2009-02-16

RNDP 23: More on Online


The Globe and Mail says people's financial troubles make online dating more appealing. Interestingly, back before the financial troubles, online dating was more appealing because hardworking people didn't have time for real life dating. What does this mean? It means that every time a journalist puts a profile on a dating site we can expect to get a story about how these services are growing.

SomeCards.com has line of e-cards tailored to online dating and ready for you to send to people you can't be bothered to buy a postage stamp for.

Two researchers from Indiana University have concluded that "eligible women express themselves better" than eligible men by studying text messages on Italy's real-time interactive music television channel Allmusic. The say, "it is the women who push their messages closest to the character-count limit, who use more abbreviations and insertions, and who implement more emoticons".

Their findings must be legitimate because they were expecting to find the opposite result.

3 comments:

coyote said...

Awright! We got decent peer reviews or independent confirmation on any of this? Because I think I'm seeing an e-update of the old "women talk more than men" fallacy.

The sexes likely learn and communicate differently, but I believe the consensus these days is that overall, verbal skills are more likely to differ significantly among the sexes, than across them. And that the loquacious girl stereotype was more-or-less scientifically debunked at least, ummm, a few times by now.

Well, maybe except among reporters who just discovered they can get laid on LavaLife and lightweight Italian veejays.

As long as we're going with stereotypes, have those Indiana researchers considered that maybe guys' big oafish clumsy thumbs just ain't as well adapted as women's, to those tiny, delicate li'l cellphone keys...?

4th Dwarf said...

You raise excellent questions, Coyote.

One thing we know with certainty is that you were not one of the males using the Allmusic system.

Unless they discarded your character-count maximizing texts as an outlier.

coyote said...

I'm such a yappy dog...