Individual commentary

Gender representation and gendered content consumption on social media

Angeliki Vytogianni

The world of social media has blossomed into a cultural hub and has inserted itself to almost every single person’s life and identity. Whether we use it for communication, information, stimulation, recreation or creativity flow, it certainly accounts for a big part of our daily life. Access to such a quantity of audio and visual media is a relatively new phenomenon, leading us to wonder about content consumption, standards and representation on social media platforms. A particularly interesting dive is the research on subconscious content consumption, that can reveal any de facto enforced stereotypes in society, through the simple choice that people by choosing who to follow on social media, what content they are choosing to watch. Our group is interested in exploring the extent to which social media reinforces gender stereotypes already attributed to various professions and/or interests.

In our minds, we suppose that this relatively new volume of content consumption has exacerbated the case of gender disparity on what professions and content type of each gender dominates pop culture. Most followed men on social media, and the ones supported by our peers are often political figures, top athletes or comedians, while most followed women tend to be influencers related to beauty, lifestyle, fashion. In order to test this hypothesis of ours we propose that we examine the social media accounts with which our peers interact on a daily basis and discover whether that gender disparity of type of subconscious content consumption truly applies.

To begin with research on the topic, Coelho José, Gomes Gonçalo, Matos Eduardo, and Duarte Carlos from the University of Lisbon published A Survey About Media Content Consumption in Social Network Platforms in 2013. Under their hypotheses that sources and types of social network platforms impact the type of content consumed by users, they conducted a survey on 148 active Facebook users, looking at their behaviour regarding three different types of content. Between text only posts, posts with a video, posts with an image, while also considering the posts’ origin, shared by family, friends, or official pages, the researchers investigated and characterized users’ habits regarding media content consumption regarding: the importance of shared or consumed media content; how relevant is the source of media content for the users; and how is the content’s relevance influenced by its source. The position of the paper argues that different media types are perceived differently depending on the consumption or production of content on the platforms, and sources of content are also of particular importance to social media users.

Despite the fact that this article was published almost 10 years ago, its relevancy has progressively increased and concerns in regards to subconscious content consumption on social media platforms is ever more pressing. The way people are consuming content on social networks has certainly changed, and according to a recently conducted Pew Research Center survey, large numbers of people get their news sources from social media platforms and have abandoned other, more rigid forms of media. How does this impact sexist prototypes on social network platforms? As we have all seen, such platforms are free for everyone to post and interact, leading to the spread of unrealistic standards, false information, and reproduction of gender stereotypes according to professions and interests. This leads to an overall skewed perception of oneself, as well as other people, in terms of gender, as this is the lens through which we will be examining.

Although this survey does not examine the gender disparity on content consumption per say, it provides us with valuable insight on the fact that video and image posts are the most common type of media consumed, and that Facebook users prioritised their friends’ posts more than other pages. It will also be interesting to compare with our own research, in present time, as the platforms for content sharing have expanded; one would say completely transformed since then. We can examine how these findings compare to our own results, on what type of media and profiles are the most visited by social media users. Also, considering the fact that their methodology differs to our proposed one, we can see how that will affect results. To be more specific, the survey conducted in the paper involved people rating their content consumption and behaviour on social media platforms, while we will look at the activity of users (publicly available) randomly to gauge behaviour without elements of bias. Basing our project on the findings of Coelho, Gomes, Matos and Duarte, we can delve a little bitter on how us and our peers behave on social media, adding the extra axis of gender.

References

Coelho, José, Gomes, Gonçalo, Matos, Eduardo, Duarte, Carlos. (2013). A Survey About Media Content Consumption in Social Network Platforms.

Plieger, T., Groote, O., Hensky, R., Hurtenbach, L., Sahler, S., Thönes, L.,& Reuter, M. (2021). The Association Between Sexism, Self-Sexualization, and the Evaluation of Sexy Photos on Instagram. Frontiers in Psychology.

Walker, Mason, Matsa, Katerina Eva (2021). News Consumption Across Social Media in 2021.