Exploring Gender Differences in Indian Urban Youth's Internet Usage

The world of connectedness has reached the whole new heights with the invent of internet, which is made up of millions of computers/phones from all around the world, linked to each other by a network of telephone lines, cables and satellite connections. It has revolutionized the way we reach and connect and gave us the whole new range of purposes to remain online. This research is an attempt to probe into the gender differences in motives of using internet. The motives were classified under six major categories, viz. entertainment. pass-time, social interaction, surveillance, shopping and eroticism, that covered almost all for which we spend most of our time on net except the use for scholarly purposes. Data was collected from 100 university students equally divided into males and females. The results revealed that there were significant differences in internet usage motives of male and female students. Their choices and preferences differed significantly for various categories, like eroticism was the main motive of internet usage for boys while girls came online for surveillance majorly and entertainment remained almost an equal motivator for both the genders. The study gives us an insight into the direction that our youth is picking up on and this might be accounted as one of the major reasons of increasing number of rapes in India and the need of psychological probing required to counsel the youth.