Girl Power 3.0 Group Statement

What have we accomplished?

Certainly more than we set out to!

We have moved technological-media-mountains... the mountains in our minds that is.

We have overcome a collective setback, and basically planned two projects-successfully implementing one. We re-grouped halfway through class, worked together, got over the loss of a great ideas, shared our life experiences and desires and as a result found a new focus. We have gotten past the socialized idea that we as girls 'don't have anything to say'. We do!

We learned to overcome our fears, both surrounding technology, and fear of failure. We have realized that these two learned behaviours are correlated. Through the support of our group, we have gained confidence in our writing, our ability to blog, and subsequently in ourselves. We have interrogated our girlhoods for the constructs along the way that encouraged our aversions to technology preventing us from the lucrative fields that we felt were not available to us. In doing so, we have rejected the internalization of our inabilities and undertaken tasks that would have previously struck fear into our hearts. This confidence has permeated our lives, and we have all started to assert this new found confidence to other skills that have alluded us.

We worked independently, posting blogs at all hours in separate locations around the city. We came together, meeting often for hours at a time despite our busy schedules. We organized an evening where Erin facilitated a 'Learn how to Blog' session; sharing a skill she taught herself, creating an avenue for mutual production, instilling confidence in both learning and teaching. The result was a fully interactive site to collect and disseminate information pertaining to Girl Power in a more literal sense than the post-feminist appropriation we saw popularized in 90's consumer culture. We have countered consumerism, and created a blog that is free to view and free to comment on-further encouraging our ideal of produced 'for and by girls'. We have embraced our pro-sumer identity. This means we are consuming the media we produce and vice versa. In other words, reminiscent of Kearney's 'girl gaze', we are girls producing media for girls. We are simultaneously subverting popular media forms, and both creating and encouraging production of messages alternative to the pervasive ones available in pop culture, popular media and advertising.

We have learned how to communicate more effectively as a group. We have relinquished ownership of our thoughts, through communal effort and editing. We take pride in a mutual, unified product. In this project, we subvert the neo-liberal subjectivity of individualism by forming a collective. By informing other girls that our lack of technological skills and savvy is not a result of individual deficiency, but is systemic in nature arising from the cultural messages embedded in our lives. We have created space for girls to critically interrogate their relationships with technology. We are exited to be joining this ongoing dialogue.

We have spread our lived realities and analysis all over the world; our message reaching beyond what out individual voices could have done alone. We have created and entered into a community. We have entered the realm of the internet to create an alternative message to subvert that which is dominant today throughout pop culture. Like bel hooks, we want to 'talk back'. We want to encourage other girls too as well. And to investigate the systems and institutions in place that prevented us from feeling confident to in the first place. If we are saturated in media anyways, why not subvert the stereotypes presented, and allow a venue for girls to talk back!

The internet, blogging and online research techniques are by no means a new frontier for girls. We have to remember not to romanticize this idea. We are simply using technology to make available positive messages about girls to girls and they are are the ones utilizing technology for sense of community, sense of self, identity formation and expansion on the narrow amount of knowledge about girls and their experiences available in media manifestations today.

We have connected to our Girl Power, literally. We have touched the buttons, but this is only the beginning. Our project is finished but our message live go on, and Girl Power 3.0 will remain forever as an open information source on the internet. One that contributes to the knowledge about girls, and one that girls can contribute to as well.