Tweet O Gender

Here’s some new bullshit. There’s a new website called tweetolife that, according to its tagline, is “the science of human life in Twitter messages”. Oh boy. The idea is that you can put in phrases & find out how men & women use them. So you might come up with results that when men use the word “suck” it’s often accompanied by, say, “Favre” and when women, or teenaged girls, use “suck” it’s more often with “Bieber”.

So what’s my problem? In the About section, they explain:

We analyzed millions of tweets collected by researchers from the University of Edinburgh between November 2009 and February 2010. For gender differences, we separated the tweets into two subsets as male and female tweets by using the first names of the Twitter users.

So now we can come up with amazing data on the differences between male & female tweeters, right?

Um, no. For starters, (1) I’d like to know where they put Chris, Pat, and Alex. I assume they (2) weeded out any Twitter feeds from groups or organizations, since who is actually doing the tweeting is variable. Then, too, there’s probably (3) a shared computer or 2 (hundred thousand) out there, which means at least a few people are tweeting as people they are not. Plus there are all the (4) intentional gender switches, (5) the genderless/multiply-gendered people who don’t have an option that describes their genders, the (6) emerging trans people who are “trying on” their new gender online first, the (7) guys trying to hit on women by pretending to be women online, (8) the women using male IDs to avoid the detection of said men, etc. etc.

Someone may know you’re a dog, but no one knows if you’re male or female on the internets.

Genital Algorithm

In an attempt to get rid of the weenie waggers & masturbaters, people are trying to develop tech that would help scan for human penises when people are in chat rooms.

The idea, of course, is for people to avoid the penises.

The service may add software that can quickly scan video to determine if a penis is being shown. And users that are consistently quickly skipped over (presumably because they are exposing themselves or otherwise being disgusting) can be flagged as well. With those and other changes Chatroulette may be able to put people who actually want to talk to each other in touch much more often.

Some websites, and some users, no doubt, will want the tech to find the penises. Gay porn sites comes to mind, say.

But what this might mean for trans people? On the internet, everyone knows if you have a penis (or not)?