Entering the Girl Wide Web

I'm just going to begin the first several entries of this blog with some book recommendations. The first is a book titled Girl Wide Web: Girls, the Internet and the Negotiation of Identity (edited by Sharon Mazzarella, who is a girls studies scholar and professor at Clemson University), which was released on Peter Lang Publishing in 2005. Granted, it feels a little self-serving to start off by promoting a book in which I've written a chapter (of course, this is from a person who started a blog, so I clearly must have a self-promotion gene), but this really is a fantastic book, and it isn't so filled with academic jargon that I wouldn't recommend it to a parent.

The book explores a pretty wide range of topics regarding girls and new media (as the title suggests), from how girls use the gURL.com site (which is owned by iVillage) to discuss sexuality, to online fan communities of Chad Michael Murray (the blonde guy from "One Tree Hill"), to understanding the "Constant Contact Generation" and how the Internet can in fact, bring daughters closer to their families.

See? It's not all bad news.

In fact, the book is interesting in that it looks at how girls use the Internet in constructive ways to articulate identity and negotiate gender norms. However, another theme running through most of the chapters is how girls do this while still existing in a world that let's face it, is full of sexist stereotypes that are frankly impossible to avoid. (For example, in the gURL.com chapter, the authors note that even though it's good that the girls feel empowered to discuss issues of sexuality that they might be embarrassed to broach in real life, they also tend to use the language that you would hear in pornography and think very little about their own sexual pleasure.)

As you'll see, this "good news, bad news" theme runs through a lot of the research I'll be talking about in the blog. One of the goals of getting this work out there in the public eye should be to get rid of that "bad news" -- from stereotypical portrayals of girls as victims or vixens (borrowing from a Girl Wide Web chapter title) or uber-bullies, to sexist treatment of girls, to girls constructing and identifying themselves in harmful ways. I really do believe that getting the type of research that is found in Girl Wide Web out to the public can help reach this seemingly lofty goal.