Johanna Blakley

There were several reasons I was happy to be invited to speak at the Fashion140 event last month: first, it was in the brand spanking new Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center (wow!), and second, it gave me an opportunity to talk about two things that I think quite a lot about these days: fashion and social media.

I've given a TED talk on each of these topics - one was about the lack of copyright protection in the fashion industry and the reasons that that might be very good for business and for the artistic craft. (The response I received to this argument from working designers at Fashion140 was exclusively positive.) My more recent TED talk, which I gave in December, was about social media and the transformative impact that I believe it will have on traditional media industries and global popular culture, including the representations we see in magazines, TV, film, games, toys ... you name it.

At the Norman Lear Center, which is based at the University of Southern California, I've been doing a great deal of research on social media and its impact on the television industry, in particular. As I was combing through data, I kept stumbling across articles about women's dominance of various social media platforms, including Flickr and Facebook, and Twitter, where 57 % of users are women according to the most recent data from Ignite. I wondered if I could find some global stats and lo and behold comScore put together a very nice report in June of last year called Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet. In it, they demonstrated that women outnumber men on social media in every region around the world, and they spend a LOT more time on these sites than men do: women spend 5.5 hours per month on social media sites compared to 3.9 hours for men.

It didn't surprise me that women were flocking to social media sites - there's quite a lot of academic research that explores why it is that women tend to be more social than men. But I must say I was shocked that this trend wasn't just appearing in rich, first world nations, but in every region around the world, where, I had thought, women's access to the Internet, and the hardware and software that they need to participate in social media, might be pretty limited.

Marty Kaplan

If you watched the CNN Republican presidential primary debate, you saw moderator John King ask the candidates what he called "this or that" questions.

Conan or Leno? Rick Santorum said he didn't watch either, but when pressed picked Leno.

Elvis or Johnny Cash? Michele Bachmann said both, but noted that she had Elvis's Christmas album on her iPod.

Newt Gingrich had no trouble picking American Idol over Dancing With the Stars.

Ron Paul picked BlackBerry over the iPhone.

Pop culture preferences correlate in an interesting way with political beliefs. That's what the Lear Center found when we looked at a poll that Zogby took into the field for us during the last presidential season. Red voters have different tastes in entertainment than blue voters, and purple voters are a fairly distinct group on their own.

I'd love to know how today's deep red voters -- compared to merely red -- would answer some of John King's questions. Elvis or Johnny Cash? Talk about splitting hairs...