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Why Young Males Are No Longer the Most Important Tech Demographic
An anonymous reader writes "The Atlantic has an article discussing how 18- to 35-year-old males are losing their place as the most important demographic for tech adoption. 'Let me break out the categories where women are leading tech adoption: internet usage, mobile phone voice usage, mobile phone location-based services, text messaging, Skype, every social networking site aside from LinkedIn, all Internet-enabled devices, e-readers, health-care devices, and GPS. Also, because women still are the primary caretakers of children in many places, guess who controls which gadgets the young male and female members of the family get to purchase or even use?' The article points out that most of the tech industry hasn't figured this out yet — perhaps in part to a dearth of women running these companies."
"Internet usage, mobile phone voice usage, mobile phone location-based services, text messaging, Skype, every social networking site aside from LinkedIn, all Internet-enabled devices, e-readers, health-care devices, and GPS." --- Most of these things all revolve around communicating with others. Daughters used to spend all their time talking on the phone (watch an old episode of Gidget for an example). Now it's texting on internet devices.
Healthcare makes sense, since it's usually the mom that deals with sick kids. Ditto GPS/location services since they are driving the kids around. And e-readers are handy to use while waiting for the kids to finish with their doctor appointments or soccer games.
I draw the line at buying some minivan or SUV though.
I like my car.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
This article and your post are both yet more examples of misandric garbage being passed off as science... the article written by a corporate 'empowered' woman of course, and who knows what your interest is, but I doubt it's as altruistic as you want the reader to believe. How many people here would believe an article written by a male saying that men are the be-all end all?
It's not about offense.. it's about these ignorant people demanding that us geeks dumb things down to their level even when it's not really possible to do without sacrificing functionality that we need. There's nothing wrong with ignorance btw, because it implies that one could still want to learn. WILLFUL ignorance however, is THE issue of this society's problems today.
Being part of a dominant consumer group is NOT the same thing as being tech-relevant, or even important in terms of trending new innovations. See, in order to innovate, there needs to be a group of people who are willing to take on early adoption. This is key... most of this is done by men. As to why, I could only guess that, but my limited understanding of psychology tells me that men are the ones who are more willing to take risks to differentiate and gain advantage. Read the list in the article.. all of those things had been used by men long before they were mainstream...ie when they were initially adopted for use. This piece is just an attempt at proving some sort of gynocentric ego.
On top of that, women tend to more productive, even if they play Farmville during work time. Men do the same - they just play some other games, watch porn or talk about sports with their colleagues. On IT field it has been discovered that women's ability to multitask is a significant bonus. Men can only concentrate on one thing at a time. If something else happens, they get distracted. This is why you sometimes see people complaining about instant messages and emails during work - they cannot multitask.
unbiased citation needed, from a study not run by people with huge political conflicts of interest. This is one of those memes that is a load of rubbish. It needs to die. BOTH genders have trouble 'multitasking'.. just ask anyone who's seen a woman driving an SUV while chatting on the cellphone.
My score on Multitask 2 disagrees with you. Practice also improves my play significantly. After not having played for months I only stayed alive for 85 seconds and I fell apart with 5 tasks. My record is 105 seconds with 6 things at once. After a while it's hard for me to gather enough visual information to play each game, and they all use keyboard input which overloads that part of my brain. Towards the end I can "think" what needs to be done, but not cause my fingers to do so quickly enough.
I usually multitask when playing the piano. I...
* Get fingers positioned right (both hands of course)
* Decide on little touches like dynamics, stoccato, pedaling, rubato, what emotional content I want to convey, if any; I often make these up anew each time
* Decide on changes to the piece, like different rhythms, extra grace notes, changed chords, etc.
* Evaluate my playing--"missed note", "incorrect dynamics", "this emotional arc sucks", "I really like that passage at that speed", etc.
* Perhaps read music
* Let my mind wander, thinking about the day or interactions I had with someone or sometimes a math problem (to calibrate difficulty, I was fiddling with pointwise approximations of complex measurable functions by polynomials almost everywhere a while ago, and the non-null-homotopicness of a particular curve yesterday)
* Listen to people if they're talking around me or listen to TV if it's on; I can tune these out if I wish
Interestingly I can't respond verbally to someone while playing the piano. I can understand someone perfectly and think of a response (nodding if yes/no, for instance), but the verbal part of my brain seems to be engaged with the music. As a rule I can multitask somewhat on simple similar tasks and I can multitask to a large extent on unrelated tasks. Oh, I often juggle or otherwise occupy my hands while doing other things (eg. reading, thinking about math). I vary the patterns somewhat to keep that part of me from getting bored so it's not just tossing and catching in the same basic pattern forever.
If none of this is multitasking to you, you'll have to clarify your use of the term.