Stereotypes of Women in Digital Social Media

(citing RenRen[http://www.RenRen.com] as an example)

1. Introduction

Stereotyping is any commonly known public opinion about a

certain social group or a type of individual, and

includes racial, sexual and gender-specific stereotypes.

It can be defined as opinions about the characteristics,

attributes and behaviors of a specific social group; or

as a cognitive representation about the relationship

between a social group and its members.

Females have remained in a secondary position in this

androcentric culture for a long period of history, due to

the outdated social ideologies in China. The social image

of women has been built through men’s eyes and men's

definitions of women in society have become the accepted

general belief. The power of the media to control public

opinion is influenced by our male-dominated culture.

Traditional media are described as a gender-specific

technique and these kinds of media can adjust, rebuild,

produce, order, and criticize the relationship between

the two sexes. The power of women to control the public's

opinion has been dramatically weakened because of men's

control in this culture. Through men's eyes, the

stereotypical image of women has the following

characteristics: sensitive, fragile, overly emotional,

passive and submissive.

Digital social media are defined as any kind of social

media network which helps people to build and maintain

social relationships through the Internet. The origin of

this concept is based on the 1967 works of Harvard

University's psychologist Stanley Milgram, namely his

"Six Degrees of Separation", which states that everyone

or everything is six or fewer steps away, by way of

introduction, from any other person in the world.

According to ACNielsen, the global marketing firm, from

their 2012 report on China's social media, China's top 3

most popular social networking sites are RenRen, Kaixin

and Douban. So I have chosen RenRen as the source and

example for my research.

RenRen was previously known as Xiaonei, established by

Qianxiang Corporation in 2005, is China's biggest real-

name Social Networking Platform. (Real name here

referring to the fact that users must use their real

names in order to register and use the site's services.)

On the 4th October 2009, Qianxiang announced that Xiaonei

would be rebranded as RenRen. According to statistics,

RenRen accounts for 75% of the market share of real-name

social networking sites in China, covering 3,000

universities, 8,000 high schools and 7,000 companies and

1,000 foreign schools from 12 different countries. As of

October 2011, RenRen had 220 million registered users.

The users of RenRen can create and customize their own

profile page and content format, providing their users a

self-centric virtual environment.

Some characteristics of digital social media, like

RenRen, namely low-requirements for user registration,

openness, and peer-to-peer networking capabilities have

created a new communications platform, compared to the

one-to-one and one-to-many methods used by traditional

social media. This method of communication eliminates

men's control over public opinion. The number of female

users of digital social media is almost equal to the

number of male users and due to this women earn greater

power to affect and influence public opinion. However,

with the invention and development of digital social

media, is considered a double-edged sword, having both

its advantages and disadvantages.

From one aspect, the freedom, which is generated by

digital social media provides women unprecedented space

and opportunity to speak their minds, providing them with

an efficient, instantaneous and extensive platform to

understand and spread information and opinion. This

offers women the opportunity to present themselves as

they really are, rather than as what men think them to

be, and this helps to counteract the stereotypes of women

in traditional culture.

From another aspect, women still stand in less-central,

passive positions, due to the imbalance of the usage,

sharing and control of information in reality. Because

using social digital media requires some economic and

cultural bases, in which areas women often have a

distinct disadvantage due to social norms. Women tend to

have a fear of technology, and this is the main

psychological reason for their lack of acceptance of new

social media technology. The ratio of female users of

digital social media is increasing, but the social and

psychological causes for women being unable to escape

from this androcentric culture still remain. When

considering the aforementioned factors, can the emergence

of digital social media like RenRen change the

stereotypes of women, which have developed throughout

traditional media?

2. Research Methods

For this research, I have chosen to investigate three

functions of RenRen, namely, pictures, diaries and

personal status messages, comparing and analyzing them

according to the user's gender.

Photographs will be separated into four categories:

professionally shot and edited photographs, real life,

work and other photographs. The focus of the analysis

will be on whether men or women care more about self-

expression and about the image of themselves presented

through their photographs.

Diaries will be categorized into three groups: private,

social and mixed content. The private diary refers to the

author writing about personal, family and work

situations, with relation to themselves. The social diary

refers to anything written which relates to social

problems, events or the larger status quo. Mixed content

diaries are any which express the authors’ opinions and

feelings about social problems.

Personal status messages will be divided into two groups:

Emotional and rational. Emotional messages include any

which express emotion, life, family and entertainment.

Rational messages express popular science and business

information.

The selection method for this research will be random.

According to my current situation, I have chosen four

grades of students from the Southwest University of

Political Science and Law. From this selection, I have

chosen to have an equal male to female ratio. Using a

hyperlink transmitted through RenRen, QQ and other

platforms, respondents will be able to access an online

questionnaire. The reason for choosing this kind of

survey is its low-cost and time resource usage, and high-

effectiveness.

However, this style of survey has weaknesses in that they

are not typical of the whole country and all levels of

society, answers may be repetitive and the relatively low

response rate. Some academics believe that online surveys

are only suitable for finding online product consumption,

the impact of online media and the behavior of users

online. This is why this kind of survey has its necessity

and specialty.

3. Survey Data

There were 1,000 surveys given out in total and 240 came

back, with 200 of them being valid samples. According to

the categories mentioned earlier, some data has been

created through the analysis of these surveys.

Photographs

Gender Edited Real life Work Other

Men 143 4342 1576 5763

Women 2454 8379 2396 4966

Dairies

Gender Private Social Mixed

Men 1922 2987 1947

Women 3020 1892 1675

Personal status messages

Gender Emotional Rational

Men 12436 24894

Women 16707 10378

With reference to photographs, the sum of pictures of

female users was 18,195, while the number for male users’

was 11,824. Professionally shot and edited photographs

and real life photographs accounted for 13.5% and 46.1%

respectively among all the female users. The percentages

of professionally shot and edited photographs and real

life photographs were 1.2% and 36.7% respectively for

male users. According to these numbers, female users seem

to enjoy posting pictures more than male users,

especially professionally shot and edited, and real life

photographs.

When looking at the numbers for diaries, the number of

private dairies was 3,020 among female users, accounting

for 46.1%, while the number was 1,922 among male users,

accounting for 28.0%. It could be concluded that female

users post a larger number of private dairies, compared

with male users.

As can be seen from the data for personal status

messages, the percentage of emotional content for female

users was 59.5% while the percentage among male users was

33.3%. It could be seen that female users aremore

inclined to post emotional-content personal status

messages than men.

4. Discussion: Women maintain stereotypes in their

presentation of self.

Erving Goffman, as a representative of symbolic

interaction, believed that in social interaction, as in

theatrical performance, there is a front region where the

“actors” (individuals) are on stage in front of the

audience and they attempt to control or guide the

impression that others might have of them. When an

individual comes into contact with other people, he

prefers to play a role or act, rather than spread

information. Some moments of our lives can be evidence of

this theory. Individuals tend to present themselves

selectively instead of giving a real and complete self-

expression when they are using digital social media.

Compared with male users, female users prefer to post

their professionally shot and edited photographs and real

life photographs on RenRen, and most of them can be

described as “sweet” or “cute”. It can also be found that

women in digital social media tend to post these kinds of

photographs in order to boost page views and attract

followers. The personal status messages of female users

involve daily life, beauty, traveling and cooking, while

the contents of male users’ personal status messages

mostly relate to current affairs, sports, military

technology and online gaming.

Therefore, the image of female users, which is presented

by themselves, to the public coheres in part to the

stereotypes that are prompted by traditional media,

namely, them being sensitive, fragile, overly emotional,

passive and submissive.

5. Analysis of causes

(1) Female users try to attract attention by suiting

traditional values.

Women’s self-expression in digital social media still

caters, to some degree, to traditional androcentric

values because of their lack of critical insight and

subjective consciousness, even though digital social

media allows the opportunity and possibility for women to

express themselves. Many female users are likely to post

attractive photographs of themselves to attract

attention. Moreover, in the description of appearance

they attempt to say some negative phrases like “I've put

on weight again”, and “My face has gotten rounder” as

compensation for their lack of beauty.

Female users tend to present personality as well as build

femininity by displaying their appearance and figure in

order to make up for the imbalance between the two sexes,

and strengthen their ability to influence the general

public. As female users are likely to see themselves as

people who are seen and leave the act of seeing to men,

or transform themselves to meet the standards of men’s

attitudes and values, satisfying both their needs for

attention and men’s need to appreciate women from a

distance. Females in RenRen have become objects of

appreciation and discovery without being aware of the

fact that they are being assessed and judged by male

users. The position in society and the culture of women

has never changed, which further reinforces the

traditional gender order of society. Men’s appreciation

of beauty has become the common standard in media

including digital social media, therefore, women will

continue to remain in the position of being controlled.

(2) Women’s self-identity relies on men’s perspective.

Identity, as a multi-aspect concept in Sociology, is

related to how we understand “Who are we?” and “What’s

meaningful to us?” with gender, nation and class as its

origin. According to Anthony Giddens, identity can be

divided into two categories, self-identity and social-

identity. Social-identity tells us how each individual is

similar to others, while self-identity separates “us” as

distinct individuals. To both men and women, gender-

identity is of essential importance, because identity is

based on our position in society, which can present the

connections between us and the society we live in. In

fact, we as individuals have never stopped speculating

about ourselves or presenting ourselves through our own

words and images.

Female users are keen on posting emotional information on

digital social media, which is related to food, beauty,

cooking, traveling and personal life, as well as building

their female characteristics through mutual comments and

messages among friends. They can also create, maintain

and reinforce their gender-specific socialidentity in

digital mediaby constructing distinct social groups

through self-classification. In addition, individuals

from a certain group impose a certain identity for their

own group, but prejudice, even reject other groups, in

order to maintain a positive social identity, which can

help improve their self-esteem and eliminate their sense

of isolation.

To conclude, female users’ perspective of their gender-

specific social identity relies on men’s language and

ideologies, which means women’s identity in digital

social media is decided by men instead of women

themselves.

(3) Society's impacts on women’s self-expression

According to Pierre Bourdieu, culture can imperceptibly

influence individuals’ action by depositing into social

evaluation standards. Individuals’ action contains the

internalization of social conventions and systems. Women

become women through a process of a copying of

characteristics, which are created by social conventions

and systems.

From a certain point of view, although the construction

of women’s social image is a process of psychological

internalization, it has happened simultaneously in

certain historic and cultural backgrounds, and it is the

core concept of women's social image. Society and the

individual are two parts of a whole. Individuals’

cultural action and social reaction have the same origin

as their mental structure. Users of RenRen are both

producers and consumers at the same time. The potential

of the produced content depends on the user's social

position.

Sexual inequality has taken root in social evaluation

standards under the long-term influence of androcentric

culture. Furthermore, feminism can only be developed

through the multi-faceted fields of politics, finance and

culture, and the equal fulfillment of social and familial

rights and obligations. Due to the fact, that real

society cannot satisfy this need, many women tend to

carry their self-identityfrom the real to the virtual

world of social media. This generates a lack of rational

self-examination of online expression. This

unintentionally reinforces the traditional androcentric

culture. In this case, women's self-expression in digital

social media seems to be a fight against the traditional

limits, but in fact, it is a compromise towards the

traditional male-oriented society. Under the influence of

many years of male-centered culture, women have become

unaware that they are passive and still pleasing men's

expectations.

(4) Historic causes

Simone de Beauvoir, as a pioneer of Feminism, drew

conclusions through the analysis of women's historical,

social, cultural and psychological development, saying:

"A person is not born -- [but rather] becomes -- a

woman."

In the past, the policies for sexual equality in China

have had certain impacts, but there has been a lack of

implementation and enforcement. For instance, society

tends to pay less attention to women’s rights because of

the lack of gender sensitivity when it comes to law

making. The punishments for breaking sexual equality seem

to be blurry. We should make the rules and regulations

into words which are related to "sexual equality" and

"sexual discrimination".

6. Conclusion

Indeed, the emergence of a range of digital social media,

including RenRen, has broken the situation where men

control the power to influence public opinion. Because of

the peer-to-peer communication characteristics of digital

social media, female users have the chance to freely

present their personalities and emotions, through which

they obtain the right to communicate with men equally.

All these changes allow women opportunities to take part

in the spread of information, in order to enhance their

social status as well as alter existing stereotypes.

However, under the influence of dualistic gender notions

and traditional culture, simply offering women the chance

to express their rights instead of transforming their

awareness of their own social gender consciousness will

generate limited effects on the stereotypes of women in

digital social media.