JetLib News

Sleep, sex and…Twitter?

A new study suggests that people are more likely to give into the urge to check email and their Twitter account than they are to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol. While the study headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University’s Booth Business School was limited in size, covering just 205 people between the ages of 18 and 85, it seems to confirm what many of us have suspected for years.

“Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist,” Hofmann told the Guardian.

The study was primarily focused on willpower as opposed to addiction, and the moments when people were forced to resist urges to partake in an activity or deal with conflicting urges, such as the urge to sleep and the urge to stay out socializing. Sleep and sex generally trumped other urges, but checking media and work were generally put ahead of socializing and shopping urges.

“Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success,” Hofmann said.

The study found that resistance to all urges declined as the day wore on, and that people seem to do a better job of resisting the urge to smoke or drink than many may have thought, given the addictive nature of both.

“With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs – long-term as well as monetary – and the opportunity may not always be the right one,” Hofmann said. “So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still ‘steal’ a lot of people’s time.”

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

“We eat with our eyes,” Iliana Regan told me, “and then it travels to our brain, and we love the sensation of the taste and the hot. I think it does a lot for the senses.” Pretty steamy, right? Food is sexy. There can be no doubt. But just like sex, it’s not always pretty. And in food and sex alike, humans love to take pictures.

There are laws about the sex part, but food is not censored in our society. The temptation is strong in the smartphone age to share our daily deeds with the world. It makes them less mundane. Meals are miraculous, really. Food is sacred. It gives life. But the rest of us on the Internet aren’t at the table with you. We can’t taste how good it is. Sometimes, if the light’s not quite right, or you’re too close up, what feels really good to you might look really gross to us.

This is just intended as a friendly tip. We would never presume to dictate what kinds of fun are or are not allowed. We just have some… let’s call them aesthetic concerns about the lack of aesthetic concern sometimes sorely needed before posting a photo of food. It’s food, remember? It’s supposed to look delicious. It may taste delicious, but your Instagram followers, who don’t get to taste it, might lose their appetites if you’re not careful.

Food porn can be exceedingly pleasant. Professional photographers with solid equipment can make even everyday meals look irresistible. The website FoodPornDaily features one new shot every day, and they’re invariably good enough to make you say “MMMMMMmmmmmmm.” Iliana Regan has talented photographers capture the food she creates, and her images are lovely.

But a smartphone sensor won’t always do it justice, and Instagram filters tend to turn things very brown. Just something to keep in mind.

“The key is good post-processing,” says ReadWriteWeb webmaster Jared Smith, “and not just slapping an Instagram filter on. This digs to a deeper issue. Instagram has introduced a lot of people to photography that otherwise probably wouldn’t participate. They get into the filters and the like.”

“Punk as fuck,” replies production editor Curt Hopkins. “And I like that. EXCEPT FOR FOOD.”

“There have been amateur photos of everything from crimes being committed to mountains to ladies to flowers that have been lovely, arresting, striking,” Hopkins says. “But there has not been one single amateur picture of food on a social media site that does not look like a pile of grey-beige recycled meatloaf. This includes lobster and cake.”

Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier has an important counterpoint. “You put them in your feed,” he reminds us. “You followed them.”

“I unfollow people for this all the time,” I reply, “but there are some people whose tastes I mostly like, or who are my friends, and I don’t want to miss out on their lives.”

“You have to take the good and bad, then,” Brockmeier says. “Just saying – if a friend of mine is like ‘I don’t like cat pictures, stop posting them to Facebook,’ my response is, ‘You can unfriend me if you want. This is my feed. I’ll post whatever makes me happy.’ Now, if the cat pic is my cat licking herself, you might have a more valid criticism.”

What we are responding to here is the photo-culinary equivalent of cats licking their butts. The Web is a wonderful place to share photos. Lord knows there are enough ways to do it. But before you tweet your breakfast, take a look at the photo. Savor it. Then ask yourself, “Does this look good enough to eat?”

Feel free to agree or disagree in the comments.

Disclosure: Iliana Regan is the creator of the Chicago underground supper club One Sister, for which ReadWriteWeb’s Alicia Eler has done some social media consulting in the past.

Lead photo by Iliana Regan

Photo 2 by Jon Mitchell

Photo 3 by Simon Mayo, found in Twitter’s top image search results for “stroganoff”

Photo 4 (the good one) by Jennifer Moran

Photo 5 by Joel Sierra, found in Twitter’s top image search results for “sushi”

Photo 6 by Nabila Huda

A new study by Compete shows that women are adopting smartphones more quickly than men. In 2011, women outnumbered men in a study of smartphone owners by gender. This goes directly against findings in 2010, at which point there were more male than female smartphone owners. Of the types of activities done on smartphones, female-identified smartphone owners were more interested in sending text messages, accessing social networks, playing games, sharing photos and videos, conducting financial transactions and shopping online than their male counterparts. A greater percentage of men surveyed were more interested in streaming content (movies/TV) and making dinner reservations than female smartphone owners.

Of course, this study falls into the same space that all gender-specific studies from big research firms do. It conflates sex (biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women) and gender (socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women). These definitions of sex and gender are from the World Health Organization.

This study sees a clear distinction between “male” and “female,” and asserts that boys will be boys, and girls will be girls. It seems to de-emphasize gender-neutral phone features like sending text messages, access to social networks, long battery life and camera/video which score about the same across gender lines.

What if marketers thought more about the Kinsey scale and variations in gender instead of going by the same old hum-drum heteronormative model that conflates gender and sex?

For example, what about people who identify sex-wise as “female” but, if you asked them about their gender, they would respond with “boy” or “male”? How about people whose sex is male, but their gender is located more in the “girl” or “female” side of the gender spectrum? And how about folks who don’t see themselves in either realm? This study chooses to ignore them. Perhaps those concepts are too difficult for traditional marketers to grasp. If you want to go by a “two-gender” system, you’ll still find the results to this study fascinating and indicative of a much scarier trend: That we’re still living in the 1950′s.

What women really want more than their male counterparts, it says, is personal email access and pre-installed games. These results are in line with a study earlier this year from Flurry, which found that mobile gamers are more heavily female (53%) than traditional gamers (40% female).

Male smartphone owners are apparently most interested in fast Internet browsing, WiFi, speakerphone, touchscreen, high screen quality, GPS, music players, ability to search contents of the phone, QWERTY keyboard, memory card slot, ability to run more than one app at a time, integrated app store, access to 4G network and access to corporate email.

Basically, the study suggests that women want to use their smartphones for fun and personal use while men are busy conducting business on their phones. By these standards, it looks like things haven’t changed a bit since the 1950s.

What is study data like this being used for? Helping marketers create hypergendered products. The study goes on to discuss the gendered nature of Android (crazy red-eyed robot caters to people whose gender is more “male” or “boy,” if we’re going by the two-gendered system that this study works off of) in contrast with the new Verizon HTC Rhyme phone, which was released in September 2011 and is supposed to cater specifically to women. How does it do this? With a “charm call indicator which dangles from your purse and lights up when you get a call or text message.” So boys get the fierce, all-powerful robot from Hell and women get a dangly light-up purse toy trinket?

What marketers are really missing here is the difference between sex and gender, and how gender variance and a move away from the “two-gender” system can be used to make gendered actually marketing work.