Girls just aren't interested in that sort of stuff.... riiiiigggghhhttttt.....

I’m sad today. I’m sad because of what I never knew, what my parents never knew, what my friends never knew, what most people go through their lives never knowing. We never knew that we are limiting children’s lives by socializing them in gender roles from the time they are born. We never knew that girls are socialized to consume and reproduce and display themselves, whereas boys are socialized to create and produce and use tools and adventure into the unnknown. The pink cap on the baby girl, the blue cap on the baby boy, and so we begin. We don’t even think about it, it’s just ‘the way it is’.

We at Girl Power 3.0 spent the day browsing through toy shops. We were looking for clues as to why we are so insecure about our relationships with technology. We found the exact same toys as when we were kids, however now that we have the tools to unpack what we see, everything has such a different meaning. The girls toys were princesses, dolls, tea sets, babies, laundry games, kitchens, puppy dogs, hair-do parlors, styling games, friendship jewels, toy houses, on and on and on. The boys toys were construction tools, rockets, cars, train sets, science kits, music production, space exploration, on and on and on.

As Lipkin (2009) comments, “few toys offered to girls offer intellectual challenges, emphasize exploration or adventure, assume leadership, or goad girls into action. This conditioning seeps in and in a world where the refrain ‘but all opportunities are open to girls now’ is heard, it’s important to think back to how messages (and which messages) are first imprinted and the preparation for what kinds of roles these toys serve (p.10).

For eight years now I’ve wanted to learn to dj, I’ve come so close so many times, but I still haven’t. When I was 18 I used to stand right up close to the dj both and watch him turn knobs and press buttons, trying to learn from observation. When I was 19 years old and living in New Zealand, I bought decks and mixer on ebay, but cancelled my payment at the last minute because I moved cities. Another time, a big time dj in Auckland offered to take me on as his apprentice, but after being sexually assaulted I left the country. I’ve been immersed in the electronic music culture for eight years now, I’m friends with dozens of DJs, music producers, sound techs, and mc’s, the VAST majority of whom are male, I’ve dated an array of them, and still, I have yet to learn for myself. Secretly, many of my girlfriends who dance on stages want to become DJs. We talk about it amongst ourselves – the kinds of music we would play, the way we would work together, the power and thrill of learning the skills – and still, none of us have.


But the world is 'open' to me, to us, we have every opportunity available, right??… so why aren’t we girls rockin dancefloors all over the world like our male friends? Well, before doing research for this project I didn’t really know why. I just thought it was my own fault for not trying hard enough, being committed enough... But something clicked today as I walked down the aisles of toys r us … From the time we are little girls, through the toys we play with and activities we are engaged in, we are subliminally indoctrinated not to produce, not to invent, not to create…

So, next year in 2012, I’m doing it. I’m going to campus radio and I’m going to learn how to use all the equipment. I’m going to get my own radio show. I’ve been afraid of failing for so long, afraid of confirming the stereotypes that girls don’t understand technology, afraid of not being able to create anything ‘good’… But fuck it. I'm going to learn, I'm going to make mistakes in public, and I'm going to get over it... And once I have some skills, I’m going to encourage all my girl friends to do the same, because we need us out there, we need each other making music, playing music, we need each other as role models and supporters, we need to hear each others brilliance, we need to create.

Just Because I'm a Girl doesn't Mean My Technology Has to be Pink

Boy version of an electronic drum kit

Girl version of an electronic drum kit

Nat and I took a stroll down the isles of Toys R US and we found that all the girls toys that were related to technology were located in the section with all the toys marketed toward boys, such as science and equipment for means of media production, such as this pink, electronic drum kit. Also, any technological toys were appropriated for girls, they were pink, flowery and represented as the "token technology". Girls being involved in technology is not the normal. While boys' telescopes, chemistry sets, and mock electronic gadgets look very close to the real thing, they are black or blue and simple, much like in real life, the girl- gadgets are glammed up, they are pink and decorated with flowers and graphics. Lipkin addresses this very socialization, appropriation, and gendering of children's toys. She explains how although gender coding runs strong for both sexes, gender-typing is much more restrictive for for boys than girls (2009, p.p. 9). Girls are assigned with the roles of physical beautification, cooking, cleaning, and having babies, and boys are assigned the jobs, working with tools and technology and earning money, and this was strongly reflected by the girls and boys toys Nat and I observed today. On one hand, girls were allowed to "cross-over" into the boy's realm, but these girl-adapted versions must be hot pink and flowery. Boys on the other hand, boys were not given this freedom. There were no dolls or cooking sets marketed toward boys, not even in blue.

What can be made of this? Although girls are given a measure of flexibility in terms of gender socialization however, the fact that technology-based toys had to be altered and "gussied-up" to suit girls means that girls in technology is not normal, it is a token circumstance. This socialization of children, via what is available to consumers in stores, has caused the slow raise of women and girls being involved in technology. This acts as a barrier to girls when pursuing technology and production of media, because they are not supposed to do it, they were not trained to be work with it, and therefore they are tokenized when they are involved in it.

In the real world, when little girls grow up, if you are a D.J., your decks are not going to be pink. In a standard laboratory, microscopes are not going to pink. In an office, the desktops are not going to pink. Is consumer culture subtly suggesting that girls interacting with technology is a fairy-tale or merely a game of pretend? The boy's world is the real world, the norm, and as reinforced by this pink plastic the message communicated to girls is that they do not belong there.

Glammed-up girl version of a Blackberry

Barbie's pink computer, good grief!

Evaluation

There are two major ways we can evaluate the success of our project. First, is by how well we have satisfied what we have set out to accomplish by creating this blog and skill sharing our technological talents amongst each other. Second, is the practical assessment of how many people have been exposed to the messages we have been putting on the internet. How many hits does our blog have? How many followers do we have? How many comments and surveys have been sent to us?

In regards to the first method of evaluation, we set out with the following main goals:

* To produce knowledge and disrupt limiting 'girl' stereotypes that we had learned about.

* To learn from each other through skill-sharing our technological talents that enable us to communicate publicly, as self-identified girls.

* To subvert our culture's master narrative that girls and technology don't mix by learning new technological skills ourselves, without outside help.

* To support and encourage other girls to seek out technological skills so they too can speak publicly and produce their own knowledge.

* To encourage each other of our capabilities to learn various technologies, and that we can use technology as a political tool to get our voices, our stories, our ideas, our narratives, our knowledge heard.

Overall, we were successful in satisfying the majority of our goals. Through the posts on our blog, we presented our viewers with visual and written representations of popular girl stereotypes found in media and we countered these depictions with thoughtful analysis drawing from an array of feminist girlhoods theorists. Although we initially intended for Nat to skill-share her ability to create movies and edit film clips on iMovie to produce a short film to post on our blog, time did not allow us to do this. However, Erin was able to share with us all the skills to create, edit, and publish, a blog on the internet and this is how girlpowerliterally came to be. We helped to subvert the pervasive idea that girls do not belong in technology by posting interviews we conducted of successful and active "tech-girls". We also offered up critical analysis as to why and how girls access to technology have been limited in our society through commercial and hegemonic powers. We did this while identifying as girls, and speaking to a broader community of girls. We intended our blog to be a resource for empowering girls and helping them to gain confidence by dispelling the myth of our inherent inabilties when it comes to technology and contextualizing ourselves in a patriarchal, neoliberal consumer culture.

The shortcomings of this is that girls without access to the internet, due to circumstance or the lack of resources would be excluded from participating in our blog, so there is a class bias to our blog. However, we have learned that girls access to internet all around the world is increasing, so we hope that our messages can reach a broad range of girls. Another shortcoming has to do with language, in two senses. Firstly, our blog is in english, so only girls who can read in english will have access to our postings, though most computer programs will offer a 'translate' button at the top of the screen. Secondly, some of the language used in our analyses might be inaccessible to girls who have not been trained in women's studies or sociology discourses. Also, we did not get to be involved in teaching other girls outside of our group how to blog or engage in technology. However, we have had one request from a classmate for us to teach her, and we have also provided a how-to guide for certain aspects of blogging. What we, as girlpower 3.0, accomplished most effectively through this project was supporting each other to produce public messages via the internet and reassuring each other that we were capable and what we had to say was and is important.

So, the final question is, what would we change about our project, if we could have done something differently what would it have been? Since we had the disappointment of having to change ideas last minute, we wish we could have more time with the above goals in mind. We would have liked to have Nat teach our group how to film and edit film and possibly set up an event to engage girls in the skills we learned such as teaching other girls to teach themselves how to blog. The bright side of having our blog as a vehicle to engage girls was that we did not choose our audience, rather the chose us. Having the girls engage us is exciting because we are reaching a broader, more diverse group of girls, who chose to engage our project through excercising their own agency. They are free to engage with us on their own time, in their own ways. The project really takes on a life of its own. We are putting our messages out there, free for the taking, and as it turns out, over 70o people have taken...

We are absolutely amazed at how Girl Power 3.0 has taken off. We've reached over 700 people in ten countries around the world, and we've only been up and running publicly for two weeks. This is the true wonder and excitement of having a blog, every day people are accessing our content and sharing it amongst each other. We even got our first 'follower' yesterday, which means that she gets a message whenever we update a new post! Upon linking our blog to our facebooks two days ago, over 100 people accessed it this way, as we found out through the 'stats' tab available to blog administrators. The image below shows how many views we've had from different countries and what browsers and operating systems they have used to look us up.

Overall we have found the true success of this project manifested in our personal lives. All three of us can attest to having developed a new found confidence, inspiration and desire to engage the world of technology. Nat has new inspiration to pursue music production and DJing, Whitney wants to begin a blog about birth for her doula clients and Erin has rekindled her desire to be educated in graphic design. This project has now become a daily part of our lives, it extends beyond this course and has opened our eyes to the part we can play to encourage other girls to engage technology by empowering ourselves. By disseminating our knowledge and experiences in public spaces from our private spheres, we are blurring categories, and creating community in uncharted ways. We are excited to part of a phenomenon of debinarizing the public/private dichotomy that has so often functioned to silence girls voice. We have gained the confidence and the skills to continue applying our new skills in novel ways and sharing with other girls whenever we have the opportunity. Only the cyber gods know what may come of this...

Viva Girl Power 3.0!!!

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.