Facebook and Myspace and LiveJournal, Oh My!

In a society increasingly centered around Facebook, Myspace, LiveJournal, blogs, and various other personal spaces carved out from an almost mythological cyber space, girls are presented with more escapist opportunities than ever before. Where who you are can be tidied up in a controlled manner; a bulleted list of likes and dislikes, musical taste and extracurricular activities; it is easy to make a profile of who you want to be…not necessarily who you are. I’m guilty of it; if I think that I look anything other than pretty in a tagged picture on Facebook, I immediately untag it. There’s the email, the Facebook email, the cell phone, the house phone, the…the list goes on. I got rid of Facebook for awhile because it actually became too taxing to keep up the “internet me” in addition to the “real-life me.” Girls are so distracted, it is no wonder their diverted attentions are often mistaken for confusion or incapability. I found it interesting that in “A Virtual Room of One’s Own,” Reid-Walsh and Mitchell cast a positive shadow over the involvement of girls with the online “world.” Even in YWLP, we encourage the Big Sister’s to communicate with their Little Sister online because it offers a controlled environment. And really, that seems to be what computerization is all about; control. You can control who you are, control who you want to respond to, control how people see you, control if you look ugly, pretty, funny, bad-ass, or intimidating. You can type and re-type an email; you can write the whole thing out and then decide not to send it. The fact is that there are girls who come home from school at 3:00, and proceed to be in their virtual space interacting with virtual doppelgangers of their real-life friends until they go to sleep. When you spend the majority of your time online, real life becomes difficult to maneuver. It should be the other way around; girls should spend the majority of their life in the physical world, and have obstacles to face when it comes time to learn how to maneuver the computer. Computer skills are important; computer lives are not. I was incredibly inspired, touched, and refreshed to read the “Girls in Ghana Get Computerized” article. Picturing girls having fun by gaining knowledge about computers seems right; as it should be. Instead, we have girls imprisoned by technology and the “social” networks which accompany it. So instead of being melancholy and longing for a society where girls are active in the real world, I’m going to do something about it. I will be volunteering with our 7th graders through YWLP this week-end at the Orlando Miracle League Baseball Organization. If anyone wants to join us, please let me know!