A participant at an annual media conference tells Nader Habib about her group's research on the popular social-networking site Facebook "We form a group of 11 girls, and we decided to take the chance of doing research instead of producing a magazine or film for our graduation project in the English section at the Faculty of Mass Communication at Cairo University," Samar Essam, a participant at Media Reform: Reality and Challenges conference recently convened at Cairo University, told Al-Ahram Weekly. At first, she recalled, it was difficult for us to do the research, especially as we only really learned all the steps of research methodology in the last semester at university. However, with the guidance of our supervisor we succeeded in completing the research in the required format "Since our team consisted of friends we were able to go far beyond what the assignment required. It can take a great deal of time and effort to select a suitable subject for research, and we spent a good deal of time in the library looking for a subject that had not been researched before. We discovered that few people at the university had studied the phenomenon of Facebook, and we immediately decided that this was an opportunity not to be missed." Many young people of college age have Facebook accounts, and the site allows young people in particular to interact and to connect with each other. In fact, more young people have Facebook accounts than rush to get their official identity cards or fill out official papers! In choosing to study Facebook, added Essam, we knew that we had to be quite specific about the aspect of the site and its audience that we wanted to study. So, we decided to look at the differences between the ways in which girls and boys make use of this technology and of the Internet more generally, as well as at the different degrees of freedom in using Facebook that boys and girls enjoy. Essam and her group found that a number of studies had been carried out in this area in other countries, but that each country's results were rarely made available to others. One study, for example, showed that girls use the Internet more than boys because they want to enjoy the kind of freedom that boys have, even if this is only in virtual form. As girls ourselves, we knew very well that the society in which we live enshrines such distinctions between boys and girls, and we thought it would be interesting to examine gender differences in the virtual community, as well as in the actual one. According to Essam, the research led to many significant findings. First, boys tend to have many accounts, each with different passwords, such that they can manage who has access to their accounts. One explanation for this is that boys tend to be more adventurous than girls, or perhaps they only do this in order to annoy, without considering others or the morality of their actions. A further important issue highlighted in our research, continued Essam, was the issue of privacy. "This was seen as important by both boys and girls, and both the boys and the girls surveyed said that the freedom they experienced when sitting in front of the computer was important to them, being outside the realm of their parents' codes of conduct." Girls, however, said that they sometimes felt unsure about how they should behave online, being reluctant to abandon the generally conservative codes of conduct they adopted in real life, she added. While privacy was important to both sexes, boys said that it was far less important than it was for girls. Girls tend only to add genuine friends to their Facebook accounts, while boys seemed more keen to add acquaintances. We rarely found a girl who was prepared to add anyone to her Facebook account that she had only known electronically. Most girls also said that they did not consider their lives to be "showcases" that everyone should have the right to view, and they were far more reluctant than boys to upload pictures onto Facebook. Questions such as whether or not to upload photographs onto Facebook, whether or not to make new friends online, and whether or not to chat with people you do not know on the Internet were also highlighted in the research. Such questions also showed that boys and girls had generally different codes of conduct when it comes to Internet behaviour. However, while the research clearly showed that gender differences are very important when considering the ways in which young people use Facebook, we were surprised to find that when we posed the question of whether being a girl or a boy affects one's use of Facebook all the respondents answered that there was no difference at all in the use that girls and boys made of the site. This strange result appears to show that many young people do no realise just how much gender affects their lives. Essam also found that young people tend to choose different profile images according to the ways in which they want to project themselves to the world. Some like to show themselves in the company of friends, in order to show that they are friendly and cooperative. Girls often like to put a picture of a flower or a pet on their profiles. The idea of presenting the research at the conference came from professor Ibtsam, head of the English section at the Mass Communication Faculty at Cairo University. "Her encouragement was very important to us, particularly as we had to present it in front of assembled professors from Egypt and the Arab world," stated Essam. "This was a very good opportunity for us to continue in the field of scientific research. Despite the horrors of the presentation in front of this huge group of professors and others involved in the media, we were able successfully to use the conference to draw attention to our research."
