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Women Control the DVR
JeiFuRi writes "While men normally hog the remote, a new study commissioned by Lifetime suggests that women are more likely to be in charge of their DVRs . Results from a survey of 1000 married woman say that 48 percent made the decision to purchase a DVR on their own and 55 percent claimed they understood the system more than their husband. Three-quarters of the women surveyed said that the reason they fell in love with DVR is that they are extremely intuitive and much easier than a VCR." The study also found some interesting things about DVR users' ad-watching habits.
And a study commissioned by ESPN found that men control the dvr.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
Women also say they are the smarter sex. Since when does it matter that they "say" they know the DVR better. Everyone knows guys are television experts.
While 99 percent of women say they use their DVRs to zap through commercial spots, 76 percent reported that they stopped for ads that are entertaining or relevant to their own interests. Women are also more likely to pause for TV and movie promos.
"DVRs give them a mechanism to find commercials that are relevant, and that's a big message," Brooks said. "It's not that people don't want commercials, it's irrelevant interruptions that turn them off."
Ok, that is a big hint to the tv industry. Women do not want irrelevant commercials, but are willing to watch and advertisement that they are interested in. Unfortunately for the tv industry, I don't think men want commercials at all...
Also FTA:
The study, which was commissioned by Lifetime,
Lifetime, the network for women, is saying, "ADVERTISE HERE! WOMEN WATCH COMMERCIALS!"
See, there's a slant to everything.
Keith
wow this was especially sexist. the disturbing part is that it was modded interesting.
forgive me, some will think this is "sexist" but deep down you all know its true:
Men hunt, women gather.
Give women the opportunity to browse and pick the best [whatever] and they'll do it better than any man. A DVR does this. You can schedule things in advance, wait for them to come in, and pick the fruit when its ripened.
channel surfing without a DVR is similar to hunting. you browse, you pick a target, and you strike at it by putting the remote down. decision made, decision executed, finality. man stuff.
mod me down if you disagree, but before you do, give it some thought. its not as wrong as society would like you to believe.
To be fair, a large number of men will also claim they are experts when they aren't.
:)
But, it is true that the entire "women can do anything" push over the last couple of decades has, on occasion, led to some individuals having more confidence in themselves then is warranted.
I'd hazard a guess that there are probably just as many men as women who are likely to do this though - it may just be more noticeable since women have just recently reached the same level as guys in ego and self-confidence, irrespective of ability
I bought my parents a TiVo with built-in DVD burner last Christmas (it's their favorite present ever, btw). My Mom is fairly technophobic, but picked up on how to program the thing right away. I wouldn't say she controls it necessarily, but let's just say I'm guessing she's pretty adament about certain show's being high up on the ole priority list.
Remember that old matra that was oft-spoke years ago: "someday the technology will be so advanced, it will be easy to use, and people will view their computers just like any other appliance"?
Guess what? It's here, and it's called TiVo! For the relative complexity of what it does, I'd have to say that TiVo has one of the most brilliantly-designed user interfaces I've ever seen.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Women especially with technology if they use it enough to get by will claim they're experts
Whoa, reel in the sexism there spanky. I work in a office that has some of the smartest women I've ever met. Level 3 hardcore technowizbang smart women.
Maybe you should work for a company that doesn't look for pants when they're hiring smart people. And dresses for receptionists?
Lifetime
Propoganda for Women.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
Most idiots don't have a clue but claim they do. That's why so many people get hurt or ruin things doing DIY. Where as the true experts who do know what they are doing get so sick of the idiots they end up not caring for what they know about.
So sure Mrs. Smith might claim she knows how something works, but I claim to know how a clock works yet have no clue beyond "cogs and stuff" (to put it as simple as possible).
To claim knowledge does not mean you have it. It means you claimed it.
I like muppets.
so is it me... or do these statistics seem normal? i mean, the results are 50% men and %50 women, when taking the margin of error into consideration.
While this was a legit news article, posting it on Slashdot seems to bring out the worst in the misogynist pigs. Really, what worth does it have on Slashdot? There are plenty of technically literate women, and those of us who have made careers out of IT, a male dominated field, take offense to comments like "Women only use DVRs because they're not smart enough to use BitTorrent like their husbands."
Spongebob controls the DVR, of course!
I think a lot of people are confusing the intent of the article when it speaks of woment "understanding" the technology. Whenever you speak of a particular product, keep in mind there are nearly an infinite layers of "understanding" one might have.
To a user, "understanding" means knowing how to fully unitilize a product's features. This is not a completely illegitimate point of view. Software engineers think that they understand the DVR because they know how the code works. I'm guessing that hardware engineers could make a pretty good case that, compared to them, the software engineers don't really "understand" the machines either. It's also a pretty good bet that marketing and advertising executives think that they "understand" the DVR, since they know how it's positioned in the marketplace, etc, etc.
You get the point... Understanding is in the mind of the beholder.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Interesting that it's only sexism when something is said about women. But when women start talking about how much smarter they are than men ... that's headline news.
Well after reading the article, I'd say that this does nothing to prove or disprove anything.
Taking a statictic on a person's opinion is not scientific in the least, heck it might not even be proper measurement.
I'm suprised that only 55% of women believed that they knew more about thier DVR than thier husbands. That number seems a bit low to me, after all, this isn't a compentency test, it's a test about belief. I'd wager that 100% of all women believe that they can navigate to and from the grocery store quicker than their husbands, even though they both live in the same house, know where the nearest grocery store is located, and probably would take the exact same route.
It doesn't even matter what the men thought, because it's still playing around with perception testing, which is interesting if you want to gather information about a perception. However, perceptive information isn't consistent amonst members within a population (even a very homogenous population) so I doubt this information will have any pratical application other than sensationalisim.
Lifetime says most women understand their Tivo system better than their husbands.
I wonder what percentage of these take-charge independent wives feigned absolute helplessness at the prospect of hooking the unit up.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
So... it's ok for you to make an assumption about him, and where he works based on a simple comment, but it's not ok for him to say anything based on his experiences?
How is that world you're living in, anyways?
If I can't smoke and swear I'm fucked.
VCR not intuitive? A VCR has basically the same sort of interface as a PVR, with the PVR quite a lot more complex. Biggest difference? You set a VCR to record by time, not by program.
On a PVR, you can just click record when you want to record something. When you want to view it, you look at the list of what you have recorded, and select what you want.
With a VCR, you first have to find a tape, check that there's nothing on it you want to keep, and then start recording. If you want to keep whats on the second half of the tape, but not the first, it's a mess. Trying to plan for this can be difficult, because you may not know what you want to keep until you've watched it.
Then, when you want to watch something, you first have to find the right tape, then you have to fast forward until you find it. You might say this is intuitive, but it's a lot more work, which in my opinion makes it feel less intuitive.
Sigh. The reason people don't set the timer on their VCRs is not that they are dumb, or unable to deal with technology. It's that the timers are very poorly designed, with arcane interfaces, and most people simply don't care or have time to futz with them. Flip your argument around. If a regular, intelligent adult can't set a clock on a VCR within 5 minutes, the engineer who created the clock should be shot.
This is precisely why we should be giving people DVRs - not just MORE technology but BETTER technology. Technology that is hard to understand and use serves nothing but a few geeks' egos.
If college educated graduates don't even understand the basics of electricity, what does that say about a society that tremendously relies on electricity?
It says that people who do understand electricity will be valued and well paid. Our society depends on lots of things - medication (but we're not all doctors), air travel (but we're not all pilots), oil (but we're not all geologists or petrochemical engineers), etc. Whilst basic skills like changing light bulbs, fuses etc will make people's day to day lives easier and are worth learning, I fail to see how not being able to make a circuit as described will affect most people. My GF is an english teacher, she loves video games, DVDs, all that electronic goodness. She has (despite my attempts to educate) very little idea how any of it really works, just like I have remarkably little knowledge of Shakespeare or Pepys.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
It's brilliant how poetic that statement is. You've illustrated the problem perfectly. Men must accept, revere, and worship women. But if women do anything offensive and we complain, we're just too weak.
The 'revenge feminism' angle is being played way too often. You can see it anywhere on TV if you have your eyes open. Men are consistently infantilized in entertainment and advertising. Since advertisements generally have less air time, they tend to be more egregious about it.
For example, in Canada there is a commercial about stopping the spread of HIV. On this commercial a talk-show host - female - is paneling three 'guy' penis-shaped objects. The woman asks if they ever 'try for sex' on the first date, and the guys all hum and haw about how women aren't objects, they respect their spirituality ... and the woman instantly sneers at them and screams at the audience 'don't trust your date'. The audience, full of women, cheers raucously at this. End message: men are sex-obsessed pigs, and only women care about the spread of STDs.
For me, true disgust with this odious gender bigotry pinnacled when I saw an episode of "Third Watch" (ok, it was a slow TV day) where a female detective rammed her gun into a guy's crotch and threatened to shoot off his toolkit. While this was happening heroic music was playing - see, the female cop was avenging the death of her sister, who OD'd on drugs bought from the male pusher. Hooray for justice!
The odd thing is that this swing of attention - which is outright pandering to the female demographic - has actually infiltrated even the steadfastly male-dominated cultures. Yesterday I was watching 'Appleseed', an anime movie. The movie is set in a post-apocalyptic future in which mankind has formed a symbiosis with engineered beings. Every positive character in the movie is female. The Prime Minister is female. The doctor who invented the 'clones' is female. The hero is female. The men in the story are either war-obsessed genocidal maniacs or just there to spout anti-woman dialogue to justify the revenge feminist angle. And this is Japanese anime!
Frankly as much as I find it offensive I also find it pathetic. There's a desperate neediness about the whole thing, which I don't believe truly 'equal' people would require in order to feel good about themselves. But to be fair, we've been suffering the 'white guys are lame, white guys can't dance, white guys can't jump, white guys can't play basketball' crap for years too. Hopefully it's all just a phase.
And, hopefully, someday I'll be able to sit down to dinner without being assaulted by countless vignettes in which men are the goofy idiots and women the wise sages - or, at least, fewer commercials about feminine itch, odor, and leakage.
While this kind of thing could be argued back and forth until the end of time (but on this show/network...blah blah...movies...blah...tit-for-tat, etc.), it's still important to recognize that this kind of pandering is WRONG, regardless as to which side is doing it.
;-D
/.
Oh, and just as a fun jab at the 'other side':
Maybe the reason there isn't any outrage over this kind of thing (feminism) is because Men don't feel threatened at all, and expect their weak, little-women to want fluff like this just to puff up their fragile egos. Men don't need the support of their peers to feel valid, while women go around creating support groups for every little thing under the sun.
DISCLAIMER: Hey, it's just a fun poke. Don't take it seriously. There's a ripple of truth, buried under an attitude of sexism. I'm just trying to fit in here on
Machoism and Feminism are equally repugnant. I'm sick of this culture of guilt that demands that for every wrong somebody/group performs against another person/group, the tables must be entirely reversed for several *generations* just to break even. The idea of holding the sons responsible for the sins of the fathers makes my blood boil, especially since I can't stand my father, and have never gained anything (except my wonderful genetic code) from his works. There is no justification for holding people responsible who had nothing to do with the initial problem.
My family never owned slaves, or benefitted from them. They were immigrants who made their own way via work using their own hands. I owe nothing in reparation.
I have never 'oppressed' a woman, and in fact come from a family full of strong women. I owe nothing to the opposite gender, and will never take any responsibility for their "plight."
I'm a white male who has never wronged an entire race or gender, and refuse to apologize (I've already made my peace with the people I have wronged personally). So if somebody has a problem with my race or gender, they can get stuffed.
Political Correctness is a symptom of the guilt-culture we live in, and I will never have any part of it. Those that do can keep the hell out of my life.