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.