Girls, Technology and Bedroom Culture

“Bedroom Culture” is the name given to nature of girls’ lives, which prevented the advancement of the academic study of girls. In the past, and in many ways still to this day, girls involvement in society was confined to the private sphere, they remained at home learning domestic trades while boys engaged in the public sphere by being involved in the education system and the “outside world”. This caused barriers for scholars who wanted to study girls and many found it difficult to locateand comprehend the agency of girls (Driscoll, 2008, p.p. 21).

Bedroom culture among girls has continued to this day, but this bedroom culture is driven by the vehicle of technology. Many girls have powerful views on politics, rights, justice and the like and they express it to their friends on facebook, text it to their friends on their phones, and email it to their teachers, but they do not blog or make their thoughts for public access. Many girls express themselves on

Skype, or web cam, or on short videos done on their desktop computers, but only their friends and family ever see it. Many girls sing to brush in front of there mirrors, play their guitars on their beds, or compose their original music on Garage Band, but they

never put their music up on public sites or become D.J.’s. This is bedroom culture, all of this can be done from the comfort of the bedroom, the private sphere.

Why then do we want to encourage girls to make their opinions, movies, and music, expressed through technology, public? Because we value girls voices and believe the world needs to hear them. We believe this technological bedroom culture has starved the public of an equal representation of what needs to be said. Girls voices tend to be a minority in terms of what is represented in technology but they are not a minority in terms of the population of the world. Let's bring the girls ideas out of the bedroom and into the public!

INTERNET DISRUPTED!!!

We also want to disrupt the internet and technological public sphere. The pictures I show around this post are results from a Google image search of girls and their relationship with technology. What do we typically see? Smiling, pink, middle-class, mostly white, happy girls whose family can afford to get them their own laptop at age eight. Where are the queer girls? Where are the girls of ethnic minorities? Where are the girls of lower class engaging in technology? We want all girls to make their technological endeavors public so ALL girls are represented not just the "pretty" ones the internet wants us to see.

C. Driscoll. 2008. Girls Today: Girls, girl culture and girls studies, Journal of Girlhood Studies, Summer 1(1) 13-32