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created over 3 years ago | Tagged: |
Sally
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Quoted across the media as a bit of an authority on this topic Belinda had a few things to say about women and tech: 51% of all consumer electronics purchases are decided by women for example, but women often get turned off by tech branding and tech retail. 50% of women will leave tech shops without finding what they were looking for... compared to 22% of men. Yet women, according the Harvard Business Review represent a bigger opportunity than the Chinese and Indian markets combined.. Anyway - mostly I was interested in what Lady Geek or Belinda as we'll call her, had to say about email. Belinda thinks email will die and soon. In 10 years to be precise. Since my groaning inbox routinely overwhelms me, I'm quite in favour of this vision of the future. She thinks that not only is email broken and difficult - it's also too masculine and too systematic. The "new email" or the new way we communicate with each other online will have to be more empathetic and more feminine if it's going to work. She's predicting some more responsive and fluid form of communication, like instant messaging of some sort. So Google Wave is the future then? Yes, it could be. With the explosion of mobile internet, as Belinda points out, it's so much more likely that text-sized chat chunks will take over from the lengthy paragraphs of email. Twitter anyone? Short format sure seems to be working well there. I'm little divided here. I can see what she's saying but can email really die? email is just writing and writing can be male or female or good or bad. I've sent and received a few empathetic emails in my time, it didn't personally occur to me that the format is particularly male.
