Social Capital, Community, and Content

It is remarkable that women have caught up to men in being online. The question that comes foremost to my mind is what could be the probable reason for the closing in of the gap between the men and the women? Can we draw a causal relationship between the feminization of content and the rise of women Internet users? It is arguable that online shopping (transactions) could account for the increase in a greater number of women accessing the Internet. Since the only categories where women lead men are health and medicine and religion (Fallows, 2005). Could it be that the differential rate of adoption of technology has evened out? Furthermore, the Internet has been gendered through its social use and more importantly through its design. Shade, 2004, points out that the absence of a substantial number of women in the computer technology workplace has contributed to more male-friendly computer hardware and software designs. She however, does not advance any explanations or reasons for women catching up on men. She provides an array of descriptive statistics on how men and women differ in their use of Internet, with women tending to use the Internet more for bonding and men more for bridging roles, but fails to provide any implications that these findings might have.
Foot and Schneider, 2004, in examining crisis communication on the Web immediately after September 11 call to action the bridging role of the Internet in communicating within a dynamic environment across a multi-dimensional set of relationships. Their focus is on social mobilization through online structures during a crisis. They enumerate the different functions that the Internet fulfils during the crisis but do not provide any information on which functions helped in garnering the maximum mobilization. Foot and Schneider note that since the credibility of the source is important during a crisis, news media will retain their dominance as the content provider of choice. In my opinion, this equation may change with Internet news media or bloggers growing in power. It is another matter that they might be co-opted by the big media organizations.
With online journalism, making its presence felt more strongly, the dynamics for producing and disseminating news on the Internet has created new challenges. According to Dessaeur, 2004, these implications may include news audiences becoming more fragmented and a loss of economic credibility for some of the Internet news organizations. The news audiences may shrink in numbers but unless the news sites are content specialized, the fragmentation would be just about the numbers and not perspectives, As for the economic concerns about internet news organizations not being financially viable, most likely we will see greater collaborations or hyperlinking between online news sites or a few big Internet news organizations similar to the one observed in print and broadcast world. The journalists, however, will have to put on different hats, multitask, and contribute across different platforms. Online journalism is still evolving and to predict its future implications would be a matter of conjecture however, the manner in which it is progressing does provide sufficient insights of what to expect. We will just have to wait and see in which direction it evolves.