He-Mail E-Male

Report on Male Email Usage by The Pluto Institute

The Pluto Institute has just published a study detailing male email habits. The study originated when a group of web mistresses discovered that their correspondence patterns showed definite male email usage graphs and wondered what the determining factors could be.

Ms R U Foreal, originator of the ForeReal world wide web site, first contacted The Pluto Institute to determine whether or not studies on email usage patterns were available. When the Institute received six or seven additional requests about the same problem, they decided to conduct a study to determine peak times for email usage in the internet male population. This study, they thought, would be useful to the burgeoning internet marketing and accesss statistics community and would foster interactive commerce on the web.

The Pluto Institute is a privately funded media research group. Although based in San Francisco, its principals are from all parts of the world and its focus has always been on global media trends. It is the only media research institute active today with no ties whatsoever to the strategic defense community which gave rise to most research and futurist groups presently active in the United States.

The Pluto Institute put together a large, somewhat cumbersome research in-depth analysis document. They then selected a group of experienced psychological test administrators and submitted them to an intensive two week training session for administering the document which had been code named Stripped Bass. With very little effort, The Pluto Institute assembled a list of thirty thousand email addresses. The first determination was to assure the sex of the sample population as being 100% male. No transexuals or bisexuals were included in the study. The Institute has not revealed how they made this particular determination.

Next the administrators contacted the potential participants by email and telephone to seek agreement for them to be part of the study. From the initial calling to the thirty thousand men on the list, approximately twenty-three thousand agreed to participate, an unusually high return. It has been noted, however, that in a recent GNN study, an unusually high number of internet participants also agreed to be in a study. The reason for this high agreement rate is the subject of a further study but is not included in this one.

The twenty -three thousand participants were all interviewed for a one hour in-depth phone conversation during which time all the questions in the Stripped Bass document were covered. There were three subsequent calls or email contacts to each participant for a total of 92,000 interactions between interviewers and participants over a six month period. Nineteen thousand, six hundred and thirty two participants submitted detailed records of their email correspondence over the period of the study. Records included sender, date, time and subject information but did not include the content of the email. Additional topics in the survey covered income, education, geographical location, occupation, type of internet connection, family status, race where applicable, physiological limitations where applicable, number of years on the internet, and diet concerns while employing email.

The Pluto Institute compiled all of the answers and published the results, with clearly delineated graphs showing email usage patterns and will present a press release next week on their report, its implications and its availability.

Jorges Llosa Larraguibel, Director of Research for The Pluto Institute, was the first to record the degree of surprise and amazement that the data revealed. Not wanting to believe what he saw, he redid all the results at least five times, including rekeying the questionnaire three times. Ultimately he was convinced that the survey did in fact yield the following conclusions:

Of the twenty three thousand men surveyed, all but 1,283 had the same email usage pattern curve. What does it look like? In any given month, if the full moon were to occur on the 15th of the month, the curve would be perfectly symmetrical. This means the usage would start out low, rise gradually and reach its peak during the full moon, and then gradually decline at the same rate.

The Institute finished its study over six months ago, but was so shocked at the results that it wanted to do some more research. They were unable to find any other studies of male behavior that yielded monthly information over a more than three month time period. Therefore, according to Larraguibel, they are unable to say whether or not this usage pattern corresponds to the equivalent of the male 'moonstral' cycle, to coin a phrase if you will. "But," says Huong Chu Pham, Director of Information Services, "it seems likely that our email usage study will lead to some serious research into the whole concept of male menstrual cycles or their equivalent."

Valencia Guerrero, President of the Pluto Institute, emphatically feels that "no explanation other than that of male cycles corresponding to female menstrual cycles could possibly explain this symmetrical curve. I do not, however, expect the entire world wide medical community to take my word for it. New research should be forthcoming. Our Institute has already been contacted by the NIH (National Institute of Health) and the Office of the Surgeon General of the United States as well as the Swedish Sonnensextems Institut and the Argentinian Reactiva Sexuala Genomia Project which was begun just after World War II in Southern Argentina."

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