Claire Paquet's blog

It took me a long time to see any value in Twitter, but I ultimately came around to it about a year ago. As I got more and more invested in the social network I started to really appreciate the different ways in which it is used, and to admire it as an extremely fraught system of self-expression.

A friend recently pointed me in the direction of this blog post, How Many Women Do You Follow on Twitter?. Briefly, it suggests that most people feel they’re following more women on Twitter than they actually are – similar to the phenomenon that a room which contains 17% women will often be perceived as being populated by half men and half women. As it turns out, while I would have guessed my own percentage to be a little higher, at the time I checked 56% of the people I follow on Twitter are women.

I’m frequently encouraging my quippy friends to start tweeting, and if any of them ever listened to me, these are some of the women I’d suggest they follow.

As a new member of the .dpi team I’m anxiously awaiting the next issue, .dpi’s 28^th edition, Gender-ed Cultures on the Internet. It promises to engage with some of the ideas I'm most fascinated with right now and I can barely wait for the launch this Saturday.

The internet, suffice it to say, has taken a forefront in my life of late. On one hand I feel incredibly excited about the near-infinite possibilities it presents, but I find myself lapsing into more extreme periods of 'internet guilt'. Is my near-constant use of facebook classless? And are my relationships, increasingly mediated by social media, lacking something?

{C}