As a parent of two teenage girls, I find it challenging to keep up and to safeguard against the potential for inappropriate digital indulgences that many adolescents and teens engage in. The advances that are made by information technology and the presentation of these digital and mobile devices in the market place can be overwhelming. In “The Constant Contact Generation (Exploring Teen Friendship Networks Online),” by Lyn Schofield Clark, I cringed when I read the kind of explicit text messages by teenagers that are recorded there. Test messages such as in “A peek into the Pow(d)er Room in gURL.com: gURL.com as Haven,” and “What the Heck Is Premarital Sex?” and the many more text messages that are recorded in the readings are alarming, especially when some of these girls are only thirteen years old. On the other hand, I was heartened to read that there are some teenagers who would desist from writing inappropriate text, “Yet there are also quite a few gURL.com members who are proudly, even defiantly, vaginal and intend to stay that way until they are married. Some, but by no means all of these girls offer religious or moral justifications for their pro-virginity position.”
I was unaware of the genres “slash,” “shipper” or “fan fiction,” prior to taking this class. Now that I have learned about them, “fan fiction is when a person writes stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator. ...” Seelah, a young adult female American writer explains that FF “expands our understanding of the author’s universe,” and Cryogenia, a fictional writer said, FF is accessible to anyone with an imagination and a favorite story.” In the “Draco Malfoy” reading, girls are able to write fan fiction in an anonymous forum because they have derived a great deal of fun or amusement writing by “picking up characters, putting them down and experiment with their surroundings,” or that they may just have a natural love for writing without disclosing their real names. I think that any forum that enables an individual to write, or brings out the ability of a person to write, is a good thing.
Fan fiction to my mind, should not be considered “poaching” or “copyright infringement,” because it “is self-published, mostly on the Internet, and not for profit,” according to Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer-winning novelist. Commonly cited figures find that girls make up 90% of fan fiction writers. The fact that the audience for Harry Potter and Twilight are mostly young female, it makes them (young females) natural places to observe groups of girls.” I do not think that “slash” is feminist nor anti-feminist because it promotes awareness in human sexuality, “Slash in particular raises particular issues of identity and sexualities; women writing fantasies with and for one another projected through and by same-sex desires suggests that fandom may be a queer female space.” (p.128 2.0).
Blogs are enabling a sense of community for adolescent girls by enabling them to express themselves in a way that they don’t have to face to face, in a safe environment. It does matter for girls who create communities via blogs because they can “share writing, and authors often ask and receive detailed feedback on their posting as well as support each other's work through community challenges and contests.”(p.119 2.0). Community means is an online forum whereby members are able to take part in membership practice. It is a form of information system where anyone can post content, and you reciprocate with replies and feedback. Some girls engage in dual awareness or dual audiences to target both friends and strangers. Such acknowledgment of the known and unknown contribute to the building of an online community.
The journey into the future of Cyber world is certainly shaping the way we communicate with each other. It is definitely having a great impact on the upcoming generation. However, one thing is for sure, the potential for inappropriate use of information technology would always be there.
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