Twitter and Girls Studies Scholars

After several years of being what I think could safely be called a freakishly prolific Facebook user, I decided to just quit cold turkey and deactivated my account in April. I admit that I was appalled at all the time I was spending online reading about other people's lives and all the energy I was putting in to writing clever status updates, but I was also more than a little freaked out after hearing a lecture from an FBI agent who specialized in "forensics in digital worlds." Even with your privacy settings jacked, your photos and information on Facebook are still pretty far from private, according to her. In any case, I've been joking that I have been using Twitter as kind of a methadone to Facebook -- a nice step-down, if you will. I'm on it far less and reading tweets takes a lot less energy.

I tend to follow a lot of journalists -- primarily those working in interactive media -- and scholars who study interactive media. I know most of them personally. Online journalism is both a former professional career for me and a research and teaching interest for me. Probably 80 percent of the tweets that I read in a given day have to do with what is happening in the online media industry as it's seen by these scholars and professionals. It's fun, and I feel fairly informed about the issues and scholarship in this arena as a result, but I do feel like we're all just talking at each other to a certain extent and repeating one another to a large extent (though often adding our own snarky commentary to the repeating).

In reading through so many of these tweets, I got to thinking: I wonder if there is a different "feel" within the Twittersphere when you're following scholars and professionals working with girls and media. It's generally a group of feminists, who are interested in equality and frank discussion, and I imagine that all of our Twitter contributions would make my own experience using Twitter a fairly different one.

So, I realized, why not start following a few girls' studies scholars on Twitter?

I searched for all the usual suspects' names -- there are dozens of professors who I thought of off the top of my head -- and I came up with nothing. Nothing! So disappointing!

First, please let me know who I'm missing. Are you on Twitter, updating the world on the latest in girls and media in 140 characters or less? Drop a line, OK? (Or follow me: @chezla).

Second, I have decided that I really need to be more committed to advancing our scholarship to whomever will read it -- on Twitter, in blogs, in journals, and hopefully, in an upcoming book.

I guess that's it. It might translate into more traditional blog posts, or it might not. Blogging is so 2004, isn't it? (At least I think that is what the new media journalists and scholars I follow on Twitter would tell you.) Stay tuned.