Mirror, Mirror, on the Web

After completing the readings from the theoretically-heavy Girls Make Media, I was incredibly excited to read “Looking into the Digital Mirror: Reflections on a Computer Camp for Girls by Girls,” because it provided answers for many of the questions GMM led me to ask: Do safe spaces in technology exist for girls? What do these spaces look like in practice? How can we combine media literacy and media education in a progressive way, while keeping gender/age/class/race/ability/sexuality differences in the foreground?

“Digital Mirror” dealt with these issues right away, asserting that, “in addition to functional literacy skills acquired through experimentation with these and other technologies, the girls [at camp] receive opportunities to reflect on the role of communication technologies in both school and family life” (140). The camp thus realizes the importance of including both models of media education pedagogy, and also aims to keep the camp diverse and inclusive for girls of all backgrounds.

“To help prevent the exclusion of girls from lower-income backgrounds, we set
the family contribution at just $20 for each girl. We recruit girls from a
variety of socioeconomic contexts, and girls enter the camp with varying degrees
of technological literacy. In an effort to preserve the woman-centered, feminist
approach of the camp, all instruction and chaperoning is provided by women, and
student-to-student mentoring is encouraged” (140).

While the issue of a separatist space for women can be critiqued as being unhealthy for girls who will eventually have to pursue their media future in the “real world” which is currently dominated by patriarchal standards of men in authority, both GMM and “Digital Mirror” countered these claims using real-life examples of girls who said that boys almost always take over in class, that they (the girls) felt as if they were relegated to work only in front of the camera as subjects rather than producers, and that the girls needed a grrrls/womyn only space in order to fully realize their true potential. The Digital Mirror camp thus succeeds in providing a safe, feminist space which recognizes that the different experiences girls of all race/class/economic/etc. backgrounds need to be acknowledged and celebrated. This camp works with the most current media pedagogy, encouraging both critical analysis AND a reclamation of public media spaces through the act of production itself.

I believe that this example of a real-life camp provides an excellent model for what girls’ online safe spaces should look like - female-positive, collaborative efforts where a multitude of backgrounds are not only acknowledged but understood for both the challenges and opportunities they afford the girls who grew up in them. For example, rather than repeating the images of a “gendered enterprise” which include

“Microsoft PowerPoint clip art under the search topic of ‘computers’ that
continues to portray male as opposed to female users,” or “the popular Apple
Computer advertising campaign featuring a young, hip twenty-something male as
‘MAC,’ and a more stodgy male complete with business suit as ‘PC,’ notably both
White” (141),

safe spaces online should provide images and examples of people of all races, ability, genders, sexualities, classes, etc. If, for example, a young black girl never sees herself represented in the world of technology as either a girl, or as a black woman, why would she ever feel encouraged to join that world? This is true across all backgrounds – if I never saw any role models (or even simply representations) that I could personally relate to in a specific field, I would not feel confident or welcome enough to join that field.

It is thus incredibly important, as “Digital Mirror” points out, to place an “emphasis on narrative and story as a form of articulating women and girls’ experiences with technology, enabling broader potential for identity construction within digital spaces” (143). It is this confidence in one’s ability to construct their own identity that will enable the truest safe spaces for girls online. With camps such as the Digital Mirror encouraging girls to speak out, create their own media, and critically analyze what current media is telling them to be, girls will be able to form skill sets that allow them to be who they are and say what they want, and then broadcast this to the world. Their identities will be the backbone for the safe spaces that they are creating, and thus make media a form of self-expression, not self-doubt.