Women are Driving the Social Media Revolution?

I am one of the many people consumed by social networking websites, blogs, vlogs, whatever else is out there on the web for me to read and watch. It kills so much time and in as little as one hour, I have guzzled so much useless knowledge in my head that it becomes subliminal in the way I behave later on. One minute I’ll be watching a music video featuring a female artist and the next minute I’m watching a video tutorial on how to copy the makeup that was seen on that artist. The series of links that I subconsciously click time after time sometimes make me the type of person who would rather watch a video on the “latest trends for the fall season” than someone who would watch the “latest candidates for the upcoming election”. So one night I thought, wow…if some marketing company were to watch me right now and know the type of things I gravitate towards online…they’d be making so much money! So I started my paranoid “googling” rampage and I found myself a video. Johanna Blakely speaks on “social media and the end of gender”. I was confused as to what she meant by this. Did she mean that there will no longer be a difference in gender? Or the fact that women will become more dominant in the media world?

Blakely says “social media is actually going to help us dismantle some of the silly and demeaning stereotypes that we see in media and advertising about gender”. In her lecture she explains that it’s better to judge people on their interests rather than demographics according to age, race, and location and so on. If we cater to the common interests of the general public, there is less segregation when selling products to consumers and the way marketers try to sell them. For example, if social media networks monitor that woman research certain beers that men do online, the rate in which they use provocative images of scantily dressed women may reduce, therefore decreasing the stereotypes of what women mostly drink.

I link this notion of thinking as a possible solution to women in the news media industry and how they are portrayed. There are stereotypes of female news anchors that are depicted in mediums such as advertisements, movies and books. The type of message they want to convey to the audience is not taken the same way as a male anchor. A woman is dressed so she appeals to the male audience, which may lower the impression she has on her female audience as a knowledgeable anchorwoman. They are broadcasted on websites that rank the hotness of female newscasters. If that’s not taking a woman in her profession seriously then I don’t know what is. Is this because the media assumes that men are unwilling to take an anchorwoman as seriously as an anchorman? Or because women do not supply the major ratings for news programs and men need some “eye candy” because they do?

As mentioned in the article The Rise of the Female Anchor by Alessandra Stanley, “ONE female network TV anchor is a breakthrough. Two become a catfight.” This is the media’s way of attracting more viewers through conflict. If it became more widespread that women look to news programs as a source of information just as men, perhaps there can be more serious anchorwoman who hasn’t been promoted solely for her looks. In the case of Diane Sawyer’s accomplishment in the news business, she waited patiently for her rise for she was too “fetching to be a ‘serious’ journalist” when she started out. Because “shared interests and values are a far more powerful aggregator of human beings than demographic categories”, the most progressive way to target women and media is through online resources where demographics can be overruled by personal interests (Blakely). If it’s true that “women are really driving the social media revolution”, there should be a better chance of having more respected anchorwoman in the news business rather than luring the public with a headlining that promotes a catfight between two anchorwoman.

Links
Johanna Blakley: Social media and the end of gender:
http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_social_media_and_the_end_of_gender.html

Hot female News Anchors:
http://www.zimbio.com/Hot+Female+News+Anchors

Pictures
1st image:
http://brandeo.com/system/files/u1/boomer_woman_on_computer.jpg

2nd image:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&biw=1262&bih=625&q=anchorwoman&gbv=2&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=14887l21100l0l21273l38l28l10l1l1l0l367l2596l3.8.2.2l17l0&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi