelings, etc. Why? Well, I really don‘t know. But I‘m almost sure it‘s a question of XX (not only a Social Behavior). Maybe because sharing it‘s something even physical for a woman, since we share our own bodies with babys (sic! ). Maybe... This is just my own opinion.‖ (Ana, Nov 30, 2009). 17 http: / / royal.pingdom.com/ 2009/ 11/ 27/ study-males-vs-females-in-socialnetworks/ (22 May 2015). 235 ‣ ―Hi, I agree with Ana. I see this on our site, women join and have the need to connect and share with other women. I think they also value and place high importance on building strong relationships in a different way then (sic! ) men do. So whether they are online or offline, women are reaching out and connecting― (Sandy, Nov 30, 2009). ‣ ―One word: GOSSIP― (Jules, Feb 28, 2010), i.e. this user states that women gossip more than men or put more neutrally: They talk more about social relations, which is part of connecting to others and establishing or maintaining personal relationships. ‣ ―I would say Reddit 18 and so on are about competition such as in "Who is larger, better, more attractive to the audience." Whereas the others are more about connecting with each other and staying in touch.‖ (Karin, Nov 30, 2009). ‣ ―[…] Many of these sites force you to embrace your inner being, and be authentic when expressing yourself. Reddit and the like are kind of like the obnoxious guy who just forwards links all of the time on Twitter.‖ (Matt Dollinger, Nov 30, 2009). ‣ ―This doesn‘t surprise me at all. I think women on average are drawn to create community more readily than men. And no surprise that the one exception is the geeky slashdot! ― (John Williams, Nov 30, 2009). Male users dominate Slashdot, which is a social website that mostly concentrates on technical news. 19 The next comment relates to this: ‣ ―I think only now women becoming (sic! ) more tech savvy. Because guys have always been very interested in technology and most of these sites might focus on technology based information which attracts more male users. Its (sic! ) just a (sic! ) opinion but i (sic! ) am not meaning to say that woman (sic! ) are not tech savvy but they are becoming one (sic! ).‖ (radhika, Mar 4, 2010). These comments attribute the gendered usage patterns of the social web to a more pronounced tendency of women to use social web services in order to connect with others, build personal relationships and to selfdisclose. Men, in contrast, are seen as using the social web more for competitive purposes, to retrieve technical information and less to share personal information. These explanations reflect communicative behavior that has been described as being typical for one or the other gender in various offline studies: Women generally tend to share more of their personal information with close friends, while men tend to talk more with their friends 18 Reddit is one of the social media platforms that are dominated by men. 19 cf. http: / / de.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Slashdot (18 May 2015). Digital Communication and Privacy: Is Social Web Use gendered? Daniela Wawra 236 about common experiences. Women reveal more about themselves, i.e., they open up more and their tendency towards self-disclosure is more marked. If women have a problem, they tend to communicate with someone in order to get advice, to unburden and to have a sympathetic listener. This is less the case with men. Women also tend to seek professional help more often when they have emotional, physical or mental health problems. This tendency is reflected in women‘s more frequent use of the social web in order to share personal information and problems (cf. e.g. Wawra 2004: 74f; Nosko et al. 2013: 2; Thelwall 2011: 2, 4f). Consistent with the findings from offline studies which show that women tend to communicate more in private circles and tend to choose more personal topics than men, women prefer social media that offer a platform for personal communication with people they already know and trust. Nosko et al., for example, have shown that women write more personal blogs than men and thereby reveal more about themselves (cf. Nosko et al. 2013: 2). Bennett (2015) states: [This] echoes a broader observation that linguists have made about male versus female communication: namely, that women tend to be more expressive than men. This tendency plays out in a number of contexts. Studies have found that women do more diary-style blogging, while men‘s blogs tend to feature more informational content; and that women are inclined to write with more personal pronouns, more emotive words, more abbreviations like lol, more emoticons, and more expressions such as ahhh, ugh, and grrr. (Bennett 2015) Thelwall (2011: 5) also mentions studies which show that women tend to self-disclose more than men, e.g. by communicating more ―positive sentiment‖ and including a greater number of emotional signals, i.e. emoticons, in their online communication. Following Thelwall (2011: 3) we can say that the communicative needs of women ―are particularly well met by the Social Web‖. This may explain why - overall - women dominate on social web platforms. The statistically less pronounced tendency towards self-disclosure of men is a widespread stereotype that is often addressed in popular culture. Men are typically portrayed as being very uncommunicative when it comes to talking about social relationships and feelings. They tend to appreciate and look for possibilities to present themselves publicly more than women (cf. e.g. Wawra 2004: 74f; Borchardt 2015; Martin 2015). 20 This is reflected in their domination of social web services that advertise with and specifically allow for public display. 20 Explanations as to why this is the case are extensively discussed in, e.g. Wawra (2004: 129-131, 148-150). 237 Men and women therefore tend to pursue different goals by using social web services: While men are more interested in public self-display and less in sharing personal issues, women, on the contrary, value the opportunity of private and personal exchange more. This may explain, for example, why men use badoo more, while women prefer Facebook: Badoo advertises prominently with the prospect of meeting new people, while Facebook, in contrast, explicitly states that it enables you to stay in contact with friends, i.e. the people who are already in your life. While this supports the assumption that men are more interested in displaying themselves publicly, it might also reflect the fact that women are more careful when it comes to entering into contact with strangers. The reason for this might be that they are more at risk here than men - we will return to this later. Herring (2011), who also found out that men dominate public debates on the internet in her research spanning over 20 years, identified the following reason various users had cited for not participating in an online discussion on a platform for academic linguists: Both men and women said their main reason for not participating was because they were intimidated by the tone of the discussions, though women gave this reason more often than men did. Women were also more negative about the tone of the list. Whereas men tended to say that they found the ―slings and arrows‖ that list members posted ―entertaining‖ (as long as they weren‘t directed at them), women reported that the antagonistic exchanges made them want to unsubscribe from the list. One women said it made her want to drop out of the field of linguistics altogether. (Herring 2011) It might sound a bit far-fetched to those with no or only rudimentary knowledge of evolutionary biology, but we still think it is worthwhile discussing it: Men self-displaying publicly more than women and being more interested in a platform that provides - according to them - ―the most interesting stories of the web‖ (see Digg above) is consistent with their evolutionary role of wooers in courtship (cf. Miller 2000: 92-93, 351-387 and Wawra 2004: 129-131). It is particularly beneficial for a man‘s reputation to present himself to large (female) audiences, to know interesting stories and capture his audience with them. This trait has been selected more for the male than for the female gender over evolutionary time spans, which is reflected in a greater tendency of men to seek opportunities that allow for public self-display. With this evolutionary rooted drive for displaying themselves publicly comes a higher frustration tolerance (which helps, among other things, during courtship) - i.e., most men are less bothered than most women when they are criticized. 21 21 Due to space constraints, we cannot go into detail here but if you are interested in this line of thought, see Wawra (2004: 124-131, 138-153). Digital Communication and Privacy: Is Social Web Use gendered? Daniela Wawra 238 It is important to note that we always cite statistical tendencies here when we make claims about men and women. Therefore, we must keep in mind that of course the respective ‗communities‘ are not homogenous and that many men can actually prefer social web services that were found to be used more by women and that many men can actually show behavior that has been described as being typical of women and vice versa. Still, the data demonstrate clear trends and allow for remarkable empirical tests on a larger scale regarding hypotheses that were proposed in offline studies about men‘s and women‘s preferences and communicative behavior before the age of ‗big data‘. The online surveys confirm that men and women tend to have different preferences in certain respects and that there is gender-typical communicative behavior to be found. Our discussion has shown that offline gender differences are mirrored online. Does it not matter at all then, whether we look into gendered offline or online behavior? And what consequences do these findings have in relation to online privacy threats? 3.2. Threats to women’s and men’s privacy online 22 Researchers widely agree that online media encourage self-disclosure more than offline media. At the same time, the risk of personal information falling into the wrong hands is potentially much greater online. It is thus essential to take precautions (e.g. by using privacy settings) if you want to make it at least less likely that your privacy will be breached (cf. also Nosko et al. 2013: 1). Women‘s typical communicative behavior, i.e., their more marked tendency towards self-disclosure, makes them more vulnerable in terms of their privacy than men and leads to greater risks for them online. Violations of privacy also always occur when a person‘s right to stay anonymous and not draw (public) attention to themselves is violated (cf. Rössler 2001: 20-22; Wawra 2014: 12). This might happen through physical and verbal harassment. In fact, women, online as well as offline, are more often stalked and cyberbullied than men (cf. Thelwall 2011: 1, 3, 5; Borchardt 2015: 13; Martin 2015). Consequently, it makes sense that it is women who worry more about their informational privacy online (cf. 22 Parts of Thelwall‘s (2011: 3-5) ―Social Web Gendered Privacy Model‖ were integrated into the following discussion. The model is supposed to explain gender differences with regard to attitudes towards privacy and corresponding (or noncorresponding! ) behavior. Thelwall‘s model includes four central dimensions that influence concerns about privacy and claim to explain gender differences in dealings with privacy. The four dimensions are physical security, harassment, social communication skills and social communication needs. 239 Thelwall 2011: 2) and who express the greater need for protection of their personal privacy online in the Passau study (see above). 23 An advantage of the social web is that nobody can be physically harmed online. If somebody annoys you, it is usually quite simple on social web platforms to just exclude them from further online communication or leave the platform yourself. Also, the web offers the means for privacy protection so that aggressors cannot find and harass you in the offline world if you are careful with your privacy management. Women can stay anonymous on the social web, if they do not (and are not required to) give away their contact details. Therefore, it is only logical that women, more so than men, control access to information that would allow people to track them down and harass them physically and/ or verbally in the offline world - i.e., their address and telephone number (cf. the Passau study and Nosko et al. 2013). Some studies also come to the conclusion that women use more aliases and code names online (cf. Nosko et al. 2013: 2; Thelwall 2011: 2). It is problematic - particularly for women - when users do not have the choice of withholding certain information: As we have seen, social web services often require certain personal information or at least encourage users to give away personal data such as their address, phone number or a photograph of themselves. Women can also protect their privacy by not posting any photographs at all (if they are given this choice), by posting fake ones or by posting modest photographs. Thelwall (2011: 2) states that women tend to post rather modest photographs of themselves. These are pictures that do not show much of women‘s physical privacy, i.e., most of the photographs on the social web do not show women revealing much cleavage, wearing very tight-fitting clothes, short skirts or bikinis. This can be explained by the fact that images on the web tend to be more harmful for women than for men. Facebook started out as a platform containing photographs of female students that were ranked by their male fellow-students according to the women‘s physical attraction. There have been similar websites which violate women‘s privacy if pictures of them are posted there without their consent. Such recontextualizations of photographs are particularly easy to be achieved on the social web. These recontextualizations cause people to lose their right to stay anonymous and to not draw attention to themselves, i.e. their privacy is violated. In fact, women are, more often than men, victims of ex-lovers, stalkers and aggressive young men, who post compromising photographs of them online (cf. e.g. Borchardt 2015: 13). In general, women in Western cultures tend to show more of 23 The claim that women worry more about their informational privacy than men do could not be unequivocally confirmed in the Passau study. This could be due to cultural differences and/ or women‘s more thorough reputation management online, i.e., being more careful with regard to which kind of personal information they put on the social web and to whom they make it accessible. Digital Communication and Privacy: Is Social Web Use gendered? Daniela Wawra 240 their bodies than men in many contexts. This makes women potentially more vulnerable to privacy violations. In Muslim societies, the contrary is true: Women hide much more of their body by wearing a veil or a burka for example, i.e., their privacy is protected more in this respect. Social networking sites are well-known to be popular among sexual offenders as they make it easy to find victims, who are above all women (as well as children). In 2007, MySpace was publicly attacked when it became known that thousands of convicted sexual offenders had been using the platform and that MySpace, being well aware of this fact, did not take any precautions against it (cf. Lewis et al. 2008: 82). This demonstrates that the social web also offers protection for criminals and sexual offenders, who themselves are able to stay anonymous and use aliases, allowing them to harass people, for example. We may summarize then that on the one hand, the social web potentially bears more threats for women, which is also due to their typical communication behavior. On the other hand, the social web can be a protected space which offers better protection against verbal and physical harassment than the offline world. 4. Conclusion: The social web and privacy as blessing and curse So far the discussion has shown that the social web can be blessing and curse for both genders, but particularly for women. It depends a lot on the individual and how they handle their privacy, whether it is more of one or the other. In the same way, privacy can be blessing and curse as will be explained below. In 1988, Allen published Uneasy access: Privacy for Women in a free society. The book has been widely and controversially discussed in the USA since then. In 2000, Allen published a follow-up article titled ―Gender and Privacy in Cyberspace―. In both of these publications, she establishes several hypotheses that are relevant to our topic. In Uneasy Access, Allen defines privacy as ―inaccessibility to others― (Allen 2000: 1177) and ―noninterference― (Allen 2000: 1180), i.e., others do not get access to a person, and privacy is seen as the right to be left alone. In Uneasy Access (1988), Allen states that women in the USA have too much of the wrong kinds of privacy. According to Allen (1988), these wrong kinds of privacy consisted of externally imposed modesty and restraint, chastity and domestic isolation. She traces these back to dominant social and economic patterns, where the man of the house goes to work while the women cares for the home. Women needed more decisional privacy according to Allen (1988). They were not independent enough in their decisionmaking. This situation has improved considerably during the last decades. Women can now live more self-determined lives when it comes to 241 their privacy. However, women are still not equal to men - neither offline nor online - with regard to the desired extent of and kinds of privacy: Women still tend to be attributed an inferior status and to be seen as easy targets. We saw this in our discussion which showed that women are more often the targets of harassments than men. Allen also identifies a lack of respect towards women and their preferred forms of privacy and intimacy (cf. Allen 2000: 1177-1179). On the other hand, the author concedes that women can use the web to their advantage in order to satisfy their specific needs (cf. Allen 2000: 1179). This is because social contacts can easily be established with other people, while the web also offers privacy, anonymity and confidentiality (cf. Allen 2000: 1186). Allen said that women would want the ‗right kinds‘ of privacy if they were available to them. Today, the social web offers that possibility. However, some women choose less privacy and less intimacy as well and voluntarily make themselves particularly accessible to others (cf. Allen 2000: 1184f) - despite all the risks related to this. Consequently, Talbot (1998) asks the question of whether it was possible to violate one‘s own privacy (quoted in Allen 2000: 1185). It is important to differentiate between women who are forced to do so, women who make a free, conscious decision (cf. Allen 2000: 1186) and women, who accidentally do so. Allen states that as liberals, we can criticize this but must tolerate it nonetheless. We would go further and prefer an attitude of actual acceptance if a woman makes a conscious decision. Only then would her decisional privacy really be respected. Allen‘s discussion of privacy prior to and in the digital age leads to the following conclusion: Privacy is often important, but there can be too much as well as too little privacy; subordinating as well as equalizing forms of privacy; fairly distributed, as well as unfairly distributed privacy; privacy used for good, as well as privacy used for evil […]. (Allen 2000: 1200) Thus, cyberbullying and ‗shitstorms‘, for example, flourish under the protection of anonymity, while at the same time the web allows for protection from harassment. Giving fake information about oneself on the web can be a case of privacy used for ‗evil‘ purposes or it could mean protecting one‘s privacy. We can easily create ‗the perfect‘ identity online, which bears the danger of trying to please others too much and to neglect one‘s real self and individual needs. The following two comments made by young adults who participated in the PEW study are revealing in this respect (cf. Madden et al. 2013): male (aged 16): ―[…] a lot of people either glorify themselves on Facebook or post stuff that doesn‘t show what they‘re really about, or them in real life.‖ female (aged 15): “You need to pretend that you’re something that you’re not.” Digital Communication and Privacy: Is Social Web Use gendered? Daniela Wawra 242 Consequently, there is a greater temptation and risk on the social web in comparison to the offline world regarding people presenting themselves as they want to be or as they think others would want them to be. People can thus lose their authenticity. Also, since you often communicate to a larger number of people online, the possibility is potentially higher that there will be some people among them who do not agree with your opinion. If you want to be liked by as many people as possible and avoid attacks and ‗shitstorms‘, then a convenient strategy is to adopt mainstream opinions. In comparison to boys and men, girls and women seem to be particularly in danger of losing their self as they still tend to be socialized more in a way that makes them want to please others. Consequently, they tend to be more sensitive to criticism and suffer more when exposed to verbal attacks as illustrated above. Therefore, they are more likely not to engage in (potentially) controversial discussions in the first place or to adopt the opinions of powerful others or majorities. As we have seen, women consequently have less influence on public opinion and resulting policies. During adolescence, the development of an independent, authentic personality is particularly vulnerable and this vulnerability can be even greater when the social web plays too big a role in a young adult‘s life. ‗Big data‘ and an insufficient protection of our informational and decisional privacy threaten our freedom and autonomy and our self which in the end makes us human (Lynch 2013). This is even more true for young adults whose self is still more moldable. 5. Outlook In 2011, Thelwall (2011: 13) stated that there was still a great need for systematic studies of all kinds of social websites in different national and cultural contexts. This is still true. Such studies are also relevant in practice for the owners of these platforms who could be sensitized, for example after our discussion, to rethink privacy issues, such as the settings of websites that force users to reveal certain personal information, which can be especially detrimental to women. Some authors (e.g. Lewis et al. 2008: 95-96) hope that social websites will regulate themselves once knowledge about threats to privacy has spread among their users. The social web is expected in this sense to be a self-regulating system. Up to now, first steps towards this can be identified, such as, for example, the development of various social platforms offering better privacy protection than Facebook, which, however, is still the most widely used platform. In the end, therefore, it remains questionable whether an improved privacy protection on the social web will ever occur without legal and government regulations. 243 Bibliography Allen, Anita (1988). Uneasy access: Privacy for Women in a free society. New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield. Allen, Anita (2000). ―Gender and Privacy in Cyberspace.‖ Stanford Law Review 52.5. 1175-1200. Altman, Irwin (1976). ―Privacy: A conceptual analysis.‖ Environment and Behavior 8(1). 7-29. Anon (2014). ―data mining.‖ thefreedictionary. [online] thefreedictionary.com (23 April 2014). Anon (2014). ―data mining.‖ webopedia. [online] www.webopedia.com (23 April 2014). Anon (2014). ―social web.‖ wikipedia. [online] en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Social_web (30 May 2014). Anon (2015). ―digg.‖ wikipedia. [online] en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Digg (18 May 2015). Anon (2015). ―internet users worldwide.‖ statista. [online] www.statista.com/ statistics/ 273018/ number-of-internet-users-worldwide/ (22 May 2015). Anon (2015). ―orkut.‖ wikipedia. [online] en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Orkut (18 May 2015). Anon (2015). ―quora.‖ wikipedia. [online] en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Quora (18 May 2015). Anon (2015). ―reddit.‖ wikipedia. [online] en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Reddit (18 May 2015). Anon (2015). ―social bookmarking sites.‖ wikipedia. [online] en.wikipedia.org / wiki/ List_of_social_bookmarking_websites (18 May 2015). Anon (2015). ―social network users worldwide.‖ statista. [online] www.statista.com/ statistics/ 272014/ global-social-networks-ranked-by-numberof-users/ worldwide (22 May 2015). Appelquist, Daniel (et al.) (2010). ―A Standards-based, Open and Privacy-aware Social Web.‖ W3C Incubator Group Report (ed. Harry Halpin et al.). [online] http: / / www.w3.org/ 2005/ Incubator/ socialweb/ XGR-socialweb-20101206/ (30 May 2014). Bennett, Shea (2012). ―Social Media Gender Balance - Women Like Pinterest, Twitter, Men Like Reddit, Google+.‖ mediabistro. [online] www.mediabistro.com/ alltwitter/ social-gender_b24495 (1 June 2014). Bennett, Jessica (2015). ―Why Men Are Retweeted More Than Women. The gender disparity of influence on Twitter.‖ The Atlantic, June 2015. [online] www.theatlantic.com/ magazine/ archive/ 2015/ 06/ why-men-are-retweetedmore-than-women/ 392099/ (26 May 2015). Borchardt, Alexandra (2015). ―Der neue digitale Graben: Frauen sind dem Missbrauch im Internet besonders ausgesetzt.― Süddeutsche Zeitung 30 April/ 1 May 2015. 13. Carmichael, Matt (2011). ―Ad Age Stat - The Demographics of Social Media: Ad Age Looks at the Users of the Major Social Sites.‖ Advertising Age. [online] adage.com/ article/ adagestat/ demographics-Facebook-linkedin-myspacetwitter/ 227569/ (15 May 2014). Cohen, Heidi (2013). ‖Social Media Buyer Persona - 10 Questions to Ask.‖ HeidiCohen actionable marketing guide. [online] heidicohen.com/ social-mediabuyer-persona/ (18 May 2015). Digital Communication and Privacy: Is Social Web Use gendered? Daniela Wawra 244 Collins Cobuild Advanced Dictionary (Harper Collins Publishers, Heinle Cengage Learning, eds.) (2009). Glasgow/ Boston. Duggan, Maeve, Nicole B. Ellison, Cliff Lampe, Amanda Lenhart & Mary Madden (2015). ―Social Media Update 2014.‖ PEW Research Center. [online] www.pewinternet.org/ files/ 2015/ 01/ PI_SocialMediaUpdate20144.pdf (18 May 2015). Garber, Megan (2012). ―The Digital (Gender) Divide: Women Are More Likely Than Men to Have a Blog (and a Facebook Profile).‖ The Atlantic, 27 April. [online] www.theatlantic.com/ technology/ archive/ 2012/ 04/ the-digital-gend er-divide-women-are-more-likely-than-men-to-have-a-blog-and-a-Facebookprofile/ 256466/ (18 May 2015). Hampton, Keith, Lauren Sessions Goulet, Cameron Marlow & Lee Rainie (2012). ―Why most Facebook users get more than they give.‖ PEW Research Center. [online] www.pewinternet.org/ files/ old-media/ / Files/ Reports/ 2012/ PIP_Fac ebook%20users_2.3.12.pdf (18 May 2015). Herring, Susan (2011). ―Communication styles make a difference.‖ The New York Times, February. [online] www.nytimes.com/ roomfordebate/ 2011/ 02/ 02/ where-are-the-women-in-wikipedia/ communication-styles-make-a-difference (26 May 2015). Koetsier, John (2012). ―Social media demographics 2012: 24 sites including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.‖ VB News 22 August. [online] venturebeat.com / 2012/ 08/ 22/ social-media-demographics-stats-2012/ (28 May 2015). Lenhart, Amanda et al. (2010). ―Social Media & mobile internet use among teens and young adults.‖ Pew Research Center. [online] pewinternet.org/ Reports/ 2010/ Social-Media-and-Young-Adults.aspx (23 May 2015). Lenhart, Amanda & Dana Page. (2015). ―Teens, social media and technology overview 2015.‖ PEW Research Center. [online] www.pewinternet.org/ files/ 2015/ 04/ PI_TeensandTech_Update2015_0409151.pdf (22 May 2015). Lewis, Kevin, Jason Kaufman & Nicholas Christakis (2008). ―The Taste for Privacy: An Analysis of College Student Privacy Settings in an Online Social Network.‖ Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 79-100. www.wjh. harvard.edu/ ~kmlewis/ privacy.pdf (26 May 2015). Lynch, Michael (2013). ―Privacy and the threat to the self.‖ The New York Times Opinionator, June 22. [online] opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2013/ 06/ 22/ privacy-and-the-threat-to-the-self/ ? php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 (April 22 2014). Madden, Mary (2012). ―Privacy management on social media sites.‖ Pew Research Center. [online] www.pewinternet.org/ files/ oldmedia/ / Files/ Reports/ 2012/ PIP_Privacy_management_on_social_media_sites_022412.pdf (22 May 2015). Madden, Mary, Amanda Lenhart, Sandra Cortesi, Urs Gasser, Maeve Duggan, Aaron Smith & Meredith Beaton (2013). ―Teens, Social Media, and Privacy.‖ PEW Research Center. [online] www.pewinternet.org/ files/ 2013/ 05/ PIP_TeensSocial MediaandPrivacy_PDF.pdf (22 May 2015). Martin, Fiona (2015). ―Women are silenced online, just as in real life. It will take more than Twitter to change that.‖ The Guardian, 23 April 2015. [online] http: / / theguardian.com/ commentisfree/ 2015/ apr/ 23/ women-are-silencedonline-just-as-in-real-life-it-will-take-more-than-twitter-to-change-that (26 May 2015). McCandless, David (2012). ―Chicks Rule: Gender balance on social networks.‖ Information is beautiful - ideas, issues, knowledge, data - visualized! [online] www.informationisbeautiful.net/ visualizations/ chicks-rule/ (18 May 2015). 245 Miller, Geoffrey (2000). The mating mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature. New York. Nissenbaum, Helen. (2004). ―Privacy as contextual integrity.‖ Washington Law Review 17 (1). 101-139. Nosko, Amanda et al. (2013). ―Disclosure and use of privacy settings in Facebook Profiles: Evaluating the impact of media context and gender.― Social Networking 2. 1-8. Pingdom (2009). ―Study: Males vs. females in social networks.‖ Royal Kingdom blog, 27 November. [online] royal.pingdom.com/ 2009/ 11/ 27/ study-males-vsfemales-in-social-networks/ (18 June 2014). Pingdom (2012). ―Report: Social network demographics in 2012.‖ Royal Kingdom blog, 21 August. [online] www.royal.pingdom.com/ 2012/ 08/ 21/ report-socialnetwork-demographics-in-2012/ (18 June 2014). Rössler, Beate (2001). Der Wert des Privaten. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Smith, Aaron (2011). ―Why Americans use social media.‖ PEW Research Center. [online] www.pewinternet.org/ files/ old-media/ / Files/ Reports/ 2011/ Why%20 Americans%20Use%20Social%20Media.pdf (18 May 2015). Stadd, Allison (2013). ―From Social To Sale: Facebook v. Twitter v. Pinterest E- Commerce (STUDY)‖. SocialTimes. [online] www.adweek.com/ socialtimes/ social-ecommerce-study/ 487389 (18 May 2015). Storey, John (2014). ―Being in love with media.‖ Anglistik 25/ 2, Focus on Media Communication: a cross-cultural perspective (ed.: Daniela Wawra). 39-49. Talbot, Margaret (1998). ―Candid Camera.‖ New Republic, 26 October. 42. Thelwall, Mike (2011). ―Privacy and gender in the Social Web.‖ In: Trepte, Sabine, Leonhard Reinecke (eds.). Privacy online: Perspectives on privacy and selfdisclosure in the Social Web. New York: Springer. 255-269. [online] www.academia.edu/ 2637465/ Privacy_and_gender_in_the_Social_Web (15 June 2014). Wawra, Daniela (2004). Männer und Frauen im Job Interview: Eine evolutionspsychologische Studie zu ihrem Sprachgebrauch im Englischen. Münster. Wawra, Daniela (2014). ―Privacy in times of digital communication and data mining.‖ Anglistik 25/ 2. 11-38. World Newsmedia Network (2013). Global Digital Media Trendbook 2013. Chicago. [online] www.wnmn.org (18 June 2014). Daniela Wawra Chair of English Language and Culture University of Passau Digital Communication and Privacy: Is Social Web Use gendered?