MIAMI UNIVERSITY the Graduate School Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

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MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

We hereby approve the Dissertation

Michele Polak

Candidate for the Degree:

Doctor of Philosophy

______Director Dr. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson

______Reader Dr. Heidi McKee

______Reader Dr. Michele Simmons

______Graduate School Representative Dr. Sally Lloyd

ABSTRACT

BEYOND DIGITAL PLAY: INTEGRATING GIRL-CREATED SUBJECTIVITY INTO THE COLLEGE COMPOSITION CLASSROOM

by Michele Polak

This dissertation focuses on the intersections between digital literacy studies and Girl Studies. Informed by current theories of the development of girls’ subjectivity, I contend that girl-created subjectivities outside of the classroom should be connected to what girls (or by the time they enter our college classroom, young women) are asked to do inside the digital classroom. I propose that girls’ practices of online identity formation before coming to college are a powerful form of digital literacy that college writing instructors should recognize and foster. In this project, I investigate the following questions: How have online writing spaces affected girls’ subjectivity before entering college? What literacy skills have girls developed from a girl-created subjectivity? Are the criteria of what constitutes girl space adaptable to the composition classroom? What are the routines and familiarities of our female students’ writing processes outside of the classroom? Are such processes and forms recognized within the academic environment? Is the notion of a girl-created subjectivity able to thrive in the academic setting and perhaps more importantly, should it? With this dissertation, I suggest that we need to have an understanding of a girl-created subjectivity and that it needs to be recognized if we as scholars are to move forward into understanding girls’ development for the sake of girls themselves. I contend that teachers of college composition should work toward allowing an integration of girls’ social activities online with their writing processes in the classroom if young women at the college level are to succeed in the identity exploration that begins in early adolescence.

BEYOND DIGITAL PLAY: INTEGRATING GIRL-CREATED SUBJECTIVITY INTO THE COLLEGE COMPOSITION CLASSROOM

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to the Faculty of

Miami University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

Michele Polak

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2011

Director: Dr. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson

Michele Polak

2011

TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE

DEDICATION vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS viii

INTRODUCTION 1 Theoretical Foundation 2 Context of Project 3 Chapter Structure 4

CHAPTER ONE: PROJECT OVERVIEW AND METHODOLOGY 6 Introduction 6 Project Design 6 Recruitment and Solicitation of Project Participants 8 Following A Feminist Research Structure 9 Data Collection 12 Online Anonymous Survey 12 Miami University First-Year Composition & Computing, Online Anonymous Survey 13 Miami University First-Year Composition & Computing, Video Interviews 16 Case Studies, Face-to-Face Interviews 16 Student Writing, In-class and Assignments 20 Conclusion 20

CHAPTER TWO: IS THIS ENGLISH CLASS? GOING DIGITAL IN THE COLLEGE COMPOSITION CLASSROOM 22 Introduction 22 Incorporating Digital Pedagogies 23 Establishing a Writing Identity 27 Realizing the Digital Writing Process 28 Making a Rhetorical Connection 29 Writing Comfortably/Writing Critically 33 Conclusion 36

CHAPTER THREE: HOW TWO FIELDS INTERSECT: LITERATURE REVIEW AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT 37 Youth Culture and Digital Literacy 37 The Critical Possibilities of Digital Literacy 37 Pedagogical Progressions in the Composition Classroom 40 A History of Girl Studies in America 42 The First Wave 43 Moving Forward 46 The Rise of Girl Culture 48 Becoming the Third Wave 49 The Riot Grrrls and DIY 51

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CHAPTER FOUR: WHERE THE gURLs ARE: A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS OF ONLINE SPACE 53 Introduction 53 Commercial Websites 56 The Girl Market 58 Site Design 59 Content 62 Institutional Websites 68 Content 68 Personal Websites 71 Site Design 73 Content 78 Complicating the Issue 82 Conclusion 84

CHAPTER FIVE: A PERSONAL WEBSITE CASE STUDY: INSIDE THE PRO-ANA MOVEMENT 86 Introduction 86 Pro-Ana Girls Online 87 Inside the Pro-Ana Site 88 Creating a Pro-Ana Identity 92

CHAPTER SIX: THE BLOGOSPHERE AND SOCIAL NETWORKING: WEB 2.0 99 Introduction 99 Enter: Web 2.0 99 The Blogosphere 101 Diaries vs. Journals 102 The Blogging Audience 104 Blogging Activism 105 The Curious Case of Tavi Gevinson, Style Rookie 106 Social Networking 111 MySpace 112 facebook 113 Twitter 114 Access 116 The Digital Divide 116 In the Institutional Setting 118 Conclusion 119

CONCLUSION: FROM THE SOCIAL SCENE TO THE ACADEMIC SCREEN: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FIELD 121 Introduction 121 Digital Literacy and the Institutional Setting 124 Students and the Traditional Writing Process 130 Teachers and the Digital Composition Classroom 133 Conclusion 135

WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED 137

APPENDIX A: Solicitation Email for Request for Participation in Recruiting Research Participants 152 APPENDIX B: Consent Form to Participate in an Interview Study 153 APPENDIX C: Notational Interview Questions for Face-to-Face Interviews 155 APPENDIX D: Survey: Gauging Digital Literacy In and Out of the Composition Classroom 157 APPENDIX E: General Student Consent Form 161 APPENDIX F: Miami University First-Year Composition & Computing Survey, Early Fall 2006 162 APPENDIX G: Miami University First-Year Composition & Computing Survey, Late Fall 2006 166 APPENDIX H: Consent Form for Participation in a Research Study, Miami University First-Year Composition & Computing, Fall 2006 170 APPENDIX I: Notational Interview Questions, Miami University First-Year Composition & Computing, Fall 2006 173

LIST OF TABLES

Table

1 Gender Breakdown of Research Respondents 11

DEDICATION

for Steph

because during this / uphill / winding out of the way path

you gave me 4am laughter

______

I pondered how this bliss would look— And would it feel as big— When I could take it in my hand— As hovering—seen—through fog—

And then—the size of this “small” life— The Sages—call it small— Swelled—like Horizons—in my vest— And I sneered—softly—“small”! (271)

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my committee for standing by me throughout the long process of this project. Michele Simmons, who has always been and continues to be excited about my research, making me excited in return; Sally Lloyd who showed me feminist and womanist spaces; Heidi McKee who never once gave up on me, and especially my Chair, Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson who not only taught me about feminist pedagogies but supported me and all my ideas from day one, long before this project was even a trickle of a possibility. I can only hope I am able to pass this strength of support onto my own students. I would like to thank my colleagues, Danielle Gray and Kristen Moore—the two best teachers I have ever met—who spent countless hours at Kofenya with me deliberating the best way to begin and end this project. I would also like to thank Trav Webster for every Thursday night at Bob’s and every Friday night in the blue chair and every moment in between. You have made me so much of who I am as a teacher and as a scholar; I could have never survived without you (and Britney). I would like to thank my closest friends who always, always thought I would succeed, even when I wasn’t so sure. Especially Russ Revock who read every word of my early writing and made me believe I was capable; Celeste Satie for all those dinners in the early years of this project, not to mention the support in too many ways to note here; and Alberta Watson who made me believe—and continues to make me believe—that I am her she-ro. Finally, I would like to thank my family for the unbelievable support emotionally, financially and spiritually. For my nieces, Amanda, Nicole, Claire, Samantha and Kate who have provided me, and will continue to provide me with research material—and purpose—for years to come. For my siblings who continue to support me no matter what idea and hair-brained scheme I toss their way. And while my mother did not live to see the completion of this project, she never once doubted I would finish it. It is because of her that I pay it forward.

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Introduction This dissertation focuses on the intersections between digital literacy studies and Girl Studies. Informed by current theories of the development of girls’ subjectivity, I contend that girl-created subjectivities outside of the classroom should be connected to what girls (or by the time they enter our college classroom, young women) are asked to do inside the digital classroom. I propose that girls’ practices of online identity formation before coming to college are a powerful form of digital literacy that college writing instructors should recognize and foster. Working through the foundational texts of Girl Studies (e.g., Gilligan, Orenstein and Pipher), I argue, following Driscoll, that a girl-created subjectivity should be recognized as its own concept other than one constructed by the adult concerns of Woman. Reviewing digital literacy theorists in Composition and Rhetoric (e.g., Alexander; Comstock; Hawisher; Kress; Selfe; Turkle) and building on their arguments, I show that girls use online positions to explore multiple subjectivities and that these pre-college experiences should be used in digital composition classes at the college level. I have addressed two fields in this dissertation: that of Composition and Rhetoric and that of Girl Studies. I have had a foot in each discipline since the beginning of my graduate career and thus designed this project around my scholarly experience; I feel well qualified to propose ideas on how to recognize a girl-created subjectivity and to encourage its growth in the college composition classroom. My struggle throughout this project had been the question of how to connect the activity I see taking place in online environments with that of my own female students in the composition classroom. Through my research, I realized that these spaces connect by way of identity forming and subjectivity creating. As rhetoricians Hawisher and Sullivan have pointed out, girls online “manage to use visual discourse to construct multiply rich selves” (288) an assertion that many Girl Studies scholars argue against when they claim that girls have lost all voice and all ability to find a sense of self as soon as they hit puberty. As I have maintained throughout this dissertation, I side with Catherine Driscoll who argues for recognition of a girl-identified subjectivity, not one that is defined by adult concepts with Woman as end point (130). My argument contributes to Driscoll’s theory yet also moves beyond by insisting that we need to have an understanding of a girl-created subjectivity and that it needs to be recognized if we as scholars are to move forward into understanding girls’ development for the sake of girls themselves. This project has enabled me to investigate the kinds of literacy

practices that young women are already doing in the college composition classroom. I contend that teachers of college composition should work toward allowing an integration of girls’ social activities online with their writing processes in the classroom if young women at the college level are to succeed in the identity exploration that begins in early adolescence.

Theoretical Foundation Catherine Driscoll in her text Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular and Cultural Theory offers theoretical positions on not only the historical narratives of adolescent girls but also girls’ placement in relation to creating and constructing a girl-identified subjectivity. Driscoll asserts that “feminist references to girlhood […] often focus less on how women currently live than on the question of what constitutes women at all,” leaving girls to function never as Subject but “as evidence for one proposition or another about women” (127). According to Driscoll, we fail to recognize girls as a construct separate from women, dismissing the experiential moments of girls’ lives, denying the opportunity for girls to create, claim and recognize their own constructions of subjectivity. She argues that girls embody a position in our culture that is perpetually in process: “the daughter’s role positions feminine adolescence as a development toward the natural end of Womanhood” (119), girls never quite claiming their own subjectivity away from that of inevitable woman. Mitchell and Reid-Walsh add, “occupying different marginalized positions according to race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and geographical location, girls—too often—still seem to be subsumed under the category of women, or are seen as some monolithic category. It is as though a very young (preschool) girl and a mature adolescent are both ‘girls’ in the same way” (17-18). Yet rhetoricians studying gender and technology argue differently: Pam Takayoshi, in her writing about girls and online space emphasizes that, “Like other groups marginalized by the uses of language, girls on the Web have taken the language used against them and used it to empower themselves” (97), effectively adapting such empowerment to continually rework their sense of self. Girls’ online space often depicts the possibilities of multiple discourses, and multiple readings, resulting in an array of subject locations. When girls create online selves, they are exhibiting a shift in contemporary authorship, one that moves “authorial positions outside the academy” (Comstock 387) and away from the gender-biased discourses found in institution- based literacy education. These self-constructed subject positions are occurring through girls’

own experiential connections and often lead to a rupturing of the silence that has been recognized in adolescent girls both inside and outside the school settings. There is conflict here: the argument of Girl Studies scholars who asserts that girls have no subject position(s) other than that of inevitable woman against the argument of the rhetoricians, who contend that girls utilize online discourse and play with many subject positions. Early Girl Studies scholars researched women’s psychological development with a goal toward understanding women’s subjectivity. Driscoll’s argument, that previous studies overlooked girl-defined subjectivity, offers a fresh approach for scholarly exploration. As a Girl Studies scholar, I see the strength of Driscoll’s argument. As a rhetorician researching online discourse, I am in agreement that various subject positions can be created in online space. It is actually by merging these two disciplines that I see a connection to the issue of a girl-based subjectivity forthcoming. Perhaps it is because I believe that girls are more rhetorically savvy than we—as educators, as researchers, as a culture—have acknowledged. With a keen awareness of audience and use of language in a familiar format of the digital environment, adolescent girls have taken a space, adapted it for their use, and are creating a prolific venue for a girl-created subjectivity.

Context of Project I am most interested in using this project to move the research already done on girls in the classroom at the middle school and high school level forward, into the college classroom setting. Recently published data tell us that a change in the environment for girls in the classroom is beginning to occur. Sara Mead, in her June 2006 report The Evidence Suggests Otherwise: The Truth About Boys and Girls, argues that “The real story is not bad news about boys doing worse; it’s good news about girls doing better,” asserting “girls have narrowed or even closed some academic gaps that previously favored boys” (3). As a teacher of traditional first-year students entering the college composition classroom, I know that many of my female students will enter with the most basic exposure to a closer-to-balanced gender environment, a very different classroom setting than I experienced as an adolescent. The move to working with college-level students for this project allowed me to address the identity issues I have been focusing on in all my research. I believe that allowing students’ identity exploration in the college composition classroom will offer scholars working in the

fields of composition and rhetoric and Girl Studies an opportunity to see young women prosper, as they use the kinds of subjectivity and locations for subjectivity they developed in early adolescence. Such identity exploration, I propose with this project, should occur within the framework of familiar forms of literacy for these students, a digital literacy students have been utilizing outside the classroom environment for some time. As a teacher of composition, I recognize Selfe’s assertion that “for teachers, literacy instruction is now inextricably linked with technology” (5). By denying access—if access is available—to learning the writing process through the utilization of new technologies in the college writing classroom seems contradictory to the purposes of teaching writing for rhetorical purposes; if girls are already accessing digital literacy to play with subject positions, a process that I argue is resulting in girl-created subjectivities, then teachers of composition need to be aware of these varying forms of literacy, writing with purpose through any means necessary. In this project, I establish that there needs to be a connection made between what girls (or by the time they enter our college classroom, young women) are doing to build identity formation and construct girl-created subjectivities outside of the classroom and what girls are doing inside the classroom by way of utilizing digital literacy. Ultimately, this project is about the college composition classroom. At risk is the space that has been afforded the contemporary young women who enter our writing programs. By allowing and encouraging a space for a girl-created subjectivity in the composition classroom, teachers of writing at the college level may begin to see a sense of self-awareness and empowerment flourish as first-year female students move out of adolescence and into adulthood. In this dissertation, I argue that we need to recognize the writing that girls are already doing as they enter our classrooms, a writing that exists in a girl-focused online space, structured by a girl-created subjectivity. I propose that an all-encompassing change in the current way college composition is taught needs to occur in order for such a space to thrive in the educational setting. Integrating new technologies into the current college composition curriculum is but one act that will enable this space to develop.

Chapter Structure The arguments for this project are supported by a strong rhetorical analysis of online space, specifically, websites. Included in my research is a case study of a sub-genre of personal websites followed by examples of the current state of digital texts. Through these examples, I

present the argument toward recognition of girl-created subject position(s) through the utilization of digital literacy in the college writing classroom. I begin chapter one with a project overview and a breakdown of the methodology used to structure my research. Within this chapter, I provide the source material for my research, including the specifics from which my data was culled. With chapter two, I outline the purpose for this project, giving an overview of the state of writing in the current traditional college writing classroom. In this chapter, I review the position of our student writers and make a connection to the need for recognition of hybrid (digital) texts in the college writing classroom. Chapter three lays the foundation for a merge of the two fields discussed with this project, that of digital literacy and Girl Studies. With this chapter, I parallel the rise of both fields and the interdisciplinary position both fields mark within the academic environment. In chapter four, I move toward a rhetorical analysis of contemporary digital texts created both for and by girls and young women. In this chapter, I argue how such sites work rhetorically toward creating—or hindering—what becomes within a western cultural narrative, girl space. In chapter five, I progress to presenting a case study of the pro-ana online community, one in which personal websites are pivotal to community structure and interaction. Chapter six visits the shift in digital literacy with the rise of Web 2.0 technology, which enables a broader range of users by allowing software developing without the need for the knowledge of HTML coding language. In this chapter, I again present a case study, this time of Tavi Gevinson, a teen female blogger whose success as an online presence has helped provide her the space for subject construction. Finally, I conclude this project with a discussion concerning how an inclusion of the recognition of digital literacy in the college writing classroom is needed if girls and young women are to continue their creation of subject position(s).

Chapter One Project Overview and Methodology

Introduction This dissertation focuses on the intersections between digital literacy studies and girls’ studies. For this project, I studied the digital literacy activities of first-year traditional college students, specifically female students, enrolled in a first year composition course in the digital classroom. Informed by current theories of the development of girls’ subjectivity, I investigated the following questions: How have online writing spaces affected girls’ subjectivity before entering college? What literacy skills have girls developed from a girl-created subjectivity? Are the criteria of what constitutes girl space adaptable to the composition classroom? What are the routines and familiarities of our female students’ writing processes outside of the classroom? Are such processes and forms recognized within the academic environment? Is the notion of a girl-created subjectivity able to thrive in the academic setting and perhaps more importantly, should it?

Project Design Originally, this project was to be an exploration of high school girls’ online activities in relation to online girl-created subjectivities. Because I teach first-year composition, I was interested in understanding how to better instruct my first-year female writers by utilizing their familiar digital literacy from their late teen years. As I began researching how best to work with interviewing high school students, I came against the requirements of the university IRB which demanded that I seek permission not only from the parents of any student I worked with but also their teachers and school principals due to the age of consent of my research participants. These requirements had me struggling with how to proceed with my project as I considered which pool of students from which I might recruit participants. The semester that I began considering this research project, I was teaching two sections of an Introduction to Women’s Studies class. Many of the topics that were addressed either through my class planning or the topics for research considered by my students concerned issues of identity. It was then that I realized that this project would best be served by working closely with first-year students at the college level as these were the students that were developmentally

able to critically analyze constructions of identity, more so and with a clearer articulation than could high school students. And by working with first-year students, I was also able to directly investigate their writing instruction needs in the college composition classroom. In the summer of 2006, I joined a new initiative of the Miami University Composition Program, the Digital Writing Collaborative (DWC). As a lead cohort member, I was part of a team that worked to establish a program that prepares both students and teachers for composition instruction within the digital environment. In addition to training instructors in how best to utilize new technologies in their teaching of composition, the DWC worked toward developing a multimodal pedagogy in which digital elements were incorporated through a completely networked space, either in hard-wired or wireless laptop rooms. Students were able to compose multimodally in a digital environment, working on assignments such as video analysis, webpage building, or online discussions using course management software. Peer response and instructor feedback was also accessed electronically so students were always immersed within the familiarity of digital literacy. My inclusion in the Digital Writing Collaborative helped me form a structure for this project concerning the questions I had in relation to digital literacy. I worked closely at retooling my pedagogy for the technology we had access to; I rewrote traditional course assignments to include digital elements. With instruction focused on rhetorical analysis of the digital environment, my inquiry focused around what I was seeing take shape in my classroom. Once I began working with the data collected from other instructors, I began noting many of the same patterns—students enjoyed working in the digital format and were making the connection to how the digital environment for writing helped aid them in their writing process: “My favorite part about this course was the electronic classroom. It allowed us to complete major chunks of our assignments in class with the Instructor present” (Course Evaluation). As one student responded when asked how she felt about enrolling in a digital section of ENG111: “I knew how to use the word processing tools and everything like that. I was excited that I got to use the skills I already knew in my new English class” (Vid 2), testifying as my students had, that familiarity helped ease students into the process of writing.

Recruitment and Solicitation of Project Participants Because this project was intended to generalize about the digital literacy experiences of all first-year college composition students, I knew that I needed to move beyond simple case studies of young adult females who use the Internet. As I teach both men and women in my composition classroom, it was important to get a well-rounded and thorough idea of the digital literacy activities of all students, both men and women, in order to gauge a general idea of the writing produced by traditional college students in the college writing classroom, especially given that most writing instruction in the college classroom does occur in a mixed-gender setting. Thus, recruiting from a variety of sources for research participants was crucial to this project. Ultimately, while input from my male research participants was useful in understanding a conventional learning curve for writing in both traditional and digital platforms, it was the data culled from my female research participants that helped me structure the arguments and the conclusions I formed through this project. Once my project research was approved by the university IRB, I began my solicitation for research participants late in April, 2007, by sending out a Request for Participation email through the DWC Blackboard site to all instructors teaching ENG112: College Composition and Literature, spring semester 2007 (see Appendix A). With 450 students enrolled in digital sections of the second semester of composition, the most practical way to reach all students was to appeal through their composition instructors. I made two requests in this email: first, I asked instructors to announce my research to students in their classes and to provide students a link to an anonymous survey concerning their digital literacy usage (more below); second, I offered to come speak to their classes to directly request female student volunteers for participation in face- to-face interviews concerning their digital literacy usage and their digital activities within girl culture. I was hoping to secure at least 5-8, first-year female students who would be able to meet with me sometime in the following two weeks after the initial solicitation. The timing for solicitation was crucial to this project. I had to guarantee that I had female students to work with who had enough experience in the digital classroom; if ENG112 was their only exposure to applying their digital literacies to the writing process, I needed to be assured that they had enough experience in doing so. At this point in the semester any possible research participant would have already been blogging, building websites, interacting in the peer response process digitally or any other number of various multimodal activities that can occur in a digital

environment. With this familiarity of incorporating the writing process with new technologies, I could be assured that any discussions I held with students concerning digital literacy would have a context in which to work, both academically and socially. Thus, I waited until the final two weeks of the semester for the recruitment process to begin. This was both beneficial and a detriment. I received 72 responses to the anonymous survey, of which, 44 respondents were female. I felt this number would supply me with an adequate amount of data, though only two of the 44 female students polled agreed to be personally interviewed for my project. This seemed inevitable, however, as the interviews would have taken place during finals week. It was crucial that I gathered female research participants, as my interests did not lie solely with female subjectivity but also with how girls and young women utilized digital technologies in their writing processes. I resorted to contacting former students who had been in the first semester composition class I taught in fall semester 2006. This actually turned out to be an advantage as I knew these women well, having spent a full semester with them and establishing relationships with them, not only by way of familiarity with their writing but also knowing a bit about their social and personal interests. As Holmsten noted, “The idea of community is central to how teacher-researchers work; we establish our communities by sharing stories even before we begin the writing down in our preliminary talking together” (41). This personal connection to these six research participants actually helped me apply the feminist research methods I had planned to use more thoroughly.

Following A Feminist Research Structure It was important as I began this project that I held tight to the idea of working with research participants as opposed to research subjects. I designed this project following a feminist methodological approach as suggested by Gesa Kirsch by “getting to know research participants in the context of their daily lives,” interacting personally and “involving participants in formulating research questions.” By approaching my project as co-creator of new ideas with my research participants, I was keeping my focus on the purpose of my study by “designing research that benefits participants.” Like Kirsch, I agreed that the “quality of feminist research […] can and often does lead to ‘better’ data than do traditional approaches to social research” (12). I preferred that a feminist ethic guided my research; if one of the goals of my project is to recognize a girl-created subjectivity, approaching these goals within the foundations of feminist

belief not only allows for such a subjectivity to emerge but also encourages the continual growth for new subjectivities as girls develop. At one point during the process of a face-to-face (taped) interview with one of my research participants, Carrie laughed and said, “God! You’re going to listen to this and be like, ‘listen to all these conversations!’” This statement came after various side discussions that were unrelated to the project topic—the then-recent Virginia Tech shooting, Carrie’s choice to minor in art, for example. I didn’t discourage the veering from the project topic; I believe, as Holmsten found in her work as a feminist researcher, that “The oral, shared stories that are such an important part of women’s history are also the beginning point for teacher’s research” (41). While Carrie discussed her wish to minor in art over her parent’s preference of keeping her educational focus on her major in business, I realized how important it is for Carrie to keep a connection to the visual—often during her interview she discussed how much easier and more enjoyable it is for her to write when she can include a visual element such as a photo collage. Without a visual element, traditional writing assignments are “just done to get through it,” she told me. Carrie’s continual reference to her need for visual elements in her writing is not a connection I would have made had I retained traditional approaches of research; I may not have known to ask about it. When I designed the questions I was to use in the face-to-face interviews, I left room to add, subtract, or deviate from the prepared structure of the interviews. Because I had taught six of the eight female students I interviewed in the previous semester, I was able to utilize the rapport we had created in our already-established relationships as the interviews unfolded. Emily, for example, digressed at one point in our interview and began discussing her friend who is struggling to manage an eating disorder. By utilizing a feminist research method, I was free to let Emily speak and move away from the project focus. At that point, the interview became a conversation between two women discussing a shared subject, Emily’s anger at her friend for not seeking treatment and my understanding of her concerns due to my own reflective issues concerning disordered eating. I note Gerrard here who argues, “Feminist pedagogy guides students to reflect on their lives and to connect personal experience with ideology and social issues” (190); as a feminist teacher, I seldom censor my students when their move to personal narratives overtake writing assignments, whether the project criteria calls for a narrative or not. I consider these moments experiential and as I will argue throughout this project, crucial for girls

when developing their sense of identity positioning. That Emily moved our conversation into one concerning eating disorders is an example of this young woman’s real-life conflict that occurs outside the scope of the institution. By not censoring the conversation in our interviews as if it were the classroom and a writing setting, I opened the space for Emily to work through her ideas. Michelle Payne, in advising students writing about abuse and eating disorders, notes that first-year students tend to “work from their outlaw emotions to question who has named the truths of their experiences and told them why and how they should feel” (117). Emily felt bad about her anger, wanting to be more supportive of her friend. I understood her frustration and we talked about ways that Emily might turn her anger into something productive. Ultimately, she realized, “we’re able to relate with our girlfriends and support each other when there’s issues you can’t go to your parents with […] when I am with her it’s going to be OK, this is what we’re going to do and I support her.” This segued into topics of defining girl space, a set question in the interview process, though originally designed to appear later in the interview. My objective to enter the interview process with general open-ended questions following a feminist research methodology prompted a desire to enact this study in a format that did not resemble a research lab or a classroom, despite the physical location of the interview. Much of my research methodology is directed by Gilligan’s argument that we “notice not only the silence of women but [accept] the difficulty in hearing what they say when they speak” (173), knowing that once discussions concerning social and/or political issues come to the table, I may hear things that will be difficult to manage as both a scholar and a feminist. My intent was to allow interviews with my research participants to be as closely directed as possible by the participants themselves, confirming Holmsten’s point that “an important intersection between feminist methodology and teacher research is in the importance both place on collaboration” (43). By removing the institutional element, I feel I gained better data from the general conversations I had with my participants; these could have been discussions held over coffee in a social setting. In creating an atmosphere of conversational discussion I hoped to allow for a more focused collaboration of social participation, not one fraught with the requirements of academic study, thus hopefully ensuring that my research participant’s interests were served by this project and they were not just talking to fulfill my research goals.

Data Collection The following is a break down of the specific forms of research for collecting data and the process of each study.

Online Anonymous Survey The anonymous survey was created online using Survey Monkey, free survey software accessible to anyone with access to the Internet (see Appendix D). The survey was designed to take no more than 15 minutes and was left accessible online through May, a full month after the link was posted by instructors and well past the end of spring semester. I distributed the web link in the same email sent to instructors with a request to either post the link to their course Blackboard site or distribute to students in an email. To ensure that at least some of the 450 students addressed would actually access the survey, I did ask that instructors consider allowing students to complete the survey during class time, though to note that completion of the survey was not a course requirement. It was important that this survey was accessible to all students taking ENG112 in the digital classrooms; I needed a well-rounded representation of female students to gauge a general knowledge of digital literacy. In the end, I felt the balance was solid enough to move forward: of 72 respondents, the gender breakdown was 28 male and 44 female. Because I had further input from male students in several of the other studies from which I was collecting data, I felt this ratio was adequate. (see Table 1, Gender Breakdown of Survey Respondents.) I was satisfied with the end results of the survey; my biggest worry was not having enough respondents. What was unexpected was seeing that of 72 respondents, 35 of the students had taken their previous semester of composition in a digital classroom. This was enough for me to feel secure in the data I would collect from the survey results. This meant that all of the respondents had at least fourteen weeks of composition instruction in the digital classroom and 49.3% of them had an additional full semester of experience. In addition, when asked, “If you were required to take another composition class further in your college education would you seek out a digital classroom if the sections were available?” an astounding 94.4% answered yes, an indication that their experience in the digital classroom was one to which they would return, thus providing me with some positive feedback to my survey questions (ENG111/112 Survey).

Table 1 Gender Breakdown of Research Respondents Respondents Study Male Female Transgender Case Studies, Face-to-Face Interview 8 ENG111/112 Survey: Gauging Digital Literacy In and Out of the Composition 22 44 Classroom Miami University First-Year Composition & 130 208 Computing Survey, Early Fall 2006 Miami University First-Year Composition & 96 178 1 Computing Survey, Late Fall 2006 Interview Study, Miami University First- 5 11 Year Composition & Computing, Fall 2006 Assignment Writer’s Memo: 16 21 ENG:111 College Composition, Fall 2006 Assignment Writer’s Memo: 31 40 ENG:111 College Composition, Fall 2007

Miami University First-Year Composition & Computing, Online Anonymous Survey As a member of DWC, this entitled me to access many of the various forms of research studies that were created, collectively, as a collaborative. As I was included in the initial IRB process for such studies, I was able to utilize much of the data that was collected concerning learning digital composition. This included not only many of the multimodal assignments created by DWC instructors but also any survey, interview and assessment data archived by the cohort. Two studies that I found useful to this project were an anonymous online survey similar to the initial survey I created but on a larger scale (see Appendixes F and G). These surveys were useful in that the student population balanced out any concern I had for a lack of male representation in my own distributed anonymous survey. (Since this was a volunteer sample, however, it cannot be assumed that these students form a representative sample of Miami’s first- year composition students.) Presented at the beginning and end of the semester, fall 2006—the first semester the digital classrooms and curriculum were integrated into the university composition program—

both surveys were made available to students by their instructors. Some instructors allowed time in class for students to complete the surveys (as I requested for my own survey) or allowed them to complete the survey on their own time. The links were either emailed to students or posted to the course Blackboard sites. Created through the same software program and accessible online as my own anonymous online survey, the link was left available for students well through the end of the semester. These surveys were helpful in that responses showed an arc of growth; since the surveys were distributed at the beginning and end of the semester, students were able to comment on the changes in their writing process through the use of digital technologies. For the purposes of my project, I was most interested in how students made use of the technology afforded them in the digital classroom, incorporating it into their writing. A change in their use of digital elements in their writing, for example, is an indication that students either needed the instruction or the opportunity to access such tools. Perhaps both. This is evident in the differences between the beginning and end of the semester; students noted that coming into the semester, they sometimes only included video in their writing 8% of the time (Pre-Survey 7). At the end of the semester when asked the same question, the amount of students using video in their writing shifted to 17% (Post-Survey 6), an indication that sometime during the semester—possibly in ENG112—they began to consider multimodal texts for their compositions. And while the application of images to the writing process didn’t change all that much, 34% at the beginning of the semester compared to 42% by the end of the semester, their use of audio did: only 8% of the students surveyed admitting using audio (music, recorded voice etc.) in their writing at the beginning of the semester, but by the end of the semester 21% of students had applied some audio component to their writing process. This may be due to the popularity of an audio essay assigned by instructors, but it did remain the favorite assignment all semester for many; as one student noted, “My favorite assignment was the sound project because it challenged me to do something I had never done” (Post-Survey 12.19). Though email usage didn’t change much between the beginning of the semester, 95.9% and 96% at the end of the semester, the use of listservs and/or online discussion forums grew from 10.4% as the course began to 30.5% by the end of the course, probably due to the Blackboard course software utilized by almost all instructors teaching in digital classrooms.

Collecting data from a period of time that spans a full semester enabled me to note not only the growth that took place in these digital sections of composition but also to recognize possible concerns that indicate no discrepancy at all. Between both surveys, there was an indication of little if any change in data concerning resources that students access for online research. In fact, it seems problematic to me that when asked in the survey, “When you are researching for a paper, what electronic, online resources have you utilized before and for how often?” at the beginning of the semester, 13% of students admitted to using the library or school databases but this number actually fell by the end of the semester with only 9% of students using the same online sources. (Though the total number of respondents between the surveys differed, the response average remained the same for this question.) It becomes an issue of note that students are utilizing the university library resources less by the end of the semester; as students work toward understanding how to incorporate what they already know about new technologies with the requirements of academic writing and research, they are making the realization that sources such as the Internet are as useful for their purposes as traditional texts had been to previous generations of students. (What now needs inclusion in all composition course instruction in addition to how to be critical of online sources is how vast are the offerings of the contemporary university library. This includes not only traditional text access but also instruction in not only research and methodology but in many college libraries, workshops on how best to use new technologies for academic purposes.) The final comments that students offered in the end of semester survey gave no indication that students were unhappy with their success in the course. When asked how the writing process changed throughout the semester, many students offered similar comments: “I now consider my audience more, and also how to get my point across in the media I am using (Post- Survey 13.144); I just realized that there are many other forms of writing available other than just plain, simple papers (13.149); I have a better knowledge of how to utilize technology in writing and how to write more efficient papers that stay on topic.” (13.162). The comments by the students in this survey seem to offer a different image of students’ perceptions of writing than that of what Lunsford recognized at the conclusion of a pilot composition course utilizing digital technologies: “while they loved the opportunity to explore new media in writing and to push their writing in new directions, they weren’t sure their writing [sic] was actually improving. (In other words, they knew they were learning something, but many of them wouldn’t call it

writing.)” (174). That the data supplied by these surveys offers such a differing idea of students’ concepts of writing is an indication that supports my argument that students write often with new technology; they just don’t recognize their writer’s identity. The data from this survey provides an indication that how students integrate themselves into to their writing process may have changed from traditional understandings of how composition instruction is adapted. Students aren’t doing less research; they are just integrating the literacy forms they already know. Likewise, they have an understanding of audience and multiple forms of writing genres, making use of multimodal texts. These arguments will be further explored in Chapter Seven.

Miami University First-Year Composition & Computing, Video Interviews Near the end of the first semester that digital classrooms became available for students taking first-year composition, members of the DWC conducted face-to-face interviews with students recruited from various digital sections of ENG111: College Composition, fall 2006. The interviews took place on campus and were filmed, with approval from the university IRB. Conducting the interviews were DWC instructors with questions designed by members of the DWC (see Appendix I). Once all interviews were filmed and the semester ended, the videos became available to all members of the DWC for transcription and research application. The data collected from the interviews was certainly beneficial to my research. As I previously noted, I knew that having input from male students would provide a good balance to my research. I didn’t transcribe the interviews until well after I held my own face-to-face interviews with the eight female students that agreed to be my research participants; I quickly became aware of patterns of differences such as what became important to these students in the writing process. This seemed to differ between the male students, who favored speed and accuracy in their writing with digital technologies, compared to the female students who preferred to discuss the content of their writing. Further analysis of these differences will be discussed in the conclusion.

Case Studies, Face-to-Face Interviews The strongest source of my data for this project came from the eight female students that agreed to meet with me for face-to-face interviews (see Appendix C); while I had collected data concerning general digital literacy usage, I needed to meet with young women who could

address specific questions about not only their digital literacy but also about their involvement with issues important to girl culture. To place my project within theoretical arguments of girl- created subjectivity, working closely with the student population that I was analyzing would be the most effective in moving my project from theory to practice. With these eight women, I was able to ask specific questions—for example, how they defined girl space. The interviews took place within two weeks in April 2007 during the same time as the distribution of my anonymous online survey and DWC final online survey. All women met me on campus and agreed to be recorded for transcription purposes. Of the eight participants, two—Laura and Lindsey—were students that I had never met, recruited from digital sections of ENG112. By the time I had met with these students, Laura on April 19 and Lindsey on April 24, I had already spoken with five of the six women I knew from the previous semester as my own students in ENG111. I was concerned that when I met with Laura and Lindsey that the personal element I was so hoping for in the interview process would not be present. This was far from the truth. I found the interview process with both young women to be as conversational as the discussions I had with my own students. This helped me maintain a feminist research agenda as previously outlined. The interview was broken into four different sections. I began with various questions in which issues of identity were situated. To begin with a focus on identity helped me establish an idea of not only their experiences with digital technologies but also where, in relation to elements of girl culture, each participant stood. Often, discussions veered during this interview topic. It was during these questions, for example, that Beth got into a discussion about her personal space and how it relates to men: A lot of girl space is their personal space. You know how we have like how Americans don’t like to be close to each other? I think that especially if guys violate that it’s big, even it’s just in a friendly way you don’t want to be bothered? It automatically makes you think of unfriendly ways. I knew Beth as a student in my ENG111 class the previous semester—I knew she was very active in fighting for women’s reproductive rights; knowing this, I encouraged her to research women’s reproductive health for the required public policy project and the following website assignment. Beth’s statements about personal space coincided well with how protective she is of

her space as a woman. It also became clear during this discussion about identity how aware Beth is of gender difference: I was a cheerleader in high school. I have two older brothers and I did play sports up until I was in high school yet my friends treated me differently when I decided to be a cheerleader and not play basketball. Yeah, I heard that, so it was big. I always did both at the same time like, through elementary school and junior high but I dropped basketball and went all cheerleading [in high school]. Her mention of her shift from basketball to cheerleading in high school led to an interesting discussion concerning Beth’s realization that identity positions are often assigned by others. Once this was understood, we moved to a discussion of online activities. As an example of moving away from the set interview questions, many of my research participants led me into a discussion about online shopping sites after the question, “Which type of online activities do you partake in?” As trivial as these discussions may appear, they helped me establish a tie back to identity—as Driscoll observes, “Fashion provides a range of already sanctioned codes for coherence and recognition to be cited by the girl in pursuit of identity” (245), allowing me more support for my arguments concerning a girl-focused online space. A traditional construction of femininity is often defined in many of these websites and this feeds into a stereotypical “girl” identity. Both affordances and constraints of such pre-constructed identity positions will be further explored in Chapter Four. The next topic we discussed in these face-to-face interviews was that of the writing process. Because I established an understanding of identity positions with each of my participants, I was able to direct questions about writing to cater to the interests of my interviewees. Knowing Carrie’s penchant for art, for example, or that Emily was the only one of the six of my previous students lucky enough to land in a digital section for ENG112, I could gear specific questions of process to their interests. An illustration of this is evident in Emily’s responses when we discussed the differences between the website she had created for my class the previous semester and the wiki she was creating for her current class. As Emily revealed, “I think the wiki was easier but I like the idea of the website because I went home and just typed in my web address and I was like, look mom this is my website!” Emily’s statement is evidence that perhaps offering students a platform in which to move their writing outside of the institution may lead them to embrace their writing identities. If students are to recognize an identity as

writer, this may lead them to better acknowledge the writing they are doing in their social spaces as rhetorical; that is, writing that leads to action. This may move them to writing with purpose, making a connection between their academic writing and their communities outside the spaces of the institution. The final part of the interviews was a rhetorical analysis of websites broken down into the categories as discussed in Chapter Four: commercial, institutional and personal. I chose to focus much of my project on websites as opposed to individual blogs or group social networking communities. The reasons are twofold: first, because websites—especially personal websites created by girls themselves—epitomize the multimodal examples I think best represent girl- created subjectivities; personal websites can include, but are not limited to, the visual rhetoric and aural forms that construct hybrid texts. Secondly, personal websites often contain within their framework all of the other components that can be found in online spaces such as blogs, videos, .mp4 music files, social networking links, and the interactivity that is so crucial toward building community among youth. Since each of these research participants had already completed ENG111: College Composition the previous semester, they were already familiar with rhetorical terminology as many of them had written a rhetorical analysis as an assignment—the six women from my classes certainly had. In addition to addressing the application of ethos, pathos, and logos, purpose was explored at length, as was audience. And because the sites represented a visual text, discussions concerning layout and other design elements were noted, such as color and font usage. I chose one commercial website, gurl.com, which has a decade-long history, in the hopes that at least one of my research participants might recognize the site; three of the eight did. Scarleteen and Teen Consumer Scrapbook, both institutional sites, were useful in being new to all of my participants. Scarleteen, with its focus on sex education, distracted many of my participants—especially Beth with her interest in reproductive health. It was important that I chose an institutional site relevant to my audience as the Teen Consumer Scrapbook site was targeted toward an age group younger than my participants. Finally, I chose two personal websites: (not otherwise specified)—with its focus on disordered eating—was a website I have worked with in other research projects. I was interested in hearing how my participants viewed this site in comparison to the analysis I had done in the past. Saturate Me was a generic personal

site like many on the web at present, containing a blog, art gallery, webcam/portal and links to other sites within the online, girl-focused community. A breakdown of each participant’s analysis can be found in Chapter Four.

Student Writing, In-class and Assignments Finally, the last sources of information I utilized for this project were the invention writing exercises and class assignments of my first-year composition students (see Appendix E) from both ENG111: College Composition and ENG112: Composition and Literature, fall 2006 through spring 2008. These students generously allowed me to cite their writer’s memos, freewrites and assignments pertaining to issues of digital literacy and the writing process. And as with all the contributions by students used in this project, my sources remain anonymous with pseudonyms assigned where needed.

Conclusion The data collected for this project were admittedly limited in scope to those who had access to digital technology; all the students surveyed and interviewed for this project were recruited from a digital composition class in which they were required to either have their own laptop or met in a computer classroom. While access is and will remain an issue where technology is concerned, ideas on who has access have shifted. Though Atwell notes, “These disparities in access are driven, in large part, by income inequality and/or educational differences rather than by race” (253), the statistics cited in Chapter Two of this project concerning the rise in minority use of computers already reveal a shift in data relating to access and new technologies. Though the numbers and comments gathered here might indicate that the students recruited for this project are collectively from a specific economic range, the latest research actually shows that technology use among undergraduates across the country has risen greatly during the last decade. Of 12,007 respondents from 40 universities across the U.S., laptop ownership rose from 52.8% in 2005 to 75.8% in 2007 (Salaway 3). And with measures like Miami’s own Notebook Program, where funding for laptops is made available at a reduced price with guaranteed technical support from the university IT department, the purchase of laptops by incoming first-year students will be more affordable than in the past. Given the rise in

ownership of computers by college students—98.4% of students at 103 universities surveyed own their own computers (4)—the data collected here for the purpose of this project may serve to fulfill the overall response of the traditional first-year college student regarding gaining access and utilizing digital technologies in their writing processes.

Chapter Two Is This English Class? Going Digital in the College Composition Classroom

Introduction For traditional teachers of composition, digital literacy may challenge the familiar forms of teaching writing, forcing many instructors outside the parameters of what has been familiar by way of planning writing assignments, prewriting exercises and revision work, not to mention challenging the traditional genres of writing. For our students, digital literacy is familiar and for many contemporary students, a form of literacy they have been working within for many years, employing new technologies in their social environments long before we meet them as students in the college classroom. If our students are already familiar with digital environments and digital literacy, why not teach writing utilizing digital technologies, tapping into and developing these forms of literacy? For Selfe, these forms are intertwined: “Literacy alone is no longer our business. Literacy and technology are. Or so they must become” (3). Digital literacy writing instruction is one possible way to make these forms “intertwine” as Selfe suggests. This is not to say that teachers of composition need to shift and become teachers of information technology; the focus of teaching writing by implementing digital technologies is to make use of student’s already familiar technologies. By using the platforms available in digital environments, students may learn critical inquiry and develop their rhetorical knowledge by applying a variety of multimodal styles of composing in a form favorable to their learning. When students at Miami University registered for a digital section of college composition in the fall semester of 2006, “67.7% of students did not know the section they enrolled in was a Digital Writing section” (Lewiecki-Wilson 1). By the end of that first semester, of 72 students surveyed, 94.4% agreed that if the sections became available, they would readily seek out a digital section of the required first-year, second-semester composition class (ENG111/112 Survey). This isn’t surprising, given that “students report spending an average of 18 hours per week doing online activities for school, work, or recreation” (Salaway 40). For these students, it became a conscious choice to continue their learning in an environment conducive to their success in composition. So it should be clear that as Selfe has argued, “technology has become part of our responsibility, whether we like it or not” (5).

In following the current pedagogies of composition theory with the goals of keeping students immersed in the most contemporary curriculum in writing instruction, Miami University created a digital writing initiative in 2006. This initiative was in direct response to the growing changes occurring in literacy as a whole. The goals for Miami University’s new Digital Writing Collaborative, motivated by such changes, were to support teachers and students with the learning of new technologies in relation to composition; to coordinate a new curriculum integrating new technologies; to work toward increased access of needed materials and new technologies; and to build a relationship with other digital initiatives (“Mission Statement”). With the student population of Miami University coming predominantly from middle to upper- class socioeconomic backgrounds, most of the college’s students have had Internet access since at least middle school. Of 72 students surveyed in 2006-2007, 47.2% reported that their online experiences began sometime between the ages of 8 to10 years old, with about half (48.6%) reporting their introductions at the ages of 11 to 13 years old; thus, about 95% of respondents reported that they were experienced with online environments before they even entered high school. At the extreme, one student reported having online experience by six years old and two after the age of 14 (ENG111/112 Survey). It is within this student population that I have situated much of my research concerning college composition and the digital classroom.

Incorporating Digital Pedagogies My move to digital composition pedagogy was a necessity on my part as an instructor of writing. In order to reach my students, I needed to speak their language; this is a generation of children who have been weaned on video games, p2p music exchange, and cable television. Students in my classes were bringing their digital literacies to the classroom before I even considered using the digital environment as part of my pedagogy. They exchanged peer drafts through email and responded to these drafts electronically, long before I finally gave in and followed suit. I eased into applying new technologies in my composition classroom—first with discussions that referenced topics in popular culture that included forms of digital media. By the time I began teaching in a hard-wired classroom, I made the conscious effort to create an assignment that considered my students’ digital literacy knowledge with the aims of teaching rhetorical analysis through this familiar lens.

Because facebook.com was growing as a popular website among college-age students— the site grew 272% in 2006 (Kornblum)—it became the text we addressed when first discussing the uses of rhetoric. It didn’t surprise me that my students were all aware of facebook, the layout and the peculiarities of how the site worked; they were the traditional college students all turning nineteen years old sometime within their first year of college. The generational shift between my students and myself in how we approach new technologies became apparent when we began discussing facebook as a text. Christine Rosen notes in The Chronicle of Higher Education that, “those who run institutions of higher learning have embraced technology as a means of furthering education. But they have failed to realize that the younger generation views technology largely as a means of delivering entertainment […] and secondarily, as a means of communicating” (qtd. in Bugeja). Classroom discussions involving facebook had me reflecting back to my Master’s teacher training course where Robert Brooke’s 1988 Braddock Essay, “Underlife and Writing Instruction” made an impact. Brooke references sociologist Erving Goffman’s definition of underlife, as “the range of activities people develop to distance themselves from the surrounding institution” (Brooke 232), an act toward building identity that differs from “identities assigned […] by organizational roles” (230). In discussion, my students saw facebook as a break from learning, as if they were no longer in class but sitting in the dorms or at the student center. facebook became the underlife of the classroom. Advocating student underlife with the goals of promoting the writing community, I didn’t discourage the tone in which students approached facebook in the classroom, instead referencing the site in daily discussions as often as possible. It was a shared text for us, a guaranteed reading that I knew all students were familiar with, a text I could turn to for example. I used Selfe’s argument that “critical technological literacy, suggests a reflective awareness of […] social and cultural phenomena” (148), and I became focused on how best to use facebook as a text through which to teach the concepts of rhetorical analysis and critical thinking. We began by working with the online profiles of students in class. Surprisingly, all of my students were more than willing to have their profiles shown onscreen and discussed critically; I never lacked for volunteers. I used these profiles to introduce the basic concepts of the rhetorical triangle. Students were quick to understand ethos, for example, when they began comparing pictures of each other. Those posed with drinks in their hand led my students—without my prompting—to a discussion about audience. The Wall, a running message board on the profile page, inspired

discussions of pathos, students addressing the various personal messages friends had posted. Issues of construction and cultural narratives were referenced when we analyzed the titles and content of various interest groups users had joined. Once students were able to grasp the concepts of rhetoric, a move to critical inquiry came naturally. Audience was a relevant topic both in classroom discussions and student writing. Public and private space was always up for analysis—students were very specific about who they thought should be “allowed” entry onto facebook. When it was revealed that the high school version of facebook was merging into the college version, my students were very vocal about their dissatisfaction. One wrote, “facebook was like a VIP club that they couldn’t get in and now they are everywhere” (Susan), another student wrote, “tell the high schoolers to stick to MySpace” (Emma). Yet when pushed for their feelings about having professors view their profiles, most of my students didn’t see this as a problem. In fact, all of my students signed their consent forms when asked if I could use their profiles in my research. Being a facebook member and added to “friends” lists placed me within their community, not as viewer, or lurker, but as participant. Once inside this community, I become aware of my students as individuals through their play in this underlife that is created from, but not structured within, the academic environment. As Brooke notes, “Student underlife primarily attempts to assert that the individuals who play the role of students are not only students, that there is more to them than that” (239). Identity is being built within the facebook community, one certainly arguable in terms of audience and professionalism but an identity, nonetheless. Juniors and seniors, for example, tend to be more concerned with their upcoming employment search than first-year students and often remove pictures that might be seen as unfavorable by a possible new employer. First-year students seldom have these concerns this early in their college career and build their facebook profiles in ways that play with their identity as first-year college students. This can range from discussions concerning their participation in Greek life to pictures of events that occurred during spring break. In the classroom, such construction of the college student identity can be used as a fantastic discussion prompt, often leading to solid critical and rhetorical analysis. The challenge in using a text anchored in multimodality such as facebook is in making the connection to writing. What can occur with utilizing digital literacy in the composition classroom is a new connection for our students in relation to writing and their identity as writers.

When I asked Emily if she did any writing outside of what is required writing for classes, she laughed and responded with “Not unless we’re talking about facebook communicating with friends.” What has not occurred for our students is the recognition that the writing they do outside of class is still writing. When surveyed, “Do you do any writing outside of your required school work?” 76.4% responded with “no,” yet every one of my 72 respondents admitting to emailing and taking part in community building sites such as facebook and MySpace, and another 77.8% acknowledging their use of chat for daily communication (ENG111/112 Survey). An integration of students’ digital literacy skills into the writing classroom—and leading students toward recognizing their roles as active writers—may change the relationship students have with their writing identity. As Brooke argues, the identities, which may be developing for students in writing classrooms, are more powerful for real academic success than the traditional identity of the successful student. It may be that the process of allowing a particular kind of identity to develop is what contemporary writing instruction is all about (230). These extra-classroom spaces for writing can easily be integrated into classroom activities. Classroom discussions held in chat rooms, for example, are especially rewarding for students; it allows for quiet students to have “voice” and can move textual interactions into discussions of styles of writing differences. As some students are already working in these digital platforms, “Ever since the sixth grade I have been writing for the web” (Pre-Survey 8.278), the learning curve is usually steeper for instructors than for students. In this sense, identity exploration can become collaborative, as feminist pedagogies advocate; not only are students coming to a realization about their writing identity but composition teachers are confronting their identity as teachers of writing. The rapid growth of online space activities and the rise of digital literacy in the American education system rely on this symbiotic relationship of exploration through the participation of all users; as Carolyn Handa argues, incorporating digital elements into writing—especially in the form of Web pages and multimedia projects—demands that we draw on our knowledge of rhetoric perhaps even more than our knowledge of HTML, design issues, or graphics software (“Letter from the guest editor” 2) making digital literacy an excellent opportunity for teachers of composition to utilize their skills as rhetoricians.

Establishing a Writing Identity A writing identity is certainly a topic that should be brought up for discussion with students. While students may not seem to recognize their writing identity, many of the students I surveyed and interviewed for this project were well aware of the differences in writing instruction between high school and college-level writing. This is an indication that students are capable of being critical about composition; they are just not recognizing their development as writers. When asked what kind of writing students did in high school, many of the responses were the same: “By the book, five paragraph essays” (Pre-Survey 8.13). One student noted the realization that in high school, “none of my assignments involved adding other types of media beyond the writing itself. No pictures, videos, or audio would have been considered ‘proper’ writing” (Pre-Survey 8.42). Many were surprised at the freedoms allowed in their college English classes, as their responses to a survey question about differences between high school and college-level writing revealed: “Assignments and structure versus creativity/communication” (ENG111/112 Survey). One student noted, “About 95% of what we did in high school was typed out, printed off, and turned in” (Pre-Survey 8.185) and another, “I did plain old boring papers. We never used multimodal elements. And no papers were ever written on the web” (Pre-Survey 8.75). And while several students surveyed were not without access to new technologies, they noted the differences: “My high school wasn’t computer illiterate, we did work on the computer. But never to the extent that is done here at college” (Pre-Survey 8.33) and another acknowledged, “I never chose to do anything multimodal although the option was given to us but we weren’t taught how to do it” (Pre-Survey 8.85). For Beth, one of my research participants for this project, the structures in writing that were instilled in her at the high school level affected how she addressed writing at the college level: “In class, it’s more traditional. I feel like I am more structured to a certain criteria of writing […] I can’t stay outside the bounds.” She remembered a paper she wrote in her junior year of high school, “it was ten pages and probably the worst paper for me to ever get through because I couldn’t write anything I really wanted to.” Realizing that the limitations placed on the assignment prohibited her from really exploring her ideas, she commented: “There was so much criteria we had to fulfill that we couldn’t—there was no room for any kind of your own opinion or voice what you actually felt about the poem to come through. That kind of bothered me.”

By moving to a composition pedagogy that incorporates digital literacy, some students are able to forge a new relationship with writing: I got excited about doing English projects, which sounds kind of strange but I really did. In high school I never really liked English; it wasn’t fun. I wasn’t able to put myself into my work and through the laptop course and the creativity allowed and the different programs we used I was allowed to be passionate about the stuff we write about. That was a big deal for me. I really truly enjoyed that aspect of it (Vid 3). There is the possibility for transformation here, one that incorporates a connection between the texts our students produce with the skills they are learning in the composition classroom: “I had more opportunities, I could use pictures or video or sound bites which I would have never been able to do in a regular English class. In that way, your writing becomes more effective.” (Vid 3). The digital classroom provides a space to compose in a variety of multimodal forms, opening up criticisms based on strong rhetorical choices, many of which provide opportunities for students to grow and move into new identities as writers and critical thinkers. For some students, utilizing new technologies in their writing brings them closer to a realization about writing. Molly admitted “Creating my own website has probably been the most rewarding project I have completed,” leading her toward a recognition about her writing identity and also her success as a writer.

Realizing the Digital Writing Process As students moved through their criticisms of how they learned the theories of composition, it became clear in many of the survey and interview responses that adapting new technologies into their writing changed how they viewed the writing process. One student recognized, “I’m definitely a product of my generation and would rather type than write a paper” (ENG111/112 Survey). Another admitted, “I like to type my papers rather than write them all the time. I type faster and it’s easier to put down ideas, thoughts” (Vid 1). One student addressed the flexibility the digital environment afforded in her writing process: I don’t really like writing on paper. I really like typing because it gives me a lot of freedom and if I mess something, I don’t have to go back with white out or I don’t have to erase it—I can just press the backspace and it’s like it was never there. I kind of like that freedom (Vid 2).

Beyond the material act concerning the elimination of paper as a tool or how time management affects the writing process, however, was a connection to what the digital environment allowed by way of classroom brainstorming and research: “Without the computer, we just have a few books. Here, we have the whole Internet for us to look at. We looked at a Nobel Peace Prize speech, writings by MLK Jr., really a whole wide range of anything we can look at” (Vid 2). For some, it included a different type of interaction with their composition professors and their peers: “We were able to pull up our research right away. We chose our subjects and then our instructor said, all right, get into your groups” (Vid 2) with immediate benefits attributed to the digital environment: “Having the opportunity to do the freewrites and to get more ideas out, to share ideas, to look up things on the Internet, I really think that was the best thing about being in the digital classroom” (Vid 1). The writing process for many of these students is constructed differently in the composition classroom compared to those in a traditional or non-digital classroom by the mere fact that though the platform for writing is different, it’s familiar. One student admitted that she liked having her laptop with her in class, that at times it can be “kind of comforting” as she revealed, “It’s kind of like my security blanket, I guess. Because I can have it with me everywhere and I can have it to check my email because a lot communication comes through email—you don’t get calls, you don’t get letters, email is the way to communicate” (Vid 2). The dependence on the digital environment became clear to me when I first reviewed my research data. Of 72 students surveyed, 26.4 % admitted to spending at least 3 hours a day online for leisure (23.6% at least 2 hours a day), as opposed to almost 30% acknowledging they only spend 1 hour a day online for schoolwork (ENG111/112 Survey). With this much time immersed in the digital environment socially, these students stepped into my composition classroom with at least some idea of what the possibilities might be for their writing process. It is in making the connection between being a digital user and being a digital writer that these students began their real exploration.

Making a Rhetorical Connection In an effort to marry the rhetorical skills my students were adapting with the digital environment to which they had access, I moved forward in my composition pedagogy to include web design as part of their writing process. Assigning the traditional research paper to teach the

skills of argument, I then had students recast their arguments for a larger audience. I considered the way Brooke criticizes the limitations of the writing classroom: If our goal as writing teachers is to enable students to see themselves as and to act as writers, then our role as teachers making assignments and evaluating their performance can only get in the way. In the classroom, students write to comply with our demands— they don’t write because they see themselves as writers (237). By moving the composition act out of the writing classroom and into more public space enabled by digital technologies, I intended for students to see themselves as writers with purpose, able to make connections to larger issues of public and social debate. Many students found a rhetorical purpose in their websites, “[My] web site is one of the coolest projects I have ever done in an English class. This is the first time that I have been able to present my work to the public and that really gave new meaning to the project” (Eric). Importantly, they also strengthened a connection to their personal identities as writers: “What I love about my website is the fact that when I made it, I knew that is was something that I had done, I put my myself into it” (Courtney). Students in other sections of digital writing also began adapting their skills of rhetoric to their writing in digital platforms: “I figured out you have to put a lot more thought into your audience based on the media you’re using” (Vid 3). The move to putting their newly-learned rhetorical structures into action through uses of digital literacy became an exploratory experience for many students. Research participant Emily admitted that at the beginning of the course, she was kind of panicky. I think because a lot of time I’ve been very resistant to technology because in my nature I’m a very impatient person so like if I don’t get things I don’t…that the thing with technology is it keeps changing so once you get it, its just going to change again and that frustrates me. Upon completion of her website about gathering college-aged students to vote, however, Emily concluded, “it’s kind of like the finished project is so worth the effort. It is just so cool that the idea that now I know how to make something that people all over the place can see, like my ideas really mean something.” For Emily, the transition from uncertainty about how to incorporate technology with her ideas progressed to the point that she became a confident user of rhetorical structures with purpose: rallying audiences into action. In creating her website, Emily noted, “it just helps that some people are visual learners” so she included not only images but also a comic strip and song lyrics on her webpage. As she argued, when readers see her website

they may think, “I see the picture and then I see the cartoon and I see the song lyrics it’s like, OK. Now I get it.” I only had Emily as a student for her first semester of composition. For her required second semester of composition, Emily again chose a digital classroom as she was now confidently able to apply her skills of digital literacy and to recognize how multimodal forms might affect the writing she produced. The ideas that Emily discovered about writing were a far cry from how she entered the college composition classroom, admitting that in high school, “we weren’t allowed to incorporate how we worked in your class…we weren’t allowed to incorporate our own voice,” her high school writing teacher instructing that as a writer, “you have no liability [sic], you are not known to other people so what you think isn’t going to be persuasive.” Emily was learning, as many of my students learned through writing in a digital environment, that the rhetorical choices they make by applying a form of literacy in which they already interact are not only exploratory but also rewarding. Issues of rhetoric played a large part in much of the self-assessment I had my students consider as they began building their websites. Visual rhetoric was an important element for many of my students—they surf enough websites to know what they like and don’t like. When I presented on visual rhetoric in class at the beginning of the sequence that introduced the assignment, discussions were heavy with ideas on color and image placement when we viewed sample websites onscreen, their criticism thick with alternative suggestions. Students were able to make the connections, as Emily did with her website, to considerations of visual learners and this made many students critically analyze how they used visual rhetoric in their website design. When describing her visual choices in building her website on Plan B emergency contraception, Beth noted: I used dark shades of blue, green, red and purple for backgrounds with light versions of those colors for the text. I did not want to use strictly black backgrounds because I felt that was too dramatic and I wanted my rhetorical appeal to be evident but not overpowering the information in the text itself (Beth, “Writer’s Memo”). Addressing the issues of rhetoric she had been learning in class, Beth gave careful consideration to how she applied the rhetorical appeals: Logos was presented to my website through my external links, especially those on the “Availability and Restrictions” page. I think that the description of Plan B on the

“Emergency Contraception” page is also a great [logical appeal] that the viewer reads as the initial text of my site. As with our discussions concerning facebook, audience became an important topic of discussion for many of my students. Addressing rhetorical choices in multimodal texts caused students to consider how readers may read their writing through a lens of intertextuality. Beth gave thought to the shift in audience when she moved her research paper to the website assignment. She hoped that a Google search on Plan B might bring readers to her site: “This would draw more people to read my information and lead to a greater chance of change” (Beth, Freewrite”) This realization led Beth toward awareness of not only her audience but of her own identity as writer, an identity that makes a difference. Such an identity can only benefit from the employment of digital literacy in the composition classroom. David, a first-year student I had in the hard-wired classroom, entered his first semester of college lagging behind many of his peers where applications of new technologies are concerned; his high school lacked the access to computers and other digital platforms that the majority of Miami students had the privilege of experiencing. Categorized as an “at-risk” student enrolled in Miami University’s Scholastic Enhancement Program, David was well versed in digital literacy by mid-semester. Though his socio-economic background prevented his familiarity with such technology when he first entered college, immersed in the college atmosphere with accessible computer labs and multimedia technologies in the dorms such as mp3 players, gaming systems and wireless computer access all over campus, David was surrounded by peers who continually interacted with digital technology in their social environment. What David learned in his social interactions with new technologies carried over to our composition class. His struggle with email was gone by the second week and by the time he created his assigned website, he admitted, “When first starting this webpage assignment I felt like the world was coming to an end” but then, “I felt like I finally created something dealing with a computer, which I never thought I would ever be able to do.” He completed the assignment successfully, with a keen awareness of how to apply the various elements of rhetoric to his argument. The culmination of these student stories throughout this project are a testament to how applying digital literacy to composition pedagogy can lead to a stronger awareness of the writing process and rhetorical choices. For these students, the move to a writer identity has made an

impact that will, hopefully, carry with them out of the composition classroom, through their college career and beyond.

Writing Comfortably/Writing Critically There are many areas that demand attention in the choice to restructure the composition classroom to include an integration of digital pedagogies. The first of such referents involves the teachers of writing, aiding them in making the transition to a digital pedagogy. In doing so, variables such as financial support from the institutions needs to be confronted, as does general resistance from teachers that are hesitant to incorporate multimodal writing into already familiar lesson plans. This is understandable: “schools find it difficult to fulfill their current educational and social mandates, let alone embrace a visionary new one” (Attewell 254). I remember my own resistance to teaching with digital technologies in my writing classroom. I was already overwhelmed as a new teacher of composition and then was requested to teach in a computer classroom for lack of Instructors willing to fill them. I surely did not utilize the technology in that room to the best of its ability and struggled at keeping my students focused on the topics at hand. This was long before Web 2.0 and social networking communities so the distractions were mainly in the physical setting; with computers facing the wall and no community tables in which to work, the early years of digital pedagogies left us with a lot to learn before we could get our classrooms where they are today, functioning as a work space “where students and teachers [talk] about writing in progress” (Palmquist 253). These spaces need to be provided for teaching the traditional college student. As Selfe sees it, “we cannot responsibly afford to maintain our current disinterested profile much longer without engaging in a willful ignorance that yields serious consequences” (10). Research tells us that 58.8% of undergraduates believe that instructional technology in the classroom helped them better communicate with each other (Salaway 16); if we are to continue teaching process writing, a strong community for peer response is a priority. While 40.4% admit to being more engaged learners in the courses that include digital technologies (17). It is important that we allow our students such spaces for their writing processes, as “the book and the page were the sign of writing. The screen is the site of the image—it is the contemporary canvas” (Kress 9) and without the option for learning the most relevant forums for literacy would place our students at

a disadvantage. In February 2004, the CCCC Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments concluded, “The focus of writing instruction is expanding: the curriculum of composition is widening to include not one but two literacies: a literacy of print and a literacy of the screen. In addition, work in one medium is used to enhance learning in the other” (CCCC 16). As Handa so pointedly questions, “If the students in our classes are the avant-garde of our day, what kinds of spaces do we allow them?” (“Letter from the guest editor” 5). Composition Instructors that are already working toward digital pedagogies understand that “in this scene of secondary orality and secondary literacy, student writers must be able to think critically and carefully about how to deliver the knowledge they produce” (Lunsford 170) and thus, offer writing instruction that allows for composing in spaces of multimodality. It is evident that students are capable of managing many mediums in their writing process; when Gross researched adolescent Internet usage, she discovered “most participants reported using the Internet for both social and nonsocial purposes—often simultaneously” (Gross 646). I certainly see multitasking among my own students in the digital classroom as I often allow them on their computers while we hold class discussions on the readings. While some of them are surfing the net for information to add to discussion, I am well aware that some of them are on facebook or checking email. We discuss responsible actions in the digital classroom at the beginning of the semester; I expect students at the college level to self-regulate their behaviors concerning the digital technology in which they have access in the classroom. For the most part, my students are able to do exactly as Gross has found in her research: they are able to take part in discussion while multitasking, simultaneously surfing their social networking communities or email. It is in tapping into this literacy they know and teaching them to think critically with it that we are challenged as teachers of writing. With students already writing through email, social networking communities, IM, and smartphone use, we are finding that “the quality of student writing at the high school levels [go] way up, and this is explained by the fact that they do more writing than they ever did” (qtd. in McCarroll). Students entering our classroom with this knowledge already inherent—remember, these traditional students have never had life without the Internet—should ease into the requirements of college writing with no strong obstacles should we continue teaching writing through their own form of digital literacy. Once

these students begin composing in these forums, their ideas can begin to take shape and teaching something like the modes of argument, for example, can have the focus of the intended lesson, as opposed to stopping to teach basic writing skills. When we understand that Using the cheap digital tools that now help chronicle the comings and goings of everyday life—cellphone cameras, iPods, laptops and user-friendly Web editing software— teenagers […] are pushing content onto the Internet as naturally as they view it (Zeller), purpose and audience are already within the grasp of the writing student. The remainder of writing instruction, and thus, their writing process can then become a focus on understanding further applications of rhetoric. It is in a control of the methods that enable students to begin thinking—and writing— critically. Playing with the framework of digital texts can encourage creativity in ways that students are familiar with as they compose outside the classroom setting. Hypertext, for example, offers opportunities for intertextuality as “the text itself is dispersed and assimilated and loses its stability” (Warnick 73), providing moments for possible exploration of postmodern rhetoric, a chance adventure into places students might not normally go with traditional texts. There is real critical consideration here for young adults writing in the college classroom, a chance for digital forms to take on new directions toward analysis when in the hands of students. When surveyed at the end of the semester about digital writing, Miami students collectively had positive words to summarize their experiences using multimodal texts: English class was the class I felt I was allowed to be most creative and enjoyed doing work for the most [part] because of the technology aspect (Post-Survey 7.137); My favorite assignment was the Autoethnography for which we made a scrapbook using PowerPoint. I was able to write (and brag) about an activity I love, and it was fun to put in pictures and text together (12.205); While in high school I wrote papers that just included text and maybe a few still photos. Here, I am able to add sound, videos, and other tools instead of just plain text (7.166). It is clear through the testaments of these students that digital texts are the best possible form for getting students interested in writing. Add in a push toward critical analysis and students will be on track to real exploration of the self, a journey into identity formation, subject constructing. With these possibilities, it is no wonder why girls and young women are drawn into online spaces.

Conclusion When I speak with colleagues about teaching, especially those that went through the graduate program with me so they are as new to teaching as I am, we tend to share most often what I call “light bulb moments,” that exact moment in time when a student realizes what writing can do. That rhetorical connection can be made in the classroom but unless a student actually does something with it—puts their writing into motion—it remains in the classroom. I suppose it is their realization of their writing identity that I am referring to here; the excitement students have when they connect to their lives outside of the classroom with their writing. As I teach interdisciplinary courses related to gender in addition to composition, these light bulb moments occur often with the students in my classes, gender identity being such an intimate and specific topic for exploration. I often see this in my female students, their moment to tap into topics that are specific to girls and young women (such topics are further discussed in Chapter Four). Bruce notes, “adolescent women learning to write in a women’s studies class are just beginning to form articulable positions on their developing sexualized gender identity” (24); though I see this in women’s studies, this is also clearly evident in composition courses. When I taught at Miami, I seldom made it through one section of ENG111: College Composition without at least one student paper focusing on body image. Payne, in her research concerning students writing about abuse and eating disorders notes that these topics “have been politicized in both popular and academic contexts, so when a student engages one of these discourses, that student is presenting the possibility of critical reflection and sociopolitical analysis” (117). Critical thinking and analysis is completely possible for many of these students writing within digital technology platforms as the form is familiar and thus, one less writing issue in which to master. For girls and young women, constructing subject position(s) of their own creation is possible using these technologies. As far back as 1999, Turkle noted “the many manifestations of multiplicity in our culture, including the adoption of online personae, are contributing to a general reconsideration of traditional, unitary notions of identity” (“Identity Crisis” 83) and girls that use online space in which to negotiate these subject position(s) are certainly tapping into a feasible location for identity formation. In merging the opportunities afforded them in both their social and academic environments, girls and young women are able to create a sense of self.

Chapter Three How Two Fields Intersect: Literature Review and Historical Context

Youth Culture and Digital Literacy When the Pew Internet and American Life Project first began collecting data concerning teens’ use of online activity in 2000, 73% of teens in the 12 to 17 age range admitted to avid use of the Internet. When data was collected again in 2004, a 14% increase was apparent (Lenhart, “Teens and Technology” ii). Perhaps one of the leading sources for statistical information with reference to youth and digital texts, the Pew Research Center published its first data results concerning general Internet and email usage in March 2000 and has since supplied researchers and scholars with a wide array of statistics and research covering everything from the digital divide to Web 2.0. Numbers such as a 14% growth in Internet users added to the Project’s other figures indicating the popularity of digital texts among youth: 81% that identified as gamers in 2001, with 56% revealing more than one email address (Lenhart, “Teenage Life” 4); in 2005, 75% of those polled admitted using instant messaging (Lenhart, “Teens and Technology” iii); and by 2007, 55% had already visited social networking communities (Lenhart, “Social Networking” 1). Such research by The Pew Center contributes to the narratives concerning youth and online usage; not only does the Center present their statistical results but they also provide their survey and methodological information, downloadable for any reader with access to their website. For scholars already doing research on youth and digital texts, the Pew Internet and American Life Project is quickly becoming a canonical source for cyber research. It is within this framework that youth and digital texts began to grow.

The Critical Possibilities of Digital Literacy What is interesting when discussing the history of digital environments and writing instruction is the realization that, according to Hawisher and Self, we know so little about how and why digital literacy has developed in the last 25 years (Hawisher 2). Given that digital texts can prompt collaboration, accessible revision and multimodal forms, it seems likely that such texts would be highly archival, too, offering researchers a bounty of accessible—and historical— data. But as I will argue with this project, digital texts are highly malleable and this certainly may attribute to the lack of historical attention. Such texts appear and move through the virtual

spaces of cyberspace, especially at the whims of explorative adolescents. This exploration helps contribute the to shifting definitions of literacy and how literacy relates to digital texts. As Alexander will argue, “what it means to be ‘literate’ in our society is undergoing a transformation” (1). In Kress’ text, Literacy in the New Media Age, he opened with this statement: “It is no longer possible to think about literacy in isolation from a vast array of social, technological and economic factors” (1). By 2003, already one of the leading texts in the field of digital literacy was prompting scholars to think about literacy differently, to consider the global and critical implications of a different form of text. For this technological literacy as Selfe defines it (11), such literacy takes on multimodal forms and can carry critical discussions through its application. These forms allow youth online, or as Alexander calls them, “digitally savvy students” to be “at the forefront of rethinking and reimagining the possibilities of electronically enabled literacy” (6). Not only is redefining literacy what began to occur with the rise of digital access but also who uses such literacy became at issue. Youth who use digital texts, Alexander argued, “are youth who believe in the power of the word, in the possibilities of changing their worlds through writing” (7). It was Turkle who provided an early text for scholars working with youth and identity exploration online. In her book, the 1995 Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Turkle proposed a new view on representation of the self in virtual spaces: “You can have a sense of self without being one self” (81) and her theories helped kick off several anthologies of authors writing about cyberspace. One anthology, Vitanza’s Cyberreader, included some of the field’s most prominent researchers writing about virtual space and the explorative possibilities, including Rheingold and Slouka whose work with virtual communities became a focus for many composition rhetoric scholars. It is within these communities that scholars began to theorize on the options for critical analysis through forms of literacy: “writing teachers using electronic forms considered the idea of invented, multiple selves integral to literacy formation” (Romano 249); “virtual communities offer us the opportunity to construct utopian collectivities— communities of interest, education, tastes, beliefs, and skills” (Doheny-Farina 16). Warnick, like Kress, argues that digital literacy is such a different form of textual display and structure that new heuristics will be needed for assessment. But while Kress’ focus lies in authorship, Warnick, in “Rhetorical Criticism of Public Discourse on the Internet: Theoretical Implications”

became concerned about categorical structures, “The various forms of Internet communication are discontinuous, fragmented, interactive, increasingly multimediated, and they lack the cues of face-to-face interaction and the seeming transparency of print. To study them, we will need to rethink many of our critical constructs and categories” (74) as they affect how we begin to think about societal issues critically. What is agreed by many of these scholars researching virtual spaces is that prohibiting or censoring such space from youth negates many of the lessons we are trying to teach them: “we may do adolescents a disservice when we curtail their participation in these spaces, because the educational and psychosocial benefits of this type of communication can far outweigh the potential dangers” (qtd in University of Illinois). Issues of safety, while always a concern in virtual research where youth is involved—especially recently given the rise of cyberbullying— tends to become a secondary concern when explorative possibilities are discussed: It may be that adolescents who are troubled or alienated from their parents have more difﬁculties satisfying friendship needs through face-to-face relationships and that, for some, the Internet provides an alternative. If this is so, it is not necessarily a problem. The Internet may be a source of positive social support and connection for some adolescents, for example youth with disabilities (Wolak 116). For many scholars, the critical elements accessible to youth online tend to override the risks, as many will argue: risks can be managed but the possibilities for youth to use literacy in forming critical ideas is too precious a form to dismiss. With Alexander’s 2006 text, Digital Literacies: Emerging Literacies on the World Wide Web scholars are able to find critical and celebratory possibilities for youth participation in online space: “I contend that some of the most exciting work in writing, in authorship, in literacy development, is still occurring on the Internet in general and on the Web in particular” (10). Alexander argues, like composition rhetoric scholars working with girls and women writing online—like Bruce, Literacies, Lies, and Silences: Girls Writing Lives in the Classroom; Takayoshi, “No Boys Allowed: The World Wide Web as a Clubhouse for Girls;” Hawisher and Sullivan, “Fleeting Images: Women Visually Writing the Web;” Stern, “Sexual Selves on the World Wide Web: Adolescent Girls’ Home Pages as Sites for Sexual Self-Expression;” Payne, Bodily Discourses: When Students Write About Abuse and Eating Disorders; Comstock, “Grrrl Zine Networks: Re-Composing Spaces of Authority, Gender, and Culture;” and Romano, “On

Becoming a Woman: Pedagogies of the Self”—that this space for digital literacy provides “the chance to create new possibilities of representation” (Alexander 23), one that “is more than just a communications tool. It is an identity and world-making tool” (4). The critical possibilities for youth working online may change the way we define literacy and its purposes; the audience may be larger than traditional texts as “information and contents do not simply move from one private space to another, but they travel along a network” (Birkerts 261), sending out ideas and messages in a global platform. Birkerts will argue that this has its effects: “Transitions like the one from print to electronic media do not take place without rippling or, more likely, reweaving the entire social and cultural web” (261). Critical discussions can happen in digital literacy that may make conversations “much more forthright than face-to-face encounters” (Eldred 241), bringing social and political issues to the table. By the turn of the new millennium, scholars of cyberspace were making connections to contemporary discussions and social issues; Addison and Comstock’s, “Virtually Out: The Emergence of Lesbian, Bisexual and Gay Youth Cyberculture” and DeWitt’s, “Out There on the Web: Pedagogy and Identity in the Face of Opposition” addressed how virtual spaces affected queer youth and the coming out process, for example, while Gerrard’s “Feminist Research in Computers and Composition” and Blair and Takayoshi’s Feminist Cyberscapes: Mapping Gendered Academic Spaces discussed issues of feminist pedagogy in the composition classroom. Again, it became about the possibilities for youth: “[they] may find the online environment a place to ask serious questions about race or ethnicity they would be afraid to ask in person, for fear of offending or causing a conflict.” (University of Illinois). For critical participation, online space is unguarded territory for youth. What became an issue for scholars was how to adapt it pedagogically.

Pedagogical Progression in the Composition Classroom Online scholars tend to agree that teaching using the online environment as a tool, “requires as much if not more adult support and effort as do traditional teaching methods” (Attewell 255) yet as Selber argued in his 2004 text, Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, “Many teachers of writing and communication simply transfer wholesale to the screen their existing assumptions, goals, and practices” (23) partly because they lack the skill and training to teach in the wired classroom or within a virtual framework. The reality is “in many instances, students will actually know more than their teachers about operating computers” (19) and this causes a

problem in integrating such “multiliteracies” into new curriculum with new pedagogies that best utilize digital literacy. One of the forerunners in the field of pedagogical foundations in online environments is Selfe’s 1999 text, Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention. Selfe raised questions about how technological literacy was taught and asked the reason why; her book is pivotal in understanding the uses of digital literacy in relation to teaching college composition. She noted that at the start of the new millennium, “computers were used as electronic versions of printed grammar handbooks” (69) and this made many teachers of composition at the college level start to question how and why technology in the writing classroom was so crucial to student’s success as writers. The argument Selfe made within her text became one of economic and political focus for multimodal text applications, moving beyond the social, community-driven purposes many other researchers of online environments were making. Self claimed that the “current national project to expand technological literacy officially identified as the Technology Literacy Challenge by the Clinton administration” (5) recognized technology as key to economic growth (49). This, in turn, prompted American ideology toward technological literacy to shift with literacy acutely defined: “the definition of literacy determines not only who will succeed in our culture—and the criteria for such success—but also who will fail” (18). What this created, according to Selber, was a pedagogical framework in which “[teachers] are encouraged, even mandated, to integrate technology into the curriculum, yet no incentives are given for such an ambitious assignment, one that places an extra workload burden on teachers” (Selber 2). By the progression to the new millennium, teachers of writing in the college classroom began reworking and rethinking how assignments and assessments of digital literacy needed to occur: Eldred, “Pedagogy in the Computer-networked Classroom;” Wickliff and Yancey, “The perils of creating a class Web site: It was the best of times, it was the…;” Palmquist, “Contrasts: Teaching and Learning about Writing in Traditional and Computer Classrooms;” Haas, “On the Relationship Between Old and New Technologies;” and George, “From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing” all presented either case studies or theoretical arguments concerning teaching with digital literacy. Lunsford argued for new assignments: “a multimedia research-based argument, one that would include substantive writing, research, collaboration, and delivery of the argument in one or more media” (172) and

by 2004, Yancey’s keynote address at the CCCC, “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key” reflected such changes, prompting a position statement to note that “the focus of writing instruction is expanding: the curriculum of composition is widening to include not one but two literacies: a literacy of print and a literacy of the screen” (CCCC 15). By the rise of Web 2.0 (further discussed in chapter six), composition through the forms of digital literacy became well established in the college writing classroom.

A History of Girl Studies in America In 1982, psychologist and academic Carol Gilligan published In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. The text, what Harvard Press dubs, “the little book that started a revolution” is unarguably the seminal text that kicked off the academic field of Girl Studies: “Gilligan’s work is thought by many to have inspired the girl’s movement” (Baumgardner 171). With a background in both clinical and social psychology, Gilligan moved to research the psychological development of women, something she noted was absent from most research done in the field of psychology. Focusing on the moral and ethical choices women make, Gilligan traced women’s cognitive decisions back to girlhood, where she realized “boys and girls arrive at puberty with a different interpersonal orientation and a different range of social experiences” (11), something psychologists before Gilligan were, if recognizing at all, certainly not researching and noting in clinical studies. As Tavris noted in The New York Times Book Review of Gilligan’s text: “Gilligan’s research certainly corrects a ludicrous bias in the field of moral development.” Much of what Gilligan found was the way in which women’s development was defined through attributes of men, with masculine characteristics such as autonomous thinking and clear decision making. Women’s development, Gilligan argued, “is masked by a particular conception of human relationships” (25) with psychology leaving no language to define women’s sense of self. Gilligan realized that for many adult women, a lack of identity and voice led to this lack of self awareness. To understand how women come to a place of silence, Gilligan began researching girls in order to understand women. With this goal in mind, she found that “as girls become the carriers of unvoiced desires and unrealized possibilities, they are placed at considerable risk and even in danger” (xxiii) and this stays with them well through adulthood.

The First Wave The influence of Gilligan’s findings created a ripple effect throughout the academy. Early girl studies scholars, and likewise feminists, have grounded much of their research in Gilligan’s findings. (Gilligan became Ms. Magazine’s first Woman of the Year in 1984.) For the first time in scholarly discussions, girls were being noted as a separate entity from boys, as much of the past research on youth culture tended to look at boys’ development; any mention of girlhood was new to many fields (Franzosa 326). Within the decade, researchers and scholars began studying girls in separate forums from boys. I consider three texts as the core Girl Studies texts that have their foundation in Gilligan’s work. The first is a 1992 American Association of University Women (AAUW) report, How Schools Shortchange Girls: The AAUW Report: A Study of Major Findings on Girls and Education, a “critical stake on the status of girls” (Baumgardner 177). This report addressed the issues concerning self-esteem and girls in the classroom with the goals of both classroom and curriculum change, recognizing that girls learn and socialize differently than boys. With this plan of education reform, the Executive Summary states: The educational system is not meeting girls’ needs. Girls and boys enter school roughly equal in measured ability. Twelve years later, girls have fallen behind their male classmates in key areas such as higher-level mathematics and measures of self- esteem. Yet gender equity is still not a part of the national debate on educational reform (AAUW 1). Response to the AAUW report was quick and vast; fields ranging from education through sociology began considering issues related to girls’ development, what Gilligan had touched on only a decade earlier. It may be that such issues concerning such gender disparity in the classroom was recognized by educators but that those “who have sought to point this out have been silenced” (Franzosa 327). The AAUW report then, was seriously considered as data collected toward making educational changes. A companion piece was published two years later based on the AAUW report, Peggy Orenstein’s SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap. Orenstein, a freelance writer and editor began an ethnographic study of girls’ classroom behavior looking specifically at girls’ confidence and self-esteem. Speaking with girls at two different middle schools, Orenstein provided the practical examples that the AAUW report had first presented.

She noted, “When I first read about the AAUW survey, I felt deeply troubled. This was a report in which children were talking directly to us about their experience, and I didn’t like what I heard” (xx). For Orenstein, it was not an issue of teaching girls how to cope but generating the discussion on how to change the institutions in which girls interacted. As she began her research, she admitted, “I was suspicious of any movement that stressed personal transformation over structural change, especially for women” (xxiii). With excerpts published in both The New York Times Magazine and Glamour magazine, Orenstein’s text reached a broader audience than Gilligan’s text and most of the AAUW report (Ward 17). Because of this, women outside the academy began to contemplate past developmental and relationship issues. The third text that I consider most influential and the final core text in the field of Girl Studies, one that would not be possible without Gilligan’s foray into research on girlhood, is Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. A clinical psychologist, Pipher wrote the text in an “attempt to understand [her] experiences in therapy with adolescent girls” (Pipher 11). She intended for the audience of Reviving Ophelia to be the parents and professionals who work with teen and pre-teen girls in settings such as school environments and youth organizations. Based on her many case studies, Pipher recognizing the cultural changes in the decade since Gilligan began researching girls. By the publication of Reviving Ophelia in 1994, girls’ educators and counselors were noting a myriad of issues affecting girls such as eating disorders, addictions, depression, attempted suicides, and sexual abuse in numbers that tripled in the final two decades of the latter half of the last century. Awareness and naming of some impulses, such as self-mutilation, were brand new to those working with girls. As Pipher put it, “This is a National Weather Service bulletin from the storm center” (28). Pipher not only opened the door for her readers to discover such issues but—what differed from the AAUW report and Orenstein’s text—also offered solutions for communication that involved teaching these girls how to find their identity and their sense of self. What is perhaps the most enduring strength of Reviving Ophelia is that the text wasn’t limited to the bookshelves of school counselors and Girl Scout leaders. Somewhere along the way girls discovered the text themselves, and they adapted it as their own manifesto of girl culture. Almost a full decade later and Reviving Ophelia is showing up on Amazon.com’s Listmania booklists created by junior high and high school girls. What Mary Pipher was able to do with her text was reach an audience that spans several generations of women from pre-menstruation to

menopause. A review by a high school student on barnesandnoble.com wrote, “My mother first read it and passed it on to me. After I read it, I passed it on to my group of friends. This book has traveled far.” (Carey). Given the timeliness of its topics, Reviving Ophelia not only made its mark on The New York Times bestseller list but also stayed there for two years. What made Pipher’s text different from all the others is the rhetorical structure of the text. In an interview with Family Journal, Pipher stated, “I don’t use the language of social science” (qtd. in Carlson 267), and this approach may be what separated her from any of the academic work done by Gilligan or Orenstein. Pipher’s publisher admits that Pipher “is able to convey difficult information in a very reassuring, comfortable and positive way” (qtd. in Gleick 73). Even Carol Gilligan believes Pipher “has succeeded in reaching a very wide audience with these ideas, and I think that’s terrific […] what she’s doing is building on our work” (qtd. in Gleick 73). Perhaps one of the most rhetorical moves Mary Pipher made with Reviving Ophelia, however, is in marketing her own text. According to Time magazine, Reviving Ophelia “really took off […] when the paperback came out” (Gleick 73) and Pipher went on lecture tours to universities with book signings at Borders and Barnes and Noble. My own copy of Reviving Ophelia, in fact, was purchased at one of these book signings. Within five years of the publication of both Orenstein and Pipher’s books, “there was an explosion of books geared toward girls,” which the authors of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future say, “parents gobbled up like chicken soup for Ophelia’s soul” (184). Even Pipher will admit, “I’m certainly not new or different” (qtd. in Carlson 267). When Orenstein published a reprint of her text with a updated preface in 2000, she noted that since first publication, “there’s a whole new section in local bookstores filled with straight-talking guides for teenage girls on how to stay true to themselves as they navigate adolescence” (Orenstein xi). Much of what had been researched in the early years of girl studies has been addressed similarly across disciplines and the narratives that recite girl studies’ histories are all the same. A shift began, however, near the end of the 1990s and the theorizing on girls’ development started to confront not only the developmental issues first brought to into awareness by these early researchers—what Ward and Benjamin identify as “The First Wave of Contemporary American Girls’ Studies” (16)—but also how research on girls has been constructed.

Moving Forward In the twenty years since the academy first began theorizing about girls, many similar claims have been made: Iglesias and Cormier initially followed Gilligan and Pipher’s research in recognizing that in mid-adolescence, “girls simply shut down” (Iglesias 260). Likewise, Schilt has connected with Brown and Gilligan’s claim that “girls’ lack of authentic relationships” (76) causes the creation of false relationships—relationships for relationships’ sake. Both Bruce and Pipher recognize that “the diversity of mainstream culture puts pressure on teens to make complicated choices for which adolescents don’t yet have the cognitive equipment” (Pipher 92). In trying to understand women’s psychological development, early girl studies scholars, and likewise feminists, have grounded much of their research in Gilligan’s findings, theorizing that girls’ lack of voice hinders girls’ subject and identity formation. By the end of the 1990s, contemporary Girl Studies scholars began to move forward from the initial voice research as set forth by this first wave of academics that had established a focus on the “loss of voice” that girls experience as they reach puberty. As Iglesias and Cormier realize, “girls of color may come from communities in which resistance is part of the sociopolitical history” (266), thus suggesting that a range of descriptions are needed to define what might constitute “voice.” Schilt asserts, “scholars who argue that girls lose their confidence during adolescence neglect to examine girls who do not lose their voice as teenagers” (71); this project offers one such space in which girls and young women use their voices through digital literacy. These new Girl Studies scholars—of which I count myself—recognize the limitations that Gilligan, Pipher and Orenstein held within their research. Harris argues that the then-current research “had been represented as universal and non-class- or race-specific elements of contemporary girlhood” (140). This is clearly evident when reading through a text such as Pipher’s: very few of her case studies included girls of color or those outside of the heterosexual frame. Given the socioeconomic restrictions related to family and personal counseling, girls in need of psychological attention may not have access. That much of the literature that has been produced in the early years of Girl Studies came from such research is problematic as “these research methods may leave out girls who do not seek out researchers but still may be offering resistance to the crisis of adolescence” (Schilt 78).

While Girl Studies has a number of texts that offer a focus on just girls—more so than ever in the past without the establishment of the field, the fact is that to date there is a limited body of literature that attends to methodologies for work with girls or for facilitating research by girls, even though the literature on girlhood is replete with references to participation and the need for girl-centeredness (Mitchell, “How to Study Girl Culture” 18). Driscoll’s text is by far the most hardcore theory book in the field and is often the most cited in any theoretical work done concerning a framework of research on girls. This isn’t to say that other texts do not exist; with the newness of the field, in only twenty or so years, many texts have been published with a focus on girls by the end of that first decade. Finders’ 1997 text, Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High is similar to Orenstein’s text, an ethnographic study of girl activity. Though unlike Orenstein’s middle school research project, Finders’ research focused on the high school classroom. This same year also saw the publication of Brumberg’s The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, the first book to really address the problem of body image issues specifically, among adolescent girls. Told historically through dairies, Brumberg’s text opened the door for a whole subfield of research to be published under the umbrella heading of Girl Studies. And in 1999, Shandler published Ophelia Speaks: Adolescent Girls Write About Their Search for Self, a response to Pipher’s text with words from girls themselves. Shandler’s text included research participants that Pipher’s text did not: girls of color and emergent lesbians. Many texts have since been published that included what was once identified as marginalized groups. Bauer’s Am I Blue? Coming Out from the Silence was published only a year after Pipher and deals with gay awareness among teens in the same format as Ophelia Speaks. The field has since moved forward with conscious effort to change the focus of the research; a shift has occurred from implicating adults and institutions to work that centers on the individual girls as the site of change (Ward 18). As so much of the historical narratives on how Girl Studies began are all in agreement on the input of where the “foremothers” of Girl Studies came in, I am not one to argue the linear progress of the field. What I do see, however, are references to other events during this time period concerning the developmental timeline of girls to young women. While many Girl Studies scholars mention such events to lay context to their arguments, I believe that Girl Studies is but one branch of an all encompassing Girl Culture movement that occurred simultaneously

between the academy, popular culture and several intertwining grassroots political movements. Without equal activities by each area of interest, I do not believe that Girl Studies would have thrived, nor would a Girl Culture movement have picked up momentum. Schilt suggests, if educators, mentors, and researchers want to create strategies to empower girls, there needs to be more academic work that focuses on how girls represent, create, and produce their own lives within the social and cultural constraints of adolescence (94). It is this move to recognize girls’ own constructions that has been neglected by early Girl Studies scholars. While the academy was focusing on girls’ activities in the classroom and in research settings, they were neglecting other issues that contributed to the creation of a Girl Culture movement in social and cultural venues.

The Rise of Girl Culture I remember the first time I met one of the scholarly “names” it the field of Girl Studies. I had been about four years into my own, graduate level research and was excited to meet a published scholar in the field. Since Girl Studies is a relatively new area of study—courses at the college level began popping up only around 2002—speaking to someone who had been writing on Girl Studies since its inception was rather intimidating for such a green scholar as I felt myself to be at the time. While the meeting was informative, I was baffled by what little connection this scholar actually had to do with girls. I had been attending Girl Scout camps and making mall trips with any one of my many nieces and felt more connected to girls than the published scholar I spoke with. As I reflect now, I am reminded of Mitchell and Reid-Walsh’s comments concerning the academic inquisitiveness of studying girlhood: girl culture (and the study of childhood and adolescent culture more generally) is dismissed as not being very important; somehow, the academic integrity accorded to other areas of study is often absent in the context of girlhood” (Mitchell, “Preface” xv). I found as I worked deeper in the field that many Girl Studies scholars came at this area of study through another, interdisciplinary focus. My own background is Feminist Discourses with a focus in Girl Studies, merely because the actual academic field of Girl Studies is still too new to be recognized by many academic institutions. As so much of what structures girlhood is considered popular culture, I expect that this may be why an academic interest is so slow—and late—to unfold. Considering that “so many of

the texts of girls’ popular culture that are dismissed as ephemeral have been around for decades” (Mitchell, “Introduction” xxix), it does make me wonder how so much attention has been focused on boys when studying youth culture. Even in my own work, the history of researching anything girl-related is going to rest on literature; while finding a mass of scholarly articles written on Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is easy, barely half that amount can be found published on Seventeen, a girl-focused periodical that has been around since 1944. That so much of what compromises girl culture has been ignored or merged into other areas with lesser attention is problematic. While the work that Gilligan, Pipher and Orenstein is certainly needed and I am in no way dismissing their contribution to the foundation of Girl Studies, I want to emphasize the discontent I feel as a scholar that so much important activity of girlhood takes place outside the realm of the academic researcher. I am certainly not the first to note this problem: “the lack of academic rigor in relation to girlhood and popular culture makes the challenge of doing research in the field frustrating and oddly fascinating” (Mitchell, “Preface” xvi) but I will say that none of these fields can exist and thrive without the other. Girl Studies, I argue here, became as relevant as it did due to the activities occurring at the grassroots and subculture level. And I believe it thrives as a field today—the first Girl Studies minor has been approved at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC for fall 2010—because of the continuing work done in areas of girlhood by people outside of the academy.

Becoming the Third Wave What makes the concept of a “girl culture” so promising is that within this discourse, such exploratory spaces are possible. By the mid-1990s, girls were already starting to claim a section of the social and cultural landscape for themselves, despite (or perhaps) the loss of voice early Girl Studies scholars were recognizing. While Gilligan and her successors were conducting their ethnographic studies in tracking girls’ development, a new form of feminism began to emerge from subcultures and young feminist activists. Identified as the Third Wave of feminism, this new group of feminists were/are socially and politically different than the generation of feminists that came before. Much of the gender limitations that the Second Wave fought against allowed for empowerment possibilities for the generation of young women that followed. Baumgardner and Richards believe, “the difference between the First, Second, and Third Waves is our cultural DNA” (129); while popular culture has always had a connection

with youth culture, the application of popular culture became a powerful tool of empowerment for contemporary girls. Public spaces, one relegated to boys’ play became a platform for girl activity as “girls in the twenty-first century […] appropriated and modified key emblems of boy culture and made them their own” (Mitchell, “Introduction” xxiii) with girls showing up in skate parks and as action heroes on television and in film. In 1995, two texts of importance to Third Wave feminism were published: Findlen’s Listen Up: Voices From the Next Feminist Generation, an anthology of personal narratives about girlhood and Walker’s To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism, both of which had a huge role in the move to a Third Wave of feminism. Findlen’s text defined how many of the stories of Third Wave feminists would be told; personal narratives became the focus of not only political accounts but also emotional stories told through a variety of venues. Walker’s text helped name the movement. Rebecca Walker, daughter of Second Wave feminist—or womanist as she names herself—Alice Walker, struggled identifying herself in the framework of the Second Wave. With new social, political and cultural environments, Rebecca Walker argued that a new form of feminism needed to be defined. Within five years, Baumgardner and Richards’ text Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future was published and it became the primer for the new generation of young feminists. In Manifesta, not only was a brief history of the feminist movement outlined but it also provided an idea of what feminism had given to this new generation of girls and young women. Many topics of difference among the waves were discussed; Third Wave girls are already living in a culture that has been altered by the generation of women before them. For the Third Wave, it is a matter of taking responsibility and staking their own claims to the feminism that is so readily available to them in their culture. With the Third Wave, a text such as Reviving Ophelia that discusses issues such as date rape, living with step-parents, bingeing and purging, cutting, and incest, becomes a product of its generation: “some cultural objects that girls consumed/read/loved contained feminism simply because of the political atmosphere in which they were created” (Baumgardner 142). This text helps structure an idea of a “girl culture,” by noticing difference and appropriating a space in which girls can make claim to their sense of self. Third Wave feminists for example, celebrate sexuality in ways different than generations before. The authors of Manifesta discuss the “girlie” movement, which believes “we’re not broken, and our desires aren’t simply booby traps set by the patriarchy” (Baumgardner 136).

Though one of the main criticisms of Third Wave feminism is that today’s young feminists have no political aspirations, it needs to be acknowledged that political activism is just as prominent in this generation of young women as it was during the First and Second Waves. The formats for reaching audience, however, have changed. Wong argues, “feminist politics can be shared with the world if it is carefully disguised in the mass media. Pop culture provides an effective vehicle to carry the self-celebrating concepts of third wave feminism” (296) prompting many Third Wave feminists to keenly note where the audience is. Feminism for Third Wave girls is no longer limited to specific feminist organizations or women’s studies courses. For Second Wave feminists, the political became part of the cultural landscape. For this generation of Third Wavers, “politics was superseded by culture—punk rock, hip-hop, zines, products, consumerism, and the Internet” (Baumgardner 130). As the authors of Manifesta will argue, the Third Wave is “not doing feminism the same way that the seventies feminists did it” (130) but rather finding their own forms of feminism unique to their generation.

The Riot Grrrls and DIY By the mid- to late 90s, girls were showered with iconic images of empowerment in their media. “Girl Power!” as advocated by the Spice Girls and the adventures of Buffy the Vampire Slayer had found audience in contemporary girls and young women. Subcultures were moving out of the underground as Comstock observes: In the late 1980s and early 90s, the riot grrrl ‘rants’ against dominant notions and images of girlhood and femininity first appeared in the punk and grunge music subcultures of Olympia, Washington and Washington D.C. (385). Here, Riot Grrrl bands such as Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, L7 and Sleater-Kinney were inspiring a new generation of girls and young women to get active and be productive. According to “The Riot Grrrl Manifesto,” action by girls and young women was in desperate need: BECAUSE us girls crave records and books and fanzines that speak to US that WE feel included in and can understand in our own ways. / BECAUSE we wanna make it easier for girls to see/hear each other's work so that we can share strategies and criticize-applaud each other. / BECAUSE we must take over the means of production in order to create our own moanings […] (Hanna).

One form of vocalization that was spurred by the Riot Grrrl movement was the organization of zine production. While zines first appeared in the 1930s (Cherland 91), the contemporary girl zine spans various forms of media production. Girls and young women, for an audience of girls and young women, created—and still produce—girl zines, in their various medium: “Xeroxed handwritten rants and cut-and-paste collages to professional design and offset printing” (Green xi). When the Riot Grrrls starting circulating zines at their concerts, they created a space for girls to play with identity and an exploration of subjectivity through the written and visual voices in their texts: “The Riot Grrrl movement of the 1990s was organized in opposition to patriarchy and aimed at challenging the media’s representation of girls as helpless victims” (Martinez 98). Zine production became what Comstock identifies as both a “private enclave and public training ground” (394) for girls to express themselves without institutional constrictions. With “emancipatory potential” (394), zines taught girls how to be their own cultural producers, creating a “do-it-yourself ethos” (Schilt 79). While Girl Studies scholars were contending with how to empower girls through literacy in the classroom, outside the classroom, a generation of girls became entwined in a part of girl culture that was already teaching them the power of authorship. These zines, produced and then distributed at concerts, traded at bookstores and circulated throughout the country displayed “voices of a new generation of women writers debating feminism, politics, sex, culture, and the media” (Green xi), proof of the rhetorical savvy I argue contemporary girls and young women hold. Zine makers in the 1990s took control of the medium and used it for self-expression. Comstock claims that the circulation of zines has helped connect Girl Studies scholars with what girls are producing and learning as part of the girl culture movement: “grrrl writers and designers teach us that authorship is not a fixed or completely predetermined category but a site of collective struggle and interactivity” (388). Finding a site of “collective struggle and interactivity” allows girls and young women to establish a space in which they are able to mediate through prescribed constructions toward locating their own subjectivity. As the girl culture movement ground itself within late twentieth-century social, political, and cultural discourses, this new empowerment girls acquired from Third Wave feminist activities encouraged girls to embrace their experiential environment. What better platform for allowing interactivity among multiple selves in exploration than the Internet? Personal websites are, after all, electronic zines. Enter the cyberage.

Chapter Four Where The gURLs Are: A Rhetorical Analysis of Online Space

Introduction In this chapter, I propose that the online discourse of girls and young women intermixes a sense of empowerment that girls have learned from feminist activities with a celebration of the attention they receive as an audience for popular culture. Using categories first established by Hawisher and Sullivan, I examine the rhetoric aimed at girls found in commercial websites, clearly marked for promoting consumer culture; the rhetoric of institutional websites, created for girls by nonprofit or educational sponsors; and the rhetoric of personal websites, created by girls themselves. Analyzing various online spaces in which girls interact, I argue that, taken together, these spaces create a girl-focused online space, one that should be recognized as a viable form of digital literacy. Though digital literacy as a whole encompasses a space much larger than online discourse, I see these online girl spaces as enabling the formation of girl subjectivity and establishing an agency that girls feel reluctant to claim in other discourse areas. In such spaces, girls work within the genre of personal narrative, a mode of writing already familiar to girl culture. Mitchell and Reid-Walsh argue that “certain writing genres such as journal and diary writing, when they are associated with girls and women are often seen to have little value” (21), recognizing an ideological negation of the personal narrative. But girls tend to make solid use of the genre; as Stern found in her research involving girls self-disclosure online, “stories that are very personal, intimate, and immediate” (Stern, “Virtually Speaking” 224) are the stories told in online spaces. As Gill states, “Girls are trained to make stories about themselves. […] From a young age they learn that they are objects […] so they learn how to describe themselves” (qtd in Rosenbloom). While Gill’s assertion is certainly arguable—it becomes essentialist in such a simple form—it is true that girls and young women work through many experiential moments in the interactions that take place online, and this chapter and the following will demonstrate such examples. As a scholar doing research in online discourse, I find it difficult to avoid the large number of digital spaces that have been appropriated by girls and young women, virtual spaces that are surfed, occupied, created, criticized and well managed by tech-savvy girls. That girls would occupy such spaces, which are both private and public at the same time, is curious, given

that the option to speak aloud—or occupy actual space and claim recognition—has not traditionally been a position of familiarity or comfort for most adolescent girls. Many girls have often opted for silence and nonrecognition of their identity, perhaps the consequences of a lack of recognizable subject position(s). The move to silence girls at the onset of adolescence has been well documented by Girl Studies researchers: Pipher writes, “Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence” (19); Gilligan, the psychologist who first noted the shifting of voice as girls reach adolescence indicates that, “Girls struggle against losing voice and against creating an inner division or split” (xxiii); while Stern has noted, “girls use their silence as a strategy for navigating safely through life” (Stern, “Virtually Speaking” 226). The metaphor of navigation is popular in Girl Studies and it makes an appropriate metaphor for the ways girls steer through establishing a relationship to their cultural environments. Gilligan, as early as 1982, noted that there is often “an active process of dissociation, of knowing and then not knowing” (xxii), a moment of uncertainty when a girl’s identity is not yet established. Pipher argued in 1994 that the surrounding cultural environment makes claiming an identity difficult as girls “are coming of age in a more dangerous, sexualized and media-saturated culture” (12). This loss of self and loss of voice hinders not only emotional stability through adolescence but also creates a fragmented self as girls enter into adulthood: “the edge of adolescence,” argue Brown and Gilligan, “has been identified as a time of heightened psychological risk for girls” (2). Eating disorders, sexual promiscuity and body modification such as cutting and branding are patterns that develop in adolescence and can carry into adulthood. Girls often take to “writing on the body” in this manner in their struggle to find a space in which to be recognized. Girls’ struggle to be seen and heard isn’t just manifested in such physical acts but also in “the makings of an inner division as girls come to a place where they feel they cannot say or feel or know what they have experienced” (Brown 4). Silent girls grow up to be silent women as “with loss of voice also comes loss of self” (Iglesias 259). This notion of navigation becomes one of difficulty given the cultural environment that girls must learn to manage in the search for their sense of self. The sexualization of Western culture, in which a well-defined body image plays a role in popularity, can often be a negative force in an adolescent girl’s development. Add to it the trappings of commercial advertising and girls barely stand a chance.

Enter a new space, one in which anonymity is in abundance and community is encouraged. Driscoll argues that, “alternative forms of girl culture often question what constitutes girl-space” (273); given the untamed environment of online space, alternative is merely only one description. Digital texts offer contemporary girls new spaces; as a platform for exploration, online space permits girls to enter in search of identity a venue that allows a pre-teen or adolescent girl to try out her changing identity and maturing voice against—or with—both textual and graphical imagery which can offer a step toward empowerment leading to an empowered sense of self that often eludes girls and young women. As such a space, a girl- focused online space, permeated by all interests marked “girl,” offers websites designed for girls and by girls, all adding their pages to a girl-defined virtual space. As Reid-Walsh and Mitchell argue, “Web sites constructed or designed by girls are one of the few spaces under their control” (174). By following the methodological structure of website inquiry by Hawisher and Sullivan, my research into girls’ online space is easily categorized into their suggested divisional placements as such categories encompass girl culture as a whole. By analyzing commercial websites, I am able to tap into the popular culture that constructs the contemporary adolescent female. As Driscoll claims, “an idea of the girl market is employed to sell participation in girlhood” (268) and this is none more evident than in commercial websites. Such spaces have created a discourse not much different than how language about adolescents was first structured in the 19th century: “framing the girl as the object of a discourse that speaks about her in the process of outlining a subjectivity she cannot acquire” (60). As I will argue in this chapter, such subjectivity—and for girls this could be subjectivities—is created by girls themselves. This will be evident in my argument concerning personal websites, in which “by offering self-selected descriptors, girls more easily create the selves they want others to perceive” (Stern, “Sexual Selves” 271). The institutional website category is a strong category in which to frame girls’ online discourse since much of what has prompted research into girlhood and a recognition of Girl Studies is driven by institutions that are beginning to recognize girls for girls’ sake, the argument Driscoll is proposing and one I am furthering with this project. Institutions that are backed by educational, medical, political and social structures both help and hinder girls—with institutional websites, a dichotomy is created. Feminist author Audrey Brashich hosts a site for girls entitled

Culture of Modeling, for example, complete with a message board for asynchronous discussion. While such a space for girls can be lauded for promoting critical discussion with forum titles such as “What profession should earn the most money?” it should be noted that the first forum on this message board is “Help Audrey with magazine articles she’s writing!” (Brashich). Like commercial websites, space in some institutional websites is shared with the host site’s main purpose, one that may not necessarily be completely oriented towards girls themselves, leaving girls to learn on their own how to navigate through empowerment or the perpetuation of normative ideas of what defines girl. This is not much different than the reality in which girls daily face: “American culture appears to be encouraging girls to grow into strong women who can negotiate work, home, and romance, while still retaining their femininity” (Schilt 72). Institutional websites are not without fault and sit in what I recognize as a “between” space of commercial and personal websites. For every Girl Scouts of America or girls inc. website, there is a website seeking demographics for Girl Studies researchers, sometimes losing site of the research plan for the sake of research and not always the benefit of girls. It is only with the third category—personal websites—that I deviate from Hawisher and Sullivan’s original methodology. For their research, they looked at professional websites created by women, mostly women in academia. As I am working at analyzing the alphabetic and visual texts created by adolescent girls, the professional site category was discarded for personal websites, the more prevalent site structures created by girls. I am less concerned about the reason such sites differ in form—I follow Rosenbloom’s research, which realized that “teasing out why girls are prolific Web content creators usually leads to speculation and generalization”—and am more interested in what is done with these sites and to view them rhetorically, exploring how these sites are enabling girls to establish subject position(s) of their own making.

Commercial Websites When I discussed various commercial websites with my research participants, the question, “Do you ever shop online?” prompted snickers from all my interviewees. Erin leaned across the conference table and said pointedly, “It’s like asking me if I’m a girl.” I would be remiss with this project if I didn’t note how invested girls are with consumer culture. Much of what drives their social discussions is the buying and sharing of consumer goods. As far back as

1999, when research in Girl Studies began looking at girls as a separate economic entity of youth culture apart from that of boys, statistics revealed that American girls alone had been spending $60 billion annually (Dunn 108). So when Jenn bragged in response to my shopping question, “I have a special folder in my bookmarks for all my shopping,” I was hardly surprised. Quart notes that “kids are forced to embrace the instrumental logic of consumerism at an earlier-than-ever age” (xii). This notion of buying product certainly helps to fuel the social spaces that girls occupy. Case in point, the rise of girl-friendly stores by the end of the 1990s, such as Limited Too began popping up, with clothing racks no higher than the height of the average 9 year old. Navigating such spaces can be complicated when considering a lack of ability in reason or maturity in some girls and this may just hinder the choices they make. Even Emily, at 19, struggled with her online purchasing. When asked if she shops online, Emily laughed and replied, “um, I did, until a month ago when I accidentally ordered six pairs of Ugg boots on eBay! I didn’t know that I won more than one [pair] and I thought you would have to confirm it? So something went wrong. So I don’t shop online anymore. I’m not allowed.” The commodification of youth culture has become a large focus for advertising since the rise of girl culture in the 1990s. Reaching the buyer is the main purpose, and what better way to create a cultural product than to make the product part of the cultural language of the consumer? While access for use and command of Internet activities is still unarguably class- and culturally- defined, online discourse is better utilized by this generation of youth than the previous ones as “no other generation has been so targeted and saturated with media and marketing created just for them” (Goodstein 22). For advertisers aiming to market to the current youth generation, online space is a logical medium as “the Internet is […] a force for peer-to-peer marketing” (Quart 39) with the communal sharing of information among its users. As Addison and Comstock have noted in their work on youth and online space, “Electronic networks make it especially difficult and inadvisable to draw fixed borders between on-line and off-line cultures and subcultures” (370). Creating a consumer culture online to parallel that of real-time culture was destined to become successful, as there is no separation here: girls visit commercial websites as they shop the mall, “wield[ing] tangible power in dictating popular culture […] confident consumers, secure in their opinions” (Dunn 111). The sites exist due to their popularity and receive plenty of traffic by girls and young women. When I asked my research participants to

name some of the commercial websites they visited, the rattled off URLs as quickly as listing their friends’ names.

The Girl Market For many commercial websites targeted to girls, there seems to be a belief in a foundational demographic, that there is a “girl market” and commercial website design will play to such a market. In commercial website formatting, content and structure, there is a concept of the conventional feminine, essentially actualizing Driscoll’s argument about the girl body as “eroticized in a space of preparation for heterosexuality” (77), which includes the performance of heterosexuality and all the descriptions that create normative ideologies of the constructions of gender which depend on binary oppositions. As with the genre of teen magazines, there is a “pedagogic[al] approach to femininity” (76) that becomes a manual for enforcing particular gender roles. What is sold in commercial websites is the fashioning of girl into normative definitions of the heterosexual woman, incorporating the physical representations of how the ideologically gendered role is feminized: “The construction of the woman as one who has become and the girls as one who is on her way” (Eisenhauer 86). As Pipher argued in the early years of Girl Studies, “girls are expected to sacrifice the parts of themselves that our culture considers masculine on the altar of social acceptability” (39) as much representation of femininity is defined through consumer culture. More than a decade later and many commercial websites are continuing this instruction in gender performance. What these conventionally-feminine website concepts do is inscribe a concept of what constitutes girl and seldom allows the girl or young woman who is searching for a sense of self to explore beyond the definitions and scope that consumer culture provides her. As Schilt asserts, “although […] consumer slogans may be empowering for some, they do not encourage girls’ own creativity or input into empowerment strategies” (79). Empowerment issues tend to be absent in commercial websites as a girl space is created. A girl market that is manufactured by commercial websites tends to create a girl space that looks and situates itself stereotypically ‘girly’ as portrayed in popular culture. When I asked my research participants to define girl space, many of them defined spaces that fall under conventionally feminine descriptions. Katie admitted, “The first thing that comes to my mind is pink. Because my girl space is a lot of pink.” The others described their bedrooms and dorm rooms and how they had

these spaces decorated: Lindsay explained, “I have a comforter with daisies on it” while Erin admitted, “I have clouds on my ceiling that I painted myself,” all describing the private space, the space of domesticity. My conversations with my research participants provided me with information that I already knew from visiting commercial websites, that there is a definitive idea of what defines girl and that corporations make a continual effort to implant these stereotypes into a cyber generation of girls and young women. While later in this chapter I further argue that girls are rhetorically savvy in navigating consumer marketing, I will state here that even though commercial culture tends to construct ideas of girl space—sites with color palettes of pink, lavender and yellow pastel backgrounds, for example, with ornate fonts for text—this doesn’t mean that girls aren’t aware of such gendered constructions. As one personal website designer notes on her homepage: “The color scheme for this page is magenta, not pink. THIS is pink, thank you” (Bad Girls), with a color bar of pastel pink against a bright magenta background, proving her awareness of the stereotypes of femininity that construct her gender. When Beth discussed her notion of girl space, she described her bathroom: “the one area where I have pink, and I have everything that I would ever need in pink, and no guy wants to see it in the bathroom” making this not only Beth’s idea of girl space but Beth’s space. And yet, while Carrie described her dorm room as her idea of girl space, her first response to my initial question was “what do I think about my personal time?” not even making the connection to a physical space as her first thought. What my research participants offered in defining their ideas of girl space—a space that commercial websites construct by trying to defining a girl market—is an example for how disconnected commercial websites really are from the experiential concerns of girls and young women. There is a focus in these commercial websites that tend to teach girls methods of fitting in by adhering to the codes of what constructs the normative girl, with not much attention given to moving beyond such social spaces. As Driscoll notes, “the idea of a girl market locating a specific demographic of girls is confounded by the difficulty of defining girls” (268), something developers of commercial websites seem to either not realize or not yet know how to manage.

Site Design While outwardly, commercial websites may consist of images and other graphics which match contemporary girl interests and the visual layout may be pleasing with conventionally-

feminine girl-defined colors, their purpose is pure product promotion, and this purpose is what becomes incentive for commercial website design. Website pages are often created from a standard template using two or three column layouts, similar to the traditional format for print advertising. What makes webpage layout different from that of the print ad is the format, from vertical to horizontal, allowing for different uses of traditional design space. Designers of commercial websites utilize this space to run ads in banners, usually on two or more sides, completely framing the page in product. Unlike the banners on freeservers, which host many girls’ personal websites, commercial websites’ banners often include animation so not only is the page framed in product but the product promotion rotates the entire time the page is onscreen. The result is that company product can be advertised not only centrally on the main page in the main frame, but similar products of the same nature or product line can be advertised at the same time, essentially flooding viewers with commodity. In some commercial websites, pop-up boxes may be attached to each site source page so that every time the user clicks to move to a new screen, more product promotion is advertised. In magazine websites, ads appear not only for subscriptions to the magazines but also for the products sold within their pages. Essentially, these commercial websites create a space that is targeted to the audience of girls and young women but it is one that must be shared with consumer marketing. It is sites such as these that I shared with my research participants. For the young women who participated in my research project, the various commercial sites I displayed during our interview brought a range of comments. From Lindsey’s note concerning one site, “I like the colors. I like the theme of it. It’s interesting to look at and it’s also really clean and organized,” to Erin boldly stating, “I feel like if I had to talk about a serious topic it should have to have some humor in it. Because otherwise, it just won’t be interesting. It would be like me watching the news. Really boring,” I found these women very confident in relaying their opinions about all the websites viewed. Navigation was a large concern for several of them. Beth compared two sites, noting: I like how [the first site] gives some navigation; the links are all on the left side. You click on one and it gives you a little synopsis and it gives you the entire article. Now this [other site]—the links are all on the top and sometimes that makes me confused and I don’t know why. There’s games, it looks like; when I see games I don’t feel like I am going to get a lot of information so it becomes more of just an entertainment site.

This is a clear indication that Beth is rhetorically savvy concerning how she wants her websites structured; at 19, she has experience with such digital space that she can assuredly criticize any online text. Carrie was also assertive in her analysis of the commercial sites we viewed. With one site she mostly liked, she stated, “Overall I think it’s good, the colors are good and everything stands out. I just think this space is so wasted…but I like how it’s got the articles for you to look at and the different types of things you can click on, different colors, things like that,” yet very vocally offered suggestions for reworking a site she didn’t like: Make the colors better. Make it stand out. Things just don’t stand out. They have all these colors and I just keep thinking, what else is there to see? I wouldn’t put all this stuff right here, all the different options because I was first…I didn’t even look at that actually I was like, shit where’s the rest of the website? Where are the links? Many of these young women made connections to these commercial sites as if they were familiar texts, despite several of the research participants acknowledging having never previously seen some of the sites we viewed for analysis. I contend that this is most likely because of the static, familiar elements that are found in commercial websites: stock photos of stereotypical ‘girl’ activities, a spectrum of feminine colors, i.e., pastels, and a limitation of input from the site user beyond the usual navigation buttons. Many commercial websites display conventional and stereotypical girl imagery in their design using stock photography to present a conventionally feminine construction of girl-defined activities in attempts at connecting with their audience. While the display of girl activities has expanded over the years to match the reality of activities in which girls and young women currently participate compared to when the rise of commercial websites began, there is still a good number of these websites that limit representation of girls to those that dance, ice skate, or jump rope, or there is a focus on adult women activities in the domestic sphere. The problem with the limitations of using stock photography in this manner—aside from yet another example of the enforcement of the conventional feminine—is that many of these images are utilized in duplicate commercial websites, all the more constructing a conventionally feminine narrative of what defines girl. There is no recognition here for the girl hockey player or the emo-girl, namely, one that dresses in black and lines her eyes with anything but pastel shadow. Girls that do not fit in that conventionally defined feminine girl space are made to feel marginalized by these sites and their lack of multiple identity referencing.

Fixed color choices are other design elements that are specific to commercial website characteristics. It is here where the definitions of girl are enforced with many commercial websites, the pastel palette usually in full force. Many commercial sites that girls and young women visit are coded with color limitations of yellow, lavender or pink, or hues of the same color in different tints or shades. Many of my research participants made note of the color choices used in commercial sites. Katie says of one site that the colors are “girly”: What are ‘girly’ colors for you? Pinks, purples. So you kind of gravitate towards those colors because you know they are going to be for a girl? Definitely. Carrie emphasized how much some of these sites were girl spaces, arguing, “I don’t really see a guy looking at a page covered in pinks and oranges, or purples.” Erin remarked when she saw one of the commercial websites, “It almost has a rainbow color scheme…with a dark background, all the colors are bright and fun.” She then began laughing in realization: “It’s prom! High school prom!” making a connection between the website colors and the familiar high school social event. After viewing one site, Emily made note of the layout and colors, “right off the bat it seems very appealing to girls my age” given the familiar color palette. Couple these color specifics with images and graphics of the conventional feminine such as flowers, balloons and butterflies and a narrative is created, limitations beyond anything that might allow for girls that don’t follow the conventional feminine when creating their subject position(s).

Content A girl-focused online space is seldom guaranteed on commercial websites. On many sites, users have no real interaction; girls cannot actually submit any writing or artwork, nor are there forums for posting. If the website is one in which its main focus is to sell product, there are usually instructions and advice for using the product and often printable discount coupons available for purchasing said product. Barbie is a typical commercial website that limits interaction with other girls. While the parent’s page emphasizes, “Barbie.com’s mission is to engage, enchant, and empower girls” (“Site Mission.”) there is no forum within the site for girls

to offer their own input. As much as these websites may create a space for girls to play, offering quizzes, polls and games, the only real interaction for girls in many of these commercial websites is to submit names and email addresses, making girls part of the company database, securing their position as a demographic. Mattel’s EverythingGirl, a site that showcases a variety of Barbie-related dolls opens the top left corner of their site with “NEW? Join now!” and provides login spaces for members that have already joined the site. Joining requires not only an email address from the user but also a parent’s email address. The Barbie site is a great example of the argument Stokes sets forth concerning the “assumptions that girls are passive consumers who are unable to engage with, interpret, or resist media messages” (179). Many of the commercial websites I visit create the structure of inferring that girls are incapable of producing their own texts and are only capable of absorbing the content provided, an argument disproved by the existence of girls’ personal websites. In establishing this structural narrative, commercial websites follow the script that girls need to be instructed in the forms of the conventional feminine and this concept, like the guidance manuals of the nineteenth century aimed at adolescent girls and women, dictates much of the content in commercial websites. On the Nair Pretty website—“Feel Pretty Every Day!”—the colors established are light purple with the usual conventional feminine-focused flowers decorating the headings. Pages available for navigation include “Products,” “New to Nair,” “F.A.Q.’s” and “Mom’s Corner,” all of which cover the importance of hair removal from the young female body: “So you’re at an age when the childhood fuzz is becoming thicker and coarser hair. It’s time to give some serious thought to removing it” (“New to Nair.”). As Driscoll states, “discussion of female puberty always raises the question of whether a woman is defined by specific organs or hormonal complexes” (86) and this is never more evident than in these commercial websites. Procter and Gamble’s beinggirl—“There’s lots to explore about being a girl”—is a web site created for both the “younger teen” and the “older teen” with topics that vary from “Self-Discovery” to “Private Issues.” While the site does offer an option for girls to post questions and opinions, it is completely framed in graphics of the company’s feminine sanitary product line. The site content maintains its focus on puberty and the physical aspects of the growing adolescent girl but much of this is meshed in with different advertising on each page through its banners and sidebars of the same products.

What I find interestingly rhetorical about how these commercial websites function is how girls have taken these spaces and made them their own. Despite the limitations of interactivity and input allowed on many of these sites, the ones that do allow for some sort of interaction does change the way girls are utilizing the sites. What is occurring in these commercial websites is a vast amount of collaborative girl activity, despite the purpose of such sites’ focus on product marketing. While tampon instructions may provide answers to difficult insertion questions with “remove the tampon and try again with a new one,” girls can get online and ask questions of other girls, “I can’t get um in!! Any suggestions?”(nextluckygirl) and the experienced girl can suggest another alternative not outlined anywhere in the site marketing texts: “Find the smallest ones possible and try using vaseline to help push them up there. I think the plastic applicators are the best” (meggie_54). Computer-savvy girls who build web pages in minutes and keep methodical daily weblogs about anything from dating to school activities are frequent visitors to many of these sites, logging on to contact a multitude of friends that they meet in message board forums and in chat rooms, “electronic neighborhoods’ bound together not by geography but by shared interests” (qtd in Doheny-Farina xi). Sherry Turkle found in her research of online communities, “The computer is not simply valued as the carrier of an idea, but as a means to increase a community’s self-knowledge” (Turkle, “Commodity and Community” 346) and girls are using these digital texts to create such spaces for sharing knowledge. In discussions concerning menstruation, for example, questions that are asked with timid hesitation by younger girls are answered with supportive comments and encouragement from older girls, responses enforcing the idea that menstruation is one thing they have in common and no question is too silly or too embarrassing to ask, as this example demonstrates: “OK i have a question. I started my period just recently. It came the first two months but it never came in march. I am still a virgin so i dont know whats wrong with me. If anyone might know please write a response!” (MonkeChic88). With the response, “Don’t worry, nothing is wrong with you. Within the first few years of your period you might skip a month or two from time to time, it’s completely normal” (StarDust2211). There is a meshing of public and private space online for girls, a place to be honest yet anonymous without fear of the repercussions that may occur in a live, physical space. The body is removed so identity becomes malleable and girls can interact in any venue they choose. Driscoll notes that online, “significations of gender are mutable and disposable” (277)

allowing a girl to acknowledge her gender position without the pre-written gender discourse from culture. In her research of girls’ homepages as a site for sexual expression, Stern argues, “the amalgam of private authorship and anonymous global readership offered by the WWW [World Wide Web] enables girls to speak both confidently and publicly about a conventionally taboo topic” (Stern, “Sexual Selves” 266) and this often occurs in commercial websites. Such authorship has created a space for frank discussions about everything that runs the adolescent gamut. As Ito notes “Most youth use online networks to extend the friendships that they navigate in the familiar contexts of school, religious organizations, sports, and other local activities” (1). One such content topic aimed at girls that is popular in commercial website marketing and discussion is a focus on the feminine hygiene industry. Websites that sell sanitary hygiene products are especially targeted to young women and, in many cases, a pre-teen audience who may be a potential product consumer well through to menopause. Online space has been adapted in many of these sites for conversations about menstruation. As Kissling argues, “for many girls, friends are among the most valued information sources, filling in the gaps of conventional menstrual education” (304) and for girls, such an online space has become such a source: “Could you guys post your embarrassing stories about your periods...... I dont know....Hearing about other people kinda makes me feel better for all the stupid crap Ive done” (MissSexy76110). The topic of menstruation comes up often in girl-dominated chat rooms and in asynchronous message boards. It is common to see menstruation-related posts on a message board—an online text message sent to a thread which lists posts in linear fashion under one topic heading—on both websites created for teens and also girl-specific websites. In sites such as Live Wire Teen, (“Peer answers. Peer support. Period.”) forums for teen discussion include “Teen Health & Wellness” with inclusion of threads focusing specifically on menstruation questions, among other health-related topics. bolt, another teen website, lists forums for menstruation discussion under “Dealing & Health” with a sub-forum entitled, “PMS/Period”. On girl-focused websites such as gURL.com, menstruation discussions may occur both in message board forums and in other spaces within the site such as “Help Me Heather,” an advice forum directed by one of the adult website owners; on a random day as I began my research on menstruation sites, I noted eleven feminine sanitary product-related posts on a bolt forum and twenty-six menstruation-related posts on gURL.

Menstruation discussions are occurring and in quantity online, as are other teen-related topics. In these discussions, girls are not only asking questions free from the trappings of discretionary choices that adhere to cultural guidelines but they are also learning new ideas about how cultural narratives concerning gender may be rewritten. These are communities that consist of girls of all ages and backgrounds so younger girls are benefiting from the experience of their own peers. Recognition of identity is occurring here and also, as one scholar argues, an opportunity to develop critical thinking and argument skills: They can find support from online peer groups, explore questions of identity, get help with homework, and ask questions about sensitive issues they might be afraid to ask face to face […]. They can develop their skills in understanding issues from the perspective of others (University of Illinois). So while commercial websites tend to exist for the very purpose of marketing, the users that visit such sites routinely appropriate such spaces for their own needs. It is in this creation of such a girl-focused space that I suggest girls are doing much of their formation and exploration of subject position(s), making them more rhetorically savvy than creators of commercial websites tend to understand. They use these sites for information sharing as much as community building: “Today’s teens are breaking down the traditional barriers of the mass media age that had producers of media on one side of the fence and consumers on the other,” (qtd. in Zeller), essentially creating a whole new text for themselves with a different purpose than initially intended by the authors. I find girls extremely smart and highly critical of the products marketed to them. Indeed, one of the largest discussion topics online concerning menstruation is usually fueled by arguments over which sanitary hygiene products are best, even comparing product brands on brand-specific websites. In a bolt forum thread, many contributors shared their input on products: “I recommend using tampax. I do not recommend O.B until you get used to putting in a tampon with an applicator” (Krisy1301); “Uhm, you could use playtex silkglide or tampax pearl. I think those are the easiest ones to put in. You just pull on the string to get it out. It's not a big deal really....truth is, if you use silkglide, you’ll probably fall in love with them” (OrEohunny2005); “i just tried kotex security...they’re pretty good...same with tampax and playtex...but i really couldn’t feel the kotex ones, and they don’t leak” (devillish_angel). It is common for threads to offer such a variety of suggestions with the kind of high volume visits these topics receive.

I found several of my research participants very vocal about the websites we reviewed together. Carrie responded to a question posed on gURL, “Have you ever changed your hair after a break up?” with a response that the website is definitely aimed toward girls: “No guys are going to be like, ‘Oh my God. She broke up with me I’ve got to shave my head!’ No guys are really like that. No guys would ever go to a website, ‘Hey I like this girl, what should I do?’ They’re just like ‘Dude, what should I do?’ to their friends.” When Emily realized that much of the advice in one website came from other girls, she noted that such advice “should not be something girls depend on for their main advice, especially when it comes to eating disorders and sex and things like that. Their main advice should not be coming from other people their age,” and she was anxious to register with the website we were viewing so that she could post her opinion. Such interactivity is most likely changing the way these texts function. There is an expectation for many of these commercial website authors that girls are passive visitors to their sites: “Studies of popular culture addressed to girls focus on their incorporation of a defining frame for reception or pleasure and thus represent girls as more passive in audience-text relations” (Driscoll 166). When Driscoll makes her argument for the difficulties of defining the girl market, she is sure to emphasize the relevancy and power of girls’ involvement in the consumer market: “the girl market describes a demographic wrapped up in negotiating their own power and powerlessness through consumption” (269). I certainly saw evidence of this when discussing commercial websites with my research participants. When I asked Beth which websites she visits for shopping, she replied in a serious and highly informed tone, “I like Target a lot, a lot,” while Katie rambled off her top three sites visited, “American Eagle, Abercrombie and Forever 21” without even giving the question consideration. But further discussion brings back the argument Driscoll makes in stating the difficulty of defining a girl market; despite my research participants’ interaction and time spent on commercial websites, they still remained highly critical and aware of what commercial websites’ purpose maintains, effectively becoming conscious consumers, not ones that are powerless. Carrie admitted, “I look but I don’t buy. I like to shop at the beginning—I update for summer and I update for winter. I hate spending money.” While Erin said that she would continue to visit one of the sites we looked at together, she confessed “I don’t think I would submit my name to it or anything like that but I would go visit it, see what they have to say,” she was careful of not becoming a demographic for

marketing purposes. Nor did she have a problem passing such website information on to her friends. For another site we reviewed, Erin offers: “If I read through it and it had some good advice and a good friend came up to me I would recommend it,” exhibiting her awareness of what advice she would accept from such websites, in addition to an excellent example of how community concerning such online space begins forming before these girls even get online.

Institutional Websites Issues concerning the building of subject position(s) must be addressed in relation to girl- focused online space where institutional websites are concerned as these websites often vacillate between promoting empowerment and creating a false sense of girl space. Many institutional websites have been around long before the popularity of online social communities and the rise of Web 2.0 (further discussed in chapter six), which emphasizes collaboration and sharing with easy access to web page templates. One such site, gURL began in 1996 as a graduate school project out of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and produced several print-based books that helped give weight to the rise of girl culture. gURL— the only website that all of my research participants recognized in our interviews and the first such girl-focused website I began researching at the start of my graduate career a decade ago— has gone through several hosting companies that moved it from a commercial to institutional site and back to commercial website. It is the only such site that I would consider placing under both categories and a perfect example of the obstacles in defining institutional websites. As many institutional websites are owned by nonprofit companies, few of them have the funding of say, Girl Scouts of the USA with both corporate and nonprofit financial support so many of these sites are existing on donations and thus seek site hosting where they can find it. This, however, can cause discrepancy when an institutional website’s main purpose is for creating a space of empowerment for girls and young women.

Content Several of my research participants were very interested in some of the websites we discussed during our interviews, especially the sites we viewed that they had not seen before. In viewing Scarlteen—“Sex Ed for the Real World”—Emily got lost inside the site and I let our discussion pause while she viewed each page. Like Erin, who was careful and selective about

the advice she read online, Emily admitted that she would take advice from a site such as this “with a grain of salt because it’s not, the companies you know of—Planned Parenthood is out there […]” revealing her hesitation. Yet when I tried to continue discussion, she kept interrupting me with comments of “This is interesting” while continuing to surf through the site. When I laughed and asked her if she would go back to the site on her own, once our interview was complete she admitted, “Definitely. I actually want to.” The content in many institutional websites differs from that of commercial sites usually by the topics covered. As institutional sites do not have a focus on marketing and selling product, there is room to discuss issues more relevant to the growing adolescent psyche than consumer products. In fact, discussions in institutional websites often move past what is allowed in educational environments; Lindsey admitted when reviewing several sites, “I’m kind of surprised at how much there is. Like how much they’re willing to talk about.” Because institutional sites are often created and maintained by people immersed in education-related fields, many of the sites provide users with relevant and useful information that is helpful to children and teens. Websites such as girls inc. have social organizations behind them, which might assure users that they create a space for girls in which healthy and positive messages are available. As institutional websites access a space that is open and uncensored for creating texts—that of online space—the opportunity to publish texts reaching a variety of audiences is possible. Latinitas, for example, is one such site: “a non-profit organization focused on informing, entertaining, and inspiring young Latinas to grow into healthy, confident, and successful Latinas” (“About us, Latinitas”). Such sites can offer marginalized girls a space for exploration and learning about their own cultural community free from the trappings of commodification. While the content posted by host organizations of institutional websites is often geared toward the healthy development of girls and young women, such websites are also strong spaces designed specifically for interactivity and encourage user’s input. SmartGirl, an institutional site sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the University of Michigan, offers three main pages for their users: “Speak Out,” with forums for offering opinions on posted questions; “Express Yourself,” a creative writing forum; and “Spread the Word,” with options for girls to write reviews, articles and commentaries on a variety of topics. Likewise, Teen Ink, “a national teen magazine, book series, and website devoted entirely to teenage writing and art” (“About us,

Teen Ink”), encouraging submissions in every genre from poetry to nonfiction, accepting both alphabetic and visual texts. Many institutional websites offer several outlets for discussion, such as electronic bulletin boards, and (like commercial websites), quizzes, polls and games. These are the websites often recommended by educators and in after-school programs, which is why many of them receive heavy traffic: users can be assured to interact with a variety of girls of different ages and from diverse backgrounds. I hold institutional websites up to the same rhetorical analysis as commercial websites, however. As Hawisher and Sullivan in their research on women and online space note, “institutional sites emphasize dispensing information, though not from an innocent or neutral position” (277) and this is evident in many of these websites. Originating in 1997 for example, girl zone, “one of the only independent websites for girls still alive and kicking” (“Who We Are”), was once hosted by SheKnows, “one of the top 10 web properties for women” (“About SheKnows”) before purchasing their own server space. When websites share server space, they also share the host party’s advertising. On girl zone’s “Shopping” page, the ads across the top linked users to dating sites with taglines such as “Serious Singles Only 30+” and “Meet Hot Local Fat Girls,” not necessarily information appropriate for the target audience of girl zone. Like commercial websites, girl-focused online space in some institutional websites is shared with the host site’s main purpose, one that may not necessarily be completely oriented towards girls themselves. A shared space is what must be accounted for when considering girl space. What type of censoring occurs if a girl’s input does not coincide with a websites’ theme or audience? Moderators are often an issue. “Jake,” who is credited as the site Tech Coordinator, moderates purple pyjamas, an all-girl community-created site. Jake is also referred to as the “PurplePJ’s knight in shining armor” (“Spotlight”), an indication that girls might not actually be capable of running the site themselves. In addition, keeping a site active and current is never an issue with commercial websites, as they must promote the most recent and available product. With institutional websites, however, an active site is not always available. Since many of these websites are created and posted by summer workshops or after-school programs, they are not always kept current once the program ends. gURLwURLd, for example, a website created during an after school program in Austin, Texas was last updated in September 2000 and stayed online well through 2007. An outdated website such as this limits the opportunity for girls to interact

on a website since links often become inactive and both content and graphics can become outdated. Interaction is a crucial element to a girl-focused online space since interaction often leads to community building. In writing about voice and identity development in girls and women, Iglesias and Cormier realize that “what adolescent girls desperately want is real communication” (267) and since “when they are not in school, [girls] most spend their waking hours with one form or another of electronic equipment, sometimes simultaneously” (Dunn 108), many of these websites become crucial spaces of collaboration for girls and young women.

Personal Websites I have found that personal websites fall into the position of combining both the pop culture and contemporary content interests of commercial websites and the empowerment messages created by institutional websites. Here is where girls and young women are finding a girl-focused online space free from product promotion and censors with a guaranteed space for the construction of various subject position(s) through a variety of multimodal forms in the digital environment. Takayoshi in her writing about girls and online space emphasizes, “by recognizing that girls have created spaces in what can be a hostile environment, we reveal that girls are not powerless (as the negative representations of the web would suggest), but they may have overcome significant challenges in creating Web space for themselves” (96). Likewise, Quart argues, “teen authors have become the architects of their own trademarked identities, strong-willed and mercenary in equal measure” (177). Girls can find a sense of self here, creating not only a girl space for their own voices but a space for other girls to interact, argue, discuss, brag and vent about anything with no limitation on topics tied to any conventionally feminine narrative. Addison and Comstock note in their research on gay and lesbian youth online space, “these virtual experiences lead to resistance in other environments” (374) while Brown and Gillian recognize in their research, “at adolescence, we saw women’s psychological development becoming inescapably political” (16). Ward, in her writing on the history of Girl Studies emphasizes, “the site of change has moved from the collective to the individual” (19) as Eisenhauer declares: “She is already text. She is already subject. Her work performs her contradictions and her multiplicity. She is not JUST a girl! Her work is not JUST a ‘girl’s’ work” (87). Personal websites are a prominent form of digital literacy that allows a space for the resistance that girls so seek in their exploratory discussions. In these websites, a diversity of

themes with rhetoric used both alphabetically and visually, a whole new area of girl culture is revealed. Girls’ personal websites are not hard to find once online; many are listed in the several hundred website directories that inhabit online space. A directory may list a variety of different websites by creators both male and female. Well-maintained directories offer a description of not only the site theme but a small biography of the site owner. When entering these communities, it is easily recognized that websites are grouped by interest and similarities: fan websites and fanlistings reflect the site owner’s interest, usually in an issue directly related to popular culture. Such websites often share graphics pulled from several sources (though seldom are officially approved by the interest they promote). Electronic bulletin boards and forums for discussion are also grouped together by interest. Graphics and blends are websites created strictly for showcasing knowledge of digital graphic and painter software programs. Such websites offer not only server space for members but also competitions, tutorials and design feedback. Portals are websites in which girls use webcams to communicate. Collectives, cliques, webrings and listings all are grouped by interest or common theme. With the rise of Web 2.0, weblogs and vlogs—video blogs—have become central to many of these personal websites; in many cases, a website is built around the blog, the daily journal of the site’s creator. Girls’ homepages—and pages, plural, is appropriate since some websites contain links to many screens depending on the amount of information in the site—vary visually, some elaborately constructed with digital art created by the girls themselves, some with clip art pulled from around the web. Content is usually consistent among the pages: there is a biography that reveals age and location, sometimes either a screen name or a real name or a mixture of all these elements. Many biographies also include photographs of the site owner/creator. All websites include some way of reaching the girl by way of email. Some websites include the owner’s writing, from poetry to essays they may have written for a class assignment or digital artwork created either by hand and scanned or with the aid of graphics programs. There may be links to quizzes, polls and games and there is often a listing of pop culture interests such as favorite films or television shows. In addition to blogs, a user may find tagboards, which allow for responses from readers or links to facebook pages and twitter feeds. Many websites include a site map and here is where users can navigate pages of links to things that may not be prominent on the homepage.

Many personal websites begin very basic in their construction, the content and elements of visual rhetoric is contingent not only on the age of the website author but also the skill set of software knowledge. Younger website creators utilize free server space that requires only an email address for registration. Older and more skilled site creators may pay a monthly fee for server space or team up with users in a collective to access server space together. When I began my research into girls’ online discourse, sixteen was the average age for girls to enter web development. Almost a decade later, the rise of online social communities and online space structured by Web 2.0 programming allows for users as young as 5 and 6 to get online if they have access and knowledge of the software. Age 12 seems to be the average age entry for users to begin building their online profiles starting with social networks; Xanga holds the youngest demographic of the social networking sites, beating out MySpace and facebook in popularity where younger users are concerned (Shields). Yet despite the growth and popularity of social networking sites, it remains that “girls are more likely than boys to use the web as a communication tool” (Gibson). For many, getting online is just another tool of technology for this generation. As one 16-year-old girl noted, “it was just a step-by-step process that clicked into my head. I just read directions and that's how I set it up. Pretty simple” (Zeller).

Site Design An entry-level example of a girl’s website might follow a free server template framework with an image or other graphic centered on the homepage with links to other pages in the site running down the left column. Background images are usually represented by a clip art graphic related to the site owner’s interests such as something school- or other activity-related themes as sports or dance. Links may include school assignments or short stories and photos of family and pets. Tori’s Stories, the homepage of eleven-year-old American Tori, is an entry-level example of a girl’s personal website. Basic in its design, Tori’s picture is the largest image on the page, with wrapped text stating who she is and link information running down the left side of the page. The homepage background is a clip art graphic of a chalkboard with ruled lines that represent school homework paper. Her links include “Read A Story” which are posted essays about class trips and short stories and “Soccer” which includes pictures of Tori in her soccer uniform beginning at age six. Further skills would offer the site creator opportunity to add animated images, text wraps and a variety of color options from the basic template color palette. More

advanced personal websites might include a specifically designed homepage exhibiting elaborate skills of software and graphics programs. Fifteen-year-old Canadian Sarika whose Without Love personal website changes design on a rotating basis. Sarika’s homepage seldom exhibits a basic design format as images sometimes frame the page, sometimes balancing text on either side. She often plays with colors for her page and routinely changes the images to match her popular culture interests. Central to Sarika’s page is her blog, which often discusses not only personal issues in her life but the process and ideas on how her site is designed. Links on Sarika’s page include “Where To?” a navigation sidebar for the many pages in her site, and “Right Now?” a listing of Sarika’s current interests and emotional state of being. And with the connection between pop culture and girl culture, girls’ personal websites often include references to interests within this area: for the experienced site designer, this may include several navigation windows within one web page displaying images such as that of film or television actors; a toggle button to activate an embedded mp3 player that is tuned to the owner’s favorite song of the moment; or numerous color changes to match rotating graphics with each click. For most girls’ personal sites blogs are crucial. Discussions include not only personal issues about the site owner’s life but the process and ideas on how the website is designed. What often differs between many girls’ websites in comparison to that of adult women is the inclusion of personal images of both the site creator and also of people the owner knows, an issue especially noted by scholars of online discourse: “the inclusion of photographs on their home pages casts doubt on the prominent assumption that adolescent girls are completely uncomfortable with or ashamed of their appearance and would rather traverse the WWW anonymously and invisibly” (Stern, “Virtually Speaking” 241). Girls and young women often play with the imagery of their representation of self; knowing how to read the design elements in many of these websites is part of recognizing the emerging subjects girls are constructing in such a space. As Oblinger notes, “The Net Gen are more visually literate than previous generations; many express themselves using images” (10). I have seen photos on many sites in the biography area jumbled in screen “static” until a cursor pass reveals a clear image, allowing the site owner to both hide and reveal herself at the same time. As Reid-Walsh and Mitchell will argue, “A girls’ home page appears to be a kind of contradictory space—a private space that exists only in a public domain” (181).

What I find most exciting about surfing personal websites is the vast variety of experience that girls bring to this space and how cleverly they use it. Some websites are basic in content and the design clearly follows a template provided by a freeserver host space. Laura’s World, hosted at Angelfire, a freeserver site created for building websites, exhibits thirteen-year- old Canadian Laura’s page. Like the simple elements found in Tori’s page, Laura uses the central design space to introduce herself, with the left side of the page reserved for links. In addition, she plays with animations of bouncing flowers and deflating smiley faces. When a girl moves from freeserver space to owning her own site domain (usually paying a monthly or yearly fee), her design experience becomes part of the visual space that is viewed. Sweet Catastrophe, owned by seventeen-year-old Nikki from Australia includes not only the lyrics of a song superimposed over a blend of images, but also a blog central to the design space with links to her other graphic work. Blueberry Wings. a blend/fanlisting site owned by sixteen-year-old Tina from Germany, uses her central design space to encase a scroll bar template, which exhibits her blog and links to other pages within her site. For Tina’s site, the scroll bar portion becomes part of the design layout and part of the artwork, the same color as the images that frame the site. There is certainly an indication that for many girls, the elements they select for inclusion on their websites “crafts a self out of [their] textual and graphical choices” (Hawisher 281), utilization of all the elements of design structuring the framework for the foundation of subject exploration. There are rhetorical choices made with stylistic intent in girls’ personal websites that contribute to this exploration. One choice is how girls make use of alphabetic text on their sites. Younger girls tend to adapt netspeak, using letters and numbers in linguistically different combinations. This is usually a creative use of both capital and lowercase letters either in substitution for each other or in repetitive patterns that form graphic symbols ( <3 representing a sideways heart, for example). This is discourse that reads like slang: altering familiar spellings, using acronyms in place of full words and sentence fragments with intentional shifts of general grammatical rules. Older girls also frequently play with linguistic styles, creating elements of a new language within the community. There is an appropriation of the word girl, for example, and many girls wear that title with pride, using it to create links to their biographies, such as with “the girl most likely” or simply, “The Girl.” Rachel Fudge, in analyzing the evolution of the Riot Grrrl use of multiple –rs in their name (grrr!) notes, “a playfulness with language is

characteristic of this generation's feminism” (22) and then moves her argument to include the cyber connection: ‘grrl’ is surprisingly prevalent as a synonym for girl or woman. Those extra –rs are found in the most unlikely of places, especially on the Internet. In fact, the web is quite the hotbed of grrl activity, which makes sense as web users have been quick to adopt not only cutting-edge/alternative culture but also slang that is more often grammatically horrific than it is clever (23), offering a great example of the impact of the Riot Grrrl movement on girl culture as I first referenced in Chapter Three. Home page titles for owned domains reveal a side to an adolescent girl that commercial websites may not realize: anti-reality, Sweet Catastrophe, not so graceful moments, bittersweet, Life On Display, fallentears, killmeinside are all examples of titles that may be an indication of an identity the site owner is attempting to create. However much as commercial websites may try to be current and contemporary, language styles here are fluid and this is also what separates the commercial sites from girls’ personal websites. As Dunn argues, “this is the first generation […] to grow up with true images of female empowerment” (111) and this is evident in many of the personal website titles that are found within this girl-focused online space. Titles of these sites—and some carry several titles in addition to the domain name or URL address—are very descriptive of the site owner or collective’s interests. As Addison and Comstock will note, “they are not only paying tribute to the sites and their attending countercultural values, they are, in effect, repositioning the sites in a new and irreverent context” (373), completely moving against this idea of a “girl market” that commercial and some institutional websites think they have defined. The alphabetic text alone is not what identifies the personal website created by girls from that of the corporate promotional site. As research reveals, “cyberspace is especially suited to exploring and developing a diversity of literacies and expressions” (Wise 188) and this is apparent in the sites created by girls and young women adapting digital texts. Their use of color and imagery, for example, differs greatly from what commercial and institutional websites reveal in their websites, creating a visual rhetoric that is well managed on girls’ sites. These users are often aware of the conventionally feminine stereotypes to which they have been confined and many make the effort to break out of that structure when designing their websites. These

personal websites exhibit a strong use of contrasting colors in several hues, utilizing a color palette that is often ignored when creating a commercial website marketing to girls to sell product. Girls tend to use bold colors as symbolic representations of their exploration, applying several tertiary colors to one webpage, for example, a mixture of the primary colors (red, yellow blue) and secondary colors (green, red and purple), which in basic color theory might disrupt the harmony of color agreement when used in abundance. With girls’ personal websites, however, they balance the color usage with images and ideas so that the colors show appeal upon viewing. A dominant blue-purple or red-purple page might overwhelm the viewer but when the topic up for discussion is in facing and managing teen suicide, the color becomes part of a visual rhetoric and the colors and images “serve as transitional links between concepts or ideas” (Handa, “The Rhetoric of the Image” 133). Several of my research participants commented on the color usage of all the websites we reviewed. When surfing a commercial site with Katie, she made reference to changing the color of the site, different from the existing shade of light green. When I asked if she would change it to pink she laughed and said, “No! Blue. Blues are good. I would make it brighter colors: orange, blue, real colors” an indication that for her, pink is not a color that carries any ethos. Likewise Erin, who admitted after looking at one personal website, “I think if I went to a website like this and it was in black and white it wouldn’t have the same effect,” noting how relevant color is to website design. While commercial websites and some institutional websites tend to utilize the color palette that they think defines girls, when girls adapting these online texts use these colors on their pages, it is rhetorically intentional—to break out of the feminine stereotype, embrace it and appropriate the definition. An application of pinks by a girl on her personal website, for example, might be an indication of “hyper-girly,” the move to bring recognition to her constructed identity. In this case, the color is used for everything: background, font and even image tinting. Girls are clear on who they want to be online, and very few personal websites parallel the description of who the commercial websites think girls might be. While images are certainly prominent elements to include in any website (chapter five will offer a more detailed argument for how images are utilized in girls’ personal websites), a holistic view of the visual elements on the webpage are crucial to understanding how girls’ personal sites differ from that of the commercial sites as “studying the visual in the context of the digital through a rhetorical lens means studying documents that are hybrids, not pure image”

(Handa, “Introduction” 4). Applying color to alphabetic text is often part of this hybridity of the uses of visual rhetoric. One clever way of “coding” a website so that only invited or repeated users know how to read the content is to make the alphabetic text font the same color as the page background. Readers of this site upon opening see no alphabetic text unless they use their cursor to highlight the page, thus making any “invisible” type the color of the highlight preference set in their computer software. (I opened several personal websites that I thought were blank until a younger niece—and prominent reader of girls’ personal websites—showed me how to become part of the community of readers.) Rules that are usually steadfast in web design theory, such as yellow type reversed from a just-as-light background, are often broken in the design structures of girls’ personal websites. Font use tends to be cleverly adapted into images and other graphics, with fonts sometimes becoming the only graphics on the page, such as distorted or pasted into the page in mirror direction, a play on how the type should be read both by content and image. As Hawisher and Sullivan have discovered, women online “begin to forge new social arrangements by creating a visual discourse that startles and disturbs” (287); the same is true of girls, and this is perhaps even more powerful, given their still-forming identity. With the reworking of linguistic rules, a break in syntax and grammar can create a visual representation that is carefully arranged to offer the site viewer an idea of who the author has chosen to create in her identity construction. As Warnick argues, “the visual presentation of these sites—their layout, use of images, graphics, and photos—supported or replaced their verbal messages” (82).

Content The individual exploration that occurs when a girl or young woman creates and posts her own website online is not limited to the space she alone creates. Part of the growth that comes from the adaptation of a personal website involves working oneself into the net community of like-minded girls. For many users, they create their sites with a rhetorical purpose in mind, that of community building. Many girls’ personal websites structurally support each other by sharing artwork or frames for design and posting links to other web communities. While links of interest to both commercial and institutional websites created for girls are posted on many personal webpages, Stern found that “the most common type of links girls presented was to other girls’ homepages” (Stern, “Sexual Selves” 281). It is common to find a listing of all the websites by an individual owner categorized with similar websites (such as fanlistings)—but also affiliates,

which may be websites of personal interest to the site owner or websites of similar style. There are also links to “family” listings, which are other websites that are hosted by the same server. In addition, readers can click on links to other web servers that host yet more personal websites. From one site alone, links to personal websites are endless and this is very common in the community building among girls online. Essentially, a girl can find the link to one personal website through a web directory and from there, navigate her way inside a completely girl- focused online space. It is common to see the same girls posting in various websites within a webring. Despite many of these girls knowing each other only virtually (geographical distance most likely prohibiting real-life meetings), they know each other well, and many of the discussions and arguments that arise in the texts reveal this. Much of this community building creates a bonding over shared interests, ideas and platforms for interaction. Many webpages list personal interests as either a central feature in the design format or as a linked page. In addition to personal writing and artwork, many users will share music selections with either a song overplaying as the page opens or a “playlist” with links to mp3 files and lyrics to favorite songs. Graphic websites that are created for featuring artwork, such as blend websites, are hosted at domains with larger server space so that users can save their artwork to the site. Challenges are often posted at such blend websites and collective work is created with one person starting an image and saving it on the server with other community members adding to it until the completed image is then posted and archived. Blog postings on personal pages reveal intimate issues, and allowing for responses to the tagboard opens discussion among users. This sharing of interests and intimacies is part of the process of building a strong sense of self: by adding a link to her site in a webring, by joining an online collective, these girls and young women are finding like-minded individuals that help contribute to the formation of identity, the construction of the subject. As Ito, et al argues in their research involving teens online: “in these interest-driven networks, youth may find new peers outside the boundaries of their local community. They can also find opportunities to publicize and distribute their work to online audiences, and to gain new forms of visibility and reputation” (1), making an argument that for these girls and young women adapting digital texts, community is central to purpose. While girls’ personal websites can be just as moderated and censored as both commercial and institutional websites—they are at the whim of the site author, after all—keeping a thriving community is the goal as “providing space

for participants to articulate their positions is central to many of these sites” (Addison 374), an exploratory space for sharing, so keeping users interacting with the site is purpose alone for allowing any form of discussion. Stern notes that girls “use their homepages as a forum of self- disclosure, especially as a place to engage in self-expression” (Stern, “Virtually Speaking” 224). As girls and young women venture online, outside the spaces of conventional constructions of girl and begin the process of creating multiple subject positions, they search for support. In Tragic-Beauty, a site owned by seventeen-year-old Amber from the United States, one blog post notes Amber’s struggle with self-injury as she spent the day with her grandmother. She posted: “She was screeching at me, to wear a shorter shirt so i pulled my sleeve up and was like I Can’t. She automatically went into ‘sad grandma’ mode and started lecturing me about how I should’ve called her instead of cutting.” A later entry reveals Amber’s struggle with her emerging sexuality: “My cousin ronda already suspects I’m a dyke cause I have nothing but girls on my [computer] desktop” (Amber). It is in this hybrid of personal and private space that girls are able to play with their identities, using such space to maintain their anonymity while garnering support from a community that interacts. Inside the communities created by personal websites, they begin to find themselves in solid company which “in turn, lead[s] girls to see their problems as part of a larger political situation and not unique to themselves” (Schilt 87), finding entire communities enforcing a support system. Indeed Hawisher and Sullivan realized in their research that these online users “represented themselves as taking risks, pushing boundaries, and proclaiming themselves to be net chicks” (283), the beginning of self-identifying beyond culturally constructed roles that may have locked girls and young women into identities in which they do not affiliate. Stokes, in her research involving the building of websites among girls in the African American community recognized that “Many of the girls reproduced gender inequality and stereotypical representations of Black female sexuality in their home pages” but eventual effort moved these girls and young women away from these conventional identity positions as “they also claimed space on the Web to try on identities and resist dominant sexual script discourses and sexual double standards” (179). These digital texts provide a space for subject position(s) to begin formation. As Driscoll notes, “girls are systematically franchised so that they will accept and desire a place as Women” (111), but for girls and young women that adapt these digital texts, they have found a space beyond these constrictions.

In writing about voice and identity development in girls and women, Iglesias and Cormier assert “girls from diverse groups need to be given ways to tell their stories” (269) and girls’ personal websites have allowed for such stories, told not only by the girls that have created these sites but also by the girls that read and post to them. As an outside reader to any of these websites—and most are publicly accessible without any sort of online registration to access the sites—it is clear that “a viewer seems to be intruding into a private domain that resembles in some ways a virtual version of her bedroom, yet this is an illusion” (Reid-Walsh 181). The personal and private space often meshes together for girls as they make attempts at being heard, attempting to find support, or others like them. It is in this hybrid of personal and private space in which girls are able to play with their subject position(s), using such space to maintain their anonymity while garnering support from a community that interacts. Takayoshi realized early in her research that “many girls sites on the Web are political either implicitly (through the boundaries set by the site’s definition) or explicitly (through political statements and calls to action)” (99), noting that “Understanding women and children not as victims but as technology users who critically manipulate the technology of the Web to their own ends and goals creates a different understanding of girls on the Web” (96). As noted in chapter three, many Girl Studies scholars are beginning to recognize interests in girl culture as a viable form of source study, thus making connections between how girl has been defined to what the experiential moments of girls lives actually tell us. Limitations in the writing classroom by way of genre exploration, for example, remove girls from the personal narratives that are so often found in their digital texts. Bruce notes the same disadvantages that girls face in the classroom setting as other Girl Studies scholars, yet she also sees the importance of moving girls “outside” the academic space to work within subjects of personal interest, to “assume the status of the writer [girls] desire in their self-sponsored writing while exposing their contestatory connections with school- and inquiry-sponsored writing” (42). Bruce sees this “slippage in between” as providing “transformative possibilities” toward girls constructing their own subjectivity. Likewise Payne, who works with students writing about eating disorders: “Writing about personal experiences encourages a student to discover a unified, coherent, ahistorical and acultural self, a writing task that asks the student to turn herself into an object of analysis” (9), possibly leading to the subjectivity exploration that girls are finding online. Such allowance for hybrid forms of texts in the classroom could change how girls work with the

writing process: “Youth could benefit from educators being more open to forms of experimentation and social exploration that are generally not characteristic of educational institutions” (Ito 2). DeWitt, in his work with GLBT youth suggests: “students make the choice or come out or stay in the closet in their writing on the basis of their perception of the classroom space” (233). Takayoshi argues that nonschool-based literacy forms connect to student’s lives more closely (104). The research in Girl Studies has provided the foundation for recognizing that girls’ subject placement in the classroom can hinder girls’ learning. I argue here that exploring the experiential moments is much of the objective for girls’ personal websites. By permitting girls to move within spaces of familiarity by what they produce in their writing and how they present their ideas, options for exploration are abundant. Such exploration will allow adolescent girls to confront the issues that are part of their experiential world: the embodied knowledge of rape; incest; pregnancy and abortion; sexually transmitted disease; anorexia; bulimia; bisexual, transgendered, lesbian and gay identification in a largely heterosexual world; the trauma of sibling and parental suicide; the secrecy of taboo romantic sexual liaisons; the scars of physical and sexual abuse; marks of self-mutilation; the internal damage caused by misuse of alcohol and drugs (Bruce 203). Such issues are often beyond the reach of adult teachers and mentors as they are not part of our own experiential familiarities. Until girls bring these issues forward, those with the ability to help guide girls and young women through these conflicts are at a loss until girls find a way to voice their subject position(s) in relation to the issues. Web authorship is one such way in which girls are already confronting such issues.

Complicating the Issue While access and participation in commercial, institutional and personal websites can be arguably empowering for many online girls, interactivity is not without its faults. The very recognition of a girl culture can, itself, be problematic. Driscoll claims, Girl culture consists in circulating the things girls can do, be, have, and make, and in that process defining what processes are particular to girls. This circulation of things—this economy of girl culture—includes the unresolvable tensions located by tensions between agency and conformity” (278).

Such tensions may exist for girls once they begin to integrate themselves within the online communities outlined above. As I have argued, purpose is pivotal in the differences between these sites and not all sites have purposes of creating safe and healthy online spaces. With a focus on naming and defining girl culture, such purpose can be lost in the shuffle of structuring the framework of a successful website. This may leave many users secondary in the thoughts of website creators, including those of personal websites. While I argue with this project that online space is one area in which girls may find a place to access and explore ideas of creating subject positions for themselves, this does not mean that such spaces are exempt from analysis. The tensions that Driscoll notes between “agency and conformity” are plenty and with the developmental variations apparent in girls and young women, knowledge of how to travel through such spaces can limit the malleability I contend is possible in writing through digital texts. For many of these sites, a perpetuation of the conventional narratives may risk limiting girls’ abilities to move into new constructions of subject position(s). These conventional narratives may be easier to follow when the risk of stepping outside of them is too high. In the adolescent struggle to conform, the consumer goods that are marketed on commercial websites may be too good a prize to turn away when the consumer is up against peer criticisms. What hits especially hard for girls is the negotiation of their physical space that marks sociality, one of body image and sexuality. The Internet, having created a space in which “it was hard to get information about sexuality to one in which it’s impossible to escape information about sexuality” (Pipher 244) means girls are flooded with images and ideas about their developing selves that are usually objectified in ways that call for the need of more empowerment-building websites, such as some of the stronger institutional websites previously mentioned. With discussions about typically girl-marked topics such as fashion structuring so many personal websites, blogs and social networking communities, those public/private boundaries are once again blurred. Harris argues that, “the normalization of the insertion of the public gaze into the private regulates young women by demanding a constant display of the self” (130) and this is no more obvious than in personal websites and social networking communities; with the popularity of smartphone culture, images of the self are rampant. Participation in such narratives requires girls, in adhering to ideas that girl culture sometimes perpetuates, to follow along without critical thought behind the action. This can result in girls that find empowerment through false or unhealthy representations, such as through

the idea of sexual freedoms that are—to many critics—too mature for the young self to negotiate. Romano writes, for example, “the proliferation of representational venues encourages women to fragment unitary conceptions of female by representing selves in graphic and textual shapes not easily categorizable” (252), thus paralleling Driscoll’s argument concerning the difficulties in defining the girl market. When girls grab onto—or buy into—the provisions of girl culture and a girl space without doing the critical analysis to question the repercussions, they may enter into adulthood with the same lack of scrutiny toward what is being marketed their way. In this regard, a revamping of commercial websites and a closer focus on the purposes of institutional websites may lead to better personal websites and social networking communities. In this regard, a construction of subject position(s) by girls themselves may be constructions of healthy identities toward clear and truly empowered adulthood.

Conclusion The authorship of these digital texts shows the multi-faceted nature of the users’ rhetorical awareness of their experiential lives. Embodiment issues, for example, become so central in girls’ personal websites as girls tend to learn early of the objectification of their physical space, a primer to prepare them for life as female. For the adolescent girl, physical space often conflates with social space and the borders surrounding identity begin to blur: “As a child, the girl is positioned as not fully female or feminine, and at adolescence she both loses and gains sex/gender identity” (Driscoll 87). Not only are girls traveling through adolescence while trying to manage an ever-changing body, they are doing so while navigating social and relational codes which tend to force girls into spaces of silence. When Brown and Gilligan did their ethnographic research early in the Girl Studies movement, they had found that “within hours of beginning our research with girls on the experience of being listened to, we had simply become a new version of something to guard against, someone to protect themselves from, to be suspicious of, to be warned against” (12). Of course girls were protective and guarded in this study—this is research conducted in the school setting, an environment we now know can often be hostile to girls: “Girls in school are discursively constituted to enact gender performatives in an institutional space that is bound by uncomfortable, unsafe, inequitable, and performatively oppressive conventions” (Bruce 147). The conventional narrative of girl is routine here, as girls “risk these narratives being scrutinized, interrogated, appropriated, and depoliticized,”

empowerment at issue as “the more young women speak, the less power they have” (Harris 142). Online space, however, provides a space of unguarded territory. Here, web authoring provides new platforms for girls to examine. In her research into the Riot Grrrl movement and zine making (the precursor to girls’ personal websites), Comstock argues, “the value of grrl zines is their ability to break the rules of both conventional essay writing and traditional femininity” (396), certainly the same value for that of personal websites. As authors of their own texts with rhetorical choices made in a format of familiar literacy, constructions of subject position(s) can be “tried out” in an environment with endless options. Online space allows girls to “perform” their various selves through trial and error, making identities as malleable as the format allows. And while the anonymity of web authoring, especially with the Web 2.0 framework, may be marked as a space for implosion, “the fact is that most user-created content on the Web is not challenging the authority of a traditional expert. It’s working in a zone where there are no experts or where the users themselves are the experts” (Johnson 447). This lack of foundational expertise may be actually beneficial to the exploration process of girls and young women; these are spaces of possibility as “traditional narratives are re-created with new technologies” (Hawisher 288), allowing for whole new recognition of empowerment for a new generation of girls. Online space offers girls an opportunity to play with new identities, a space that is worked and reworked according to girls’ subject constructions.

Chapter 5 A Personal Website Case Study: Inside the Pro-Ana Movement

Introduction As a scholar investigating girls’ digital discourses, I could not avoid encountering the issues of pro-ana websites since the sites hold such a controversial space in discussions of online technologies. Whether or not I reference them, I am asked about pro-ana at every conference presentation I make about girls’ online activities. I support the existence of the pro-ana movement: as a rhetorician, I value the possibilities of an online space that provides opportunities for girls to speak to a variety of audiences in an array of textual forms. As a feminist, I value the unrestricted space that online discourse provides for girls and young women, allowing for alternative viewpoints and voices of female resistance. Through my research, I am discovering that such spaces often occur within the subcultures of Girl Studies. Paradoxically, as Driscoll notes that though collectively, “girls tend to challenge dominant identifications through their diverse affiliations,” the research accumulated concerning issues related to youth culture does not acknowledge girls’ cultural groups as subcultures (209). In fact, “girls and women are kept on the margins of subcultural studies (if not subcultures themselves), when they are present at all” (210). I argue here that the pro-ana movement is, in its simplest form, a subculture of Girl Studies—a very young subculture that has only just picked up momentum a full decade after the rise of girl culture—encompassing spaces of both resistance and exploration. The pro-ana movement is more powerful than anything I have ever seen before online. The written texts by pro-ana followers are sometimes both shocking and disturbing, as are the artwork and other visual elements, such as photographs. However, there is also poignancy to these online texts as they create identity, form community, and even encourage recovery among users—it is in this space where an example of the various constructions of subjectivity unfolds. The pro-ana movement continues to thrive despite being constantly decimated by host servers and media critics and in the face of shattering clinical statistics on eating disorders. Members simply rebuild sites and find new servers. This adaptive and defiant behaviour on the part of the users demands a closer reading of the texts of the pro-ana movement for a better understanding of these carefully created identities.

In the online community called Pro-Ana, followers of the pro-ana movement identify with each other by claiming that their disordered eating is a lifestyle choice. They do not—in fact, refuse—to acknowledge medical classifications, which categorize eating disorders as a psychological disease (e.g., anorexia and bulimia). Pro-ana sites include the usual characteristics of most personal websites, in addition to personal reflections and journaling about living with an eating disorder, motivational quotations supporting the pursuit of a pro-anorexia lifestyle, dieting tips and tricks, recipes for low-calorie meals, medical information, and hundreds of pictures and other graphics of women of various weights. In August 2001, Yahoo, then Internet host to the now defunct GeoCities where many of the pro-ana websites were housed, removed over one hundred pro-ana websites in one day. They continue to monitor and shut down pro-ana sites as often as they are posted, as does Angelfire, Tripod, and AOL, all free servers like Yahoo, where pro-ana followers have built their sites. During the span of my research into the pro-ana movement, more than half of the sites I analyze are regularly deleted from their servers; every time I return to my research, I have to revisit Internet search engines for new sites from which to collect my data. In minutes, I am back inside the pro-ana community where sites seem to spring up almost as quickly as they are taken down

Pro-Ana Girls Online Public access to the Internet as a form of communication has helped rework the geophysical spaces in which girls have historically been defined. Constructions of gender have traditionally placed masculinity in “the public world of social power” and femininity in “the privacy of domestic interchange” (Gilligan 69). Harris argues, “public space is by default adult space” (98), and she joins many other Girl Studies’ scholars in citing the private space of girls’ bedrooms as sites of growth for young women. The notion of an existing idealized space in which girls are able to explore a subject position(s) outside of the domestic sphere becomes possible with the emerging concepts of public online space. The arguments that boys are allowed to roam public spaces more freely while “girls are usually associated with [more private and domestic] space inside the home and boys with space outside” has been contested by Reid- Walsh and Mitchell as they assert, “the space of the Web and the homepage may ‘unsettle’ and, indeed, begin to overturn this opposition” (181). With digital literacy part of the ideology in which contemporary girls have been educated, coupled with the pull and familiarity of popular

culture, the shift to a “virtual bedroom culture” (174) was almost inevitable. Online space allows girls and young women to escape from the traditional confines of their homes to the social and public arena of online space, all while playing with ideas of private space in their online discourse. With the activities of social communities tapping into digital technologies and the emergence of the emotional repercussions of disordered eating rising within girl culture, a foundation for the pro-ana movement materialized through the media of personal websites. The structures of pro-ana sites include the similar autobiographical information, personal writings, blogging and posted pictures that can be found on most personal websites. The rhetorical purpose for pro-ana sites, however, is to identify with others as supporters of disordered eating as a lifestyle choice. It is rare that a pro-ana follower does not identify with one of the categories that create the pro-ana discourse. Community members in fact, spend much of their time online finding and defining which category of disordered eating they may fit into. As Ferreday notes, “Although other, less visible pro-ana communities exist elsewhere on the Internet, most pro-ana sites are personal homepages, published on the World Wide Web, which present having an eating disorder as an identity position” (283).

Inside the Pro-Ana Site It is not difficult to understand why themes related to issues concerning eating disorders would be a category of research for scholars of Girl Studies. The National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) believes that as many as ten million women in the United States alone are fighting an eating disorder. Of all psychiatric disorders, anorexia nervosa has the highest mortality rate. Data collected by NEDA also reveal that at least “42% of first to third grade girls want to be thinner” (“Statistics”). This suggests that the disease may originate in childhood, progressing through adolescence and therefore is not specific to mature women. It was once believed that eating disorders affected only young, white women though “relatively little research had been conducted utilizing participants from racial and ethnic minority groups” (“Eating Disorders in Women of Color”). Many eating disorder specialists now recognize that the disease is also not specific to race, that “all socioeconomic and ethnic groups are at risk” (“Eating Disorders Crossing the Color Line”). As one young feminist writes, “Eating disorders are the famine mystique of my generation” (Martin 59), the most topical issue that plagues contemporary girls and young women.

In clinical terminology, an eating disorder was originally defined only as anorexia nervosa: self-starvation and excessive weight loss. This term has been made into an acronym by pro-ana followers who use it as part of the regular discourse of the pro-ana movement (anorexia = ana). The number of medically recognized eating disorder categories, however, continue to increase and are also included as part of the discourse on pro-ana sites: bulimia nervosa, secretive binging and purging is identified as pro-mia, and binge eating disorder or compulsive overeating (uncontrolled, impulsive, or continuous eating without purging) is identified in the pro-ana movement as COE. The most recent category added to the medical classification of eating disorders is eating disorder not otherwise specified, which combines several of the clinical features of eating disorders. The identifying pro-ana term is EDNOS. Ironically, EDNOS “is the most common category of eating disorder seen in outpatient settings yet there have been no studies of its treatment” (Fairburn 692). In addition, because many pro-ana followers also identify as self-injurers (SI), pro-SI is also a common category. Self-injury constitutes a variety of self-inflicted acts of pain including cutting, burning, and branding. While an all- encompassing term may be pro-ED (pro-eating disorder), pro-ana is the reference most familiarly found through Internet search engines. By appropriating for themselves the language of the clinical terminology that defines eating disorders, followers of pro-ana are able to create new identities that are often explored within the pro-ana community, a member who identifies as both ana and SI, for example. While the Internet is certainly a viable place for exploration in many ways due to the anonymity of users, language specifically relating to eating disorders is one of the unique features of pro-ana sites, which might not be found on other personal websites. Many pro-ana sites include a glossary of terms defining both the language used by those that identify as pro-ana and the language used by medical specialists that research eating disorders in clinical environments. Site creators compose very specific descriptions of the various categorizations of disordered eating and pay great attention to the detail of such descriptions; users can guarantee an understanding of pro-ana by reading a personal narrative in a discourse that is familiar to pro-ana community members. In the pro-ana site (not otherwise specified), for example, users may find information about the site owner by clicking on a link marked “patient.” Posted by the site owner herself, users can guarantee an understanding of pro-ana by reading a personal narrative in a discourse that is familiar to pro-ana community members. There is a shared language here, with stories

about familiar experiences related to living with, and managing, an eating disorder. Medical terminology is defined: “In my terms, ketosis is a condition in which the body uses its own muscle and/or body fat as an energy source instead of food. In technical terms, ketosis is a condition brought on by a metabolic imbalance” (ketosis) breaking down such clinical terms into a language that members understand and apply if needed. By creating a space for community members to learn and discuss the language of the medical establishment, those that identify as pro-ana are able to gain control over their identity exploration. The varying acronyms and incorporation of the assorted defined medical terminologies allow members to construct a myriad of subject positions that otherwise might not be afforded in other spaces. The depth of research that can be found in pro-ana websites is staggering. On many sites, not only are there calculators and charts for figuring body mass index and calorie intake, but sites also break down medical jargon for users and address various health issues in relation to disordered eating. On the site Feast or Famine, for example, a listing for side effects of eating disorders under “Health Risks” include (but is not limited to): cardiac problems, anemia, dental decay and discoloration, liver damage, pancreatitis, depressed immune system, hypoglycaemia, and kidney damage/failure (Health Risks). There are corresponding definitions for each listing. Several sites list links to pages of “thincouragement,” quotes in relation to perseverance and staying thin: “It’s not deprivation, it’s liberation” (Quotes ‘04) or “Think smaller, a stone lighter, a size slimmer” (Quotes ‘05). By listing dichotomies such as health risks and encouragement, pro-ana community members are left to pick and choose which information is most suitable for their identity needs. As with other personal websites, many pro-ana sites include some form of personal writing by the site creator. In the case of pro-ana, users write about the constant struggle of living with an eating disorder; through this relating of personal experience, community members may find themselves in another’s story. By reading and understanding this shared connection, the real exploration for the user that identifies as pro-ana may begin. Much of what has caused critics to lash out at pro-ana sites, aside from the textual representations of supporting disordered eating, is most likely the sites’ forums of “thinspiration.” The visual text here is represented through posted pictures of models and other celebrity icons walking down the runway or posing on the red carpet. There is a canon of respected women among pro-ana followers: many models are popular, as are any of the actresses on nighttime soap operas aimed at young adult audiences such as The Hills or 90210,

though an eating disorder admission by actress Mary-Kate Olsen in 2004 moved her to the top of the list as the body that represented a personal goal for many within the pro-ana movement. There are two divisions of thinsperation photos: those that display posed photos of well-known celebrity icons, and “bone pictures,” photos that depict female bodies in various forms of emaciation, often showing just a torso without a head. Bone pictures are inarguably the most disturbing content to view on these sites, and they cause a range of discussion among members of the community. Not all sites carry bone pictures and not all pro-ana followers strive to emulate the bodies displayed in these photos. However, the use of such pictures is significant: many are manipulated in photo software programs to depict bodies thinner than they actually are (on some sites, passing the cursor over a bone picture will show the user both the original photo and the graphically manipulated reworked version). Ironically, most pro-ana followers are aware of the rhetorical purpose that is involved in reworking of these photos, yet, because of their fascination with the pictures, they do not remove them from their sites or eliminate them as topics of discussion. It is these differences within the pro-ana community that fuel debate within these sites. Choices in posting bone pictures, for example, or choosing which eating disorder category members may identify, even noting “trigger” components—a picture or a comment that may spur someone in recovery or someone new to pro-ana into an eating disordered lifestyle—are all issues that can be found and explored in pro-ana websites. I argue that such disagreement is healthy as it prompts community members into discussion and away from (and out of) silence. There is space here to negotiate the identities that mark the pro-ana community, despite the tensions that might arise from defining one’s sense of self as pro-eating disorder; as problematic as the community might be, the discussions are, at the very least, happening. The collective conversations are about issues of disordered eating itself: how to identify, how to maintain, how to navigate health risks—all components in which community members adapt in constructing a subject position(s). Above all, the sites emphasize that being part of the pro-ana community means maintaining an eating disorder as a lifestyle choice. Members of the community are careful to hold onto an identity that links them to disordered eating through choice and warns against entering the community without such recognition: “CAUTION: THIS SITE IS NOT INTENDED TO PROMOTE ANY DISORDER OR THE BEHAVIOR! […] If you are in recovery for any eating disorder, or are under the age of 18, it is advised that you leave this

website now. You have been warned” (xcigaretteTHEIFx). Likewise, users are warned against entering pro-ana sites for reasons other than to find support within the community: “If you come here it means you have a real ED and you’re not some ED poseur or looking to lose weight fast” (ana_life6). To be part of the pro-ana community and reap the benefits of the community, users who enter pro-ana sites must be prepared to identify as pro-ana. This means understanding what entails being pro-ana and being prepared to engage with the community. Such interaction with members involves sharing both support and personal experiences. Without such vocal presence, users are often “trolled out,” or ignored as viable community members. The pro-ana community is not one of silence but of active, participatory exploration.

Creating a Pro-Ana Identity Such exploration is what may prompt girls and young women to enter the pro-ana community as they search for some sort of identification with others who struggle with disordered eating. Members are not only interactive participants but are also able to create a personal identification that allows each member to navigate through the various stages of their eating disorder in ways that affect them, according to their own needs. Many of the sites in the pro-ana movement use electronic message boards to communicate. It is on these boards that personal goals with body issues are discussed, thincouragement is exchanged, thinsperation photos are analyzed and the categories of pro-ana/mia/COE/EDNOS or SI are chosen, realized, and confronted. Here, users voice their appreciation for the community as a place that offers less isolation for eating disorder sufferers: “(Hugs Jen). Just like you’ve stood by me every step of whatever I was doing, whether it be SI, starving, exercising till I pass out, or just venting about life—I’ll stand by you. […] You really mean a lot to me having these boards, I dont know if you know that. (Hug)” (Empty). Postings on message boards are in a familiar language to many of the members within the pro-ana community. For many members, “The pro-ana sites provide a world that’s comforting” (Song 57) due to the familiarity of the shared environment. It is this use of space for community recognition and identity formation that seems most overlooked by critics of the pro-ana movement. Many critics will argue that such websites contribute to the symptoms of disordered eating, teaching users not how to control their disease but rather how to ignore the possibilities for help. The NEDA has this to say about pro-ana sites:

The National Eating Disorders Association actively speaks out against pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia websites. These sites provide no useful information on treatment but instead encourage and falsely support those who, sadly, are ill but do not seek help. These sites could have a severe negative impact on the health of those who consult them and encourage a “cult” type destructive support system that discourages people from the treatment they so desperately need. (“NEDA’s Position”) Not confined to institutional establishments, knowledge of the pro-ana movement—like the shift of Girl Studies to encompass a holistic entity of girl culture—has moved into the realm of popular culture. In an October 2001 episode of The Oprah Show, Oprah Winfrey tells her audience: “There are pro-anorexia Web sites and they are so disturbing that, when we were talking about doing or not doing this show, we debated about whether or not to even talk about them, but we decided that you as parents need to be aware” (“Girls Who Don’t Eat.”). Producers then proceeded to show screenshots from various pro-ana sites while audience members watched in shock. However, Oprah failed to discuss the deletion by Yahoo of the many pro-ana sites only months before, leaving audience members to believe that pro-ana sites have saturated online space and are accessible to anyone with a server and Internet connection. Criticisms of pro-ana sites are easy to find (easier than the sites, themselves) and media attention has shifted to the pro-ana movement through many different venues. Ferreday argues, “The mass closure of pro-ana home pages is partially a response to a proliferation of articles in the press expressing consternation and demanding that something be done about the ‘problem’ of pro-ana” (288). In reality, studies have not found “major differences in body weight, duration of eating disorders, number of missed periods or bone density between anorexics who visited the sites and those who didn’t” (Song 57). And as Nagourney reports, “some experts wonder whether they are doing a better job of getting their message out than do the sites intended to promote recovery from eating disorders,” offering that perhaps, “the sites might serve as no more than a support community, and not as a source of encouragement to continue destructive behaviour” (6). Deletion of pro-ana sites from free server space such as Yahoo is a perfect cause for Gilligan’s argument concerning women’s psychological development: “the truths of psychological theory have blinded psychologists to the truth of women’s experience” (62). Gilligan’s assertion is every bit as relevant now as it was when first asserted in 1982, which begs

the question if these critics of pro-ana websites are actually reading the sites. As Ferreday argues, “The anorexic body […] is what members of the community have in common, both as an ideal and as lived experience” (285); the fervor that makes these sites reappear after they get deleted clearly indicates that there is a real experience here by a large enough representation of the girl population to create a shared community. As I have argued throughout this project, girls’ use of digital literacy proves a rhetorical awareness that is often overlooked by scholars of literacy studies, Girl Studies and certainly the critics of this specific community: pro-ana followers are critical analysts of their disorder and of the culture in which they exist. The assumption that members are too immersed in their disorder to think objectively about the issue does not allow for the growth that does occur in pro-ana communities, the conversations that do happen: “I think the bashing of pro-ED websites is unbelievably hypocritical coming from the same media and magazines that highlight page after page of underweight actresses and models as role-models” (in general). What seems to be most overlooked by most opponents of pro-ana websites is the amount of attention that these sites give to recovery. In many of the sites there is reference to recovery, either through a link to a new page or to message board forums that house numerous discussions of disordered eating, the largest focus of which is recovery. Though many members writing within recovery forums have been with the community for some time, seldom does a user enter a pro-ana community just for recovery purposes; they enter in the process of creating their identity as pro-ana: “When I was 13 I was a classic Ana—then when I was about 15 I was Ana and Mia, then for a while I was just Mia, now I’m sometimes Mia and ALWAYS a COE. IT just changes all the time. You’re going to manipulate your disease to whatever way it suits you best” (kate). Members have already spent time forming friendships and sharing intimacies about their disorder, so by the time the entry into recovery occurs, the community knows the struggle that is ahead and offers support accordingly. As Song notes, “If there’s one thing teens respond to, it’s the rallying cry of other teens, something lacking on sites dedicated to recovery” (57). While recovery sites do exist within the medical eating disorder community, they are seldom pro-ana. Recovery sites are often linked to medical institutions or doctors who have written books on eating disorders. Where recovery is concerned, recovery sites are not frequented nearly as often as pro-ana sites. That girls tend to populate the pro-ana sites—free from the institutional gaze—is an indication that there is subject construction occurring that differs from the normative definition

of girl. Driscoll argues, “the projection of a peer group speaking for and as girls is pivotal” (156), as personal interaction concerning dialogue around recovery can occur without censorship or chastisement or being labeled as a bad girl or a sick woman. Many pro-ana sites are very informative toward issues surrounding recovery; it is common to find just as much research and dedication to recovery issues as pro-ana members give to every other aspect of disordered eating. It is the need to share in the common struggle with disordered eating that brings girls and young women to search for pro-ana communities. As Ferreday concludes, “by encouraging sufferers to talk about their conditions, they disrupt the medical model of anorexia and challenge the distinction between the public and private” (292). This brings the argument back to the value of these online spaces. There is room here for constructing not only a subjectivity but multiple subjectivties as girls begin to identify as pro-ana, pro-mia or as one recovering from an eating disorder. It is these rhetorical acts of ownership of the text, an audience awareness of the need for such sites to exist that moves girls from consumers to producers of their own popular culture. As one scholar of information sciences recognizes, “the mounting evidence [is] that teens are not passive consumers of media content. […] They take content from media providers and transform it, reinterpret it, republish it, take ownership of it in ways that at least hold the potential for subverting it” (Rothbauer qtd in Zeller) just as they do when viewing commercial and institutional web space. Girls become critical when viewing sites that are not of their making. It is in this way that they are able to appropriate web space for their own needs. Many of the pro- ana sites use quotes from medical websites concerning eating disorders as a starting point for their own exploration with text; they create responses and begin to develop critical thinking and argumentation skills. When Beth and I looked at the pro-ana sites together and I asked her if they should be allowed to stay online, she felt they should be allowed a space as much as any other website: “I think if it’s helping those girls find a way to recovery […] it’s educational for those who don’t know about it.” Emily also supported the existence of putting such sites online, “it’s something I would never do but then again, it’s not something I would say anybody shouldn’t be able to do.” The sites intrigued all of my research participants; perhaps because so many of them actually knew women their age with some sort of disordered eating habit. Erin admitted—despite being an athlete and aware of the value of strong nutritional practices—she would still visit these sites,

“just because of the whole curiosity thing,” a testament to how closely linked to the body this generation of girls and young women truly are. Despite my research participants admitting to not visiting these sites to become a member of the pro-ana community, they recognize the use of community as a benefit. As Ito argues: “New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in a classroom setting. Youth respect one another’s authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults. Their efforts are also largely self- directed, and the outcome emerges through exploration, in contrast to classroom learning that is oriented by set, predefined goals” (2). I argue that this sense of curiosity, as Erin admitted, is not a negation; Ito is only one of the many researchers that support a sense of community that is created in what can be noted as another form of underlife. As I have argued in chapter four, visual components and page layout are as important as textual elements in website design and this is no different in pro-ana sites: “Mere attention to the words on a Web page will not suffice, since the images are so important to textual meaning” (Warnick 76). While there is evidence of a symbiotic relationship between the visual and textual elements at work in most online spaces created by girls and young women, it is highly evident in pro-ana sites. The connection to the visual representation of the body must exist in order to help create the pro-ana identity. This is a constructed identity under the authorship of any given site creator; the possibilities of multiple discourses and multiple readings result in an array of created subjectivities. There is a sense of resistance here, against the institutions and the traditional forms of normative behaviour for girls. As Bruce suggests, “when the status quo is disrupted with other versions of femininity, other subversive and transformative discursive possibilities emerge for girls” (145) and this can certainly be seen in these pro-ana websites as members find themselves inside a space of like-minded interests. By redefining the positions that traditionally constitute girl, the very existence of pro-ana sites may suggest a challenge of developmental moments in a girl’s life such as puberty, which Driscoll notes: “can certainly be conceived as a systematic institution of the self in relation to normative body images” (237). These pro-ana sites are a space that allows for an alteration of these ideas. Disruption is a strong tactic used by members of the pro-ana movement—disruption of the institutions that have tried to define the disordered eating identity, one very clearly marked

by the body. With Driscoll’s argument that girls never claim a subject position(s), a connection is made to the development of the girl body: “The progression from girl to adolescent nominally depends on physical change, but that from adolescent to woman relies on an apparently indeterminate combination of social events” (90) which parallels her assertion that “while masculine adolescence is a progress to Subjectivity, feminine adolescence ideally awaits moments of transformation from girl to Woman” (57). The creation of any subject position that girls and young women might possibly construct for themselves is often defined by the body—a main purpose for commercial sites is often the focus on products for the female body while branches of institutional sites lead girls to empowerment concerning the body. In girls personal websites, specifically in the pro-ana community, the body can be defined—or redefined—by the girls themselves: “But at 5 foot 5, I know that I can’t be as obese as I look in the mirror. How do we know ACTUALLY how skinny we’re getting?” and “damnit, at what point does the line between ‘fat’ and ‘thin’ come to be? Size eight? Size one?” (Hero), offering a space for critical discussion of how the body is viewed, defined and manipulated. Knowing the focal point of representations of the body for girls and young women makes the rise of the pro-ana movement a logical step in girls’ personal website development. While the visuals that structure thinspiration forums may be shocking to non-members, pro-ana is defined by such imagery. Members may agree or disagree on how the body should look but they expect some sort of visual representation to accompany the discourse. There is an appropriated form of objectification that takes place here, one that is marked and created by these girls and young women who have claimed a subject position inside the community. The gathering of images and the ownership of the terminology of their disease—lifestyle choice, as any passing viewer is reminded—has been constructed specifically to match the needs of the community member. As Ferreday notes, “the sites’ resistance to the medical model of eating disorders is expressed in terms of a refusal to be objectified; indeed, the very idea that it is possible to be ‘pro’ anorexia implies a resistance to ‘objectifying’ reactions of concern or offers of (medical) help” (289), the normative connections to the objectified body reassigned. These are references for the pro-ana follower, a guide that helps direct them toward their pro-ana identity. With pro-ana, there are very few limitations on how the body may be constructed; members create images of how their eating disorder can contribute to their identity. Despite the communal discussions of health risks, identity is up for consideration. As members enter, they

begin to situate themselves inside a discourse that layers and intertwines textual and visual elements in relation to something very real to the user. This is the possibility for construction of self: “the postmodern self: a self that is fragmented, ever changing, ambiguous, and perhaps even liberated” (Doheny-Farina 65). Since online interaction involves an identity that has been constructed out of visual and textual elements with no “paralinguistic cues such as voice, facial expressions, and dress” (Hawisher 269), girls are free to play with self-representation, claiming a space that is defined on their own terms, constructed by their own sense of a newly created subject position(s).

Chapter Six The Blogosphere and Social Networking: Web 2.0

Introduction It is fitting that I follow a discussion on personal websites with that of the blogosphere and social networking environment created by the Web 2.0 interface; both online spaces have contributed greatly to the online environments created by girls and young women. Research conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project has noted that blogging among teenagers has doubled between 2004 and 2006, with almost all the growth attributed to “the increased activity of girls” (qtd in Rosenbloom). Likewise, social networking communities: “MySpace has more than 40 million registered users, an overwhelming number of whom are under 30” with 150,000 new users a day (Altimari). Given the community-driven platform of sites such as MySpace or facebook, friendships grow and expand with the click of a button. As Oblinger argues, “Net Gen has developed a mechanism of inclusiveness that does not necessarily involve personally knowing someone admitted to their group. Being a friend of a friend is acceptable” (10), offering a new lens into how relationships begin forming for this tech-savvy generation.

Enter: Web 2.0 As much a marketing term as it is a platform for technological formatting, Web 2.0 has opened up access to online programming. Before the shift to a user-friendlier format for utilizing web applications, knowledge of applying World Wide Web software specifics was limited to those that were well versed in digital and technical discourse such as understanding HTML coding. With Web 2.0, webspace has become universally accessible (to those with the hardware and access to the Internet, that is). Such access has allowed for a shift in audience, one that includes web users that have no knowledge—and in some cases, interest—of the layout supported on the back-end of Internet interfacing. Because of the ease in which web software programming provides new users, software developers working in programs from Wikipedia to LiveJournal have adapted the Web 2.0 platform. With new open source software, “published under licenses that ensure that the source code is available to everyone to inspect, change, download, and explore as they wish” (Woods), it seems only likely to follow that a new generation of tech-savvy youth would discover the benefits.

Once online, the geophysical social spaces of this generation has shifted to a new environment and has became “the virtual counterpart of the real-world places kids gather: a high school hallway, the locker room, the mall on Sunday afternoon or a parking lot on a sultry night” (Altimari). This new space has changed the way that this generation sees social space and thus creates a newly defined community: “The networks present the attractive possibility of finding new places that transcend the mundane physical spaces restricting our daily lives” (Doheny- Farina 49). This is a space that is accessible 24 hours a day, beyond the limitations of the close, local neighborhood: “being home alone […] does not necessarily mean feeling alone: if she can find access to the Internet, a girl can ‘hang out’ with others in the public venues of cyberspace” (Weber 50). This is international territory, beyond the immediate environment and a space that is open for possibilities reaching much further than ever before. As educators and researchers are beginning to realize, “this technologically literate generation manipulates vast amounts of data with lightning dexterity” (Cavanaugh 470) making such a social space one adaptable for creative content. The promise of creative space is certainly one that will draw in girls with their aptness for like-minded sharing within a community. In fact, girls outnumber boys as content creators (Lenhart, “Teens and Social Media” ii), so finding a framework in which to post such content is perfect for this new generation of cyber girls. With Web 2.0 applications, sharing like-interests has become easy as it allows for a customizable identity, making it manageable for users to adapt a hybrid literacy of alphabetical, visual and aural texts. Such play with textual preferences has affected the way that text coincides with space and how such spaces have defined the author. When surveyed as recent as February 2010, 61% of youth coming of age within the new millennium believe “their generation has a unique and distinctive identity” with 24% of the opinion that “it’s because of their use of technology” (Taylor 5). According to Oblinger, these young tech users “don’t think in terms of technology; they think in terms of the activity technology enables” (12). This generation has grown up with access to the Internet, either at home or school or both. They recognize the impact of technology on their identity; with the rise of Web 2.0, the user-centric form allows for a keen sense of astuteness where technology as a tool is concerned. As early as 1999, a decade before Web 2.0 came into full, active status, Turkle noted, “We don’t have to reject life onscreen, but we don’t have to treat it as an alternative life either. We can use it as a space for

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growth” (“Identity Crisis” 85). For this contemporary generation of girls, Web 2.0 has been a tool well used toward aiding the growth of girlhood.

The Blogosphere Some critics will argue that Web 2.0 has created the possibility for blogging framework and the interactivity of social networking sites to replace personal websites (O’Reilly). Certainly, when Hawisher and Sullivan first began their analysis of online texts using a category such as “personal websites,” Web 2.0 interfacing was not yet in rotation online. I contend that Web 2.0 has only enhanced the availability for creating personal websites and this includes the blogosphere and social networking communities. My argument stands from the fact that the characteristics that constitute blogging and social networking display many of the same specifics that I have previously outlined when describing personal website attributes. For girls and young women who write for online spaces, these attributes have helped create a very specific textual platform of multimodality. The merging of the personal and public space that is enabled by blogging and social networking is very much what is so desirable about personal websites; there are choices that can be made concerning how and what is displayed, a “new rhetorical opportunity” (van Dijck) for turning passivity into action and prompting a construction of various subject position(s). What makes these sites inviting for many girls and young women is very much the same as that of personal websites: identity building is up for grabs. The framework that structures the blog format—an easily modifiable website that allows for personal “posts,” listed in reverse- chronological order—is very much like the diary or journal format, of which many girls are already familiar. What provides the difference between traditional texts of diaries and that of blogs is the hybridity of multimodal configurations. Scheidt, in her research concerning the online blogosphere notes that the “the uniqueness of weblogs comes from their ability to blend personal narrative with performance characteristics” (196). This representation of performativity is exemplified by the integration of alphabetic text and either visual or aural graphics—in some cases, both. Embedding a video from an outside web source into a blog, for example, opens up the sharing of ideas with other online spaces beyond that of the source blog. This is an opportunity to integrate personal affiliations, thus adding to the construction of self.

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There is no denying the popularity of such online spaces for this generation of digital text readers and writers. Cultural theory and research in youth culture has only just begun to recognize this shift in authorship: “Youth culture […] mostly means culture directed to, about, and for youth rather than cultural production by youth” (Driscoll 214), yet we now know that these online spaces are well designed by a generation raised in a digitally literate environment. When I asked Emily about blogging, there was no confusion on her part where the blogosphere entered into her daily life: “before my really good friend Hannah started blogging, I always thought that people that had blogs—all they did was sit in a dark room at a computer and just write and I was like, that’s not the lifestyle I have. It’s obviously not true” as she proceeded to give me the URL to her new blog. Perhaps what makes the Web 2.0 platform so compatible with personal websites is how well blogging has become integrated into the sites. As referenced in Chapter Four, many personal websites include a blog central to the page layout. As much as blogs have merged with personal websites, the same can be said of those sites aimed at commercial and institutional interests as the authors of these sites also create some sort of link to other online spaces. This total immersion in online space is what makes these digital texts so favorable for girls and young women: a familiar literacy that can be adapted to a space that is compliant enough for exploration. And the use of blogs is growing; researchers from the Pew Internet and American Life Project has found, “virtually all of the growth in teen blogging between 2004 and 2006 is due to the increased activity of girls,” with the realization that the fastest rise in blog usage is occurring among young adolescent girls: “younger girl bloggers have grown at such a fast clip that they are now outpacing even the older boys (32% of younger girls blog vs. 18% of older boys)” (Lenhart, “Teens and Social Media” ii), attesting to the popularity of the format for this generation.

Diaries vs. Journals In histories of girlhood, the diary is often referenced in detail, both as a source of information about girls within their social and cultural settings and as a source by girls, an inside look into the constructed psyche of girl space. When Joan Brumberg began her research for her canonical Girl Studies text, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, she noted, “because diaries reveal so much about the heart of being a girl, I use them whenever possible to

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provide entry into the hidden history of female adolescents’ experience” (xxvii). I don’t believe a discussion concerning girls and the blogosphere can successfully be held without referencing the power of the diary and its role in girlhood. Because blogs are so often described as the digital forms of diaries, understanding the difference between diaries and journals needs to be addressed. When Reid-Walsh and Mitchell outline the move from private to public in discussing girls’ personal websites, “semiprivate places of creativity and sociality” (174), they work toward emphasizing the differences between what has traditionally been girl space, that of the private space, to the public spaces in which boys interact. These same contrasts have been assigned to the differences between diaries and journals: Of particular importance is the imposed but shifting demarcation between public and private […] there is indeed a persuasive, but often invisible, popular-culture tradition of journal or diary keeping, primarily among women, as well as a more public and elite tradition of journal keeping that is primarily male-affiliated (Gannett 100). Likewise from Bell: “forms of personal writing are not all considered equal, with a distinction being drawn between the stereotypical male journal form and the female diary form” (101). Historically, diaries have been kept for personal consumption while journals are often published and made accessible to the public or kept private by choice. Men’s journals often included topics discussing public events or “the inner life of the mind” (Gannett 130) and thus, were publishable for a public audience. Women, however, had a much more restricted audience and chose to write “for other women, often close female friends, or for family, usually their children, if they [wrote] to anybody at all” (131), topics not normally of interest or appropriate to an audience outside the personal space. As Cherland argues, “diaries are still, as they always have been, performances of girlhood, composed in complex cultural contexts that both enable and constrain what can be read and written” (91). The issue of audience is relevant in defining the differences between diaries and journals; diaries of girlhood are better kept as private due to a possible lack of interest in topic choice, the topics that construct all things found in girl space. Such topics devised in a personal space and often kept personal with no intended audience allowed for women to address an exploration of the self that may not have been allowed in a public space. Finders, in her ethnographic study of girls in junior high discovered, “only through a literate underlife [of passing notes and diaries] were these girls provided any

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opportunity for more freedom, independence, or responsibility” (Finders 129). In writing about Anne Frank’s diary, van Dijck notes, “her daily ritual was an act of self-protection as much as self-expression. By carving out a discursive space, she was able to articulate her private thoughts and define her position in relation to others and the world at large.” As Gannett argues about female diarists, “They have created texts out of their lives and new lives out of their texts” (136), making this textual space one of rhetorical action. The notion of rhetorical action taking place in such a private space creates an interesting dichotomy for how private spaces are defined by those that study textual analysis, especially that of digital texts. Is any text private? For girls and young women the creation of personal websites and the move to blogging and interaction in social networking communities made possible by Web 2.0, the private and public space is merged with a very undefined boundary between the two. Which for girls is exactly what helps make that construction of subject position(s) in online space more possible. Moving from traditional forms of diary keeping to the digital space that blogging provides allows for more options in identity exploration; while girls can lock their blogs and invite only users they allow to read their posts, the anonymity of the Internet allows for a chosen identity in the public space, created by the girl herself. Thus, audience becomes an issue at hand in those spaces between public and private.

The Blogging Audience Bell notes an important issue when analyzing blogs: “we must consider the dual nature of blogs as spaces of both a private and public nature” (105). For girls exploring their identity and subject position(s), this environment of open boundaries might be beneficial to girls in this venture toward discovery. Blogs are different from diaries simply through their format: “blogs, while they may be similar to paper diaries in writing style, provide very different opportunities for girls—ones in which they can engage in visual and textual communication with an outside audience of their peers” (104). This space, as used for multimodal writing, provides girls— especially this generation of girls that have come of age already familiar with multimodal texts through digital formats—with more options in their writing by not limited the text to traditional, alphabetic forms. When I asked Carrie if she had to choose between the traditional research paper and an assignment that included multimodal elements, she was quick to respond,

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I would choose something visual. I’m the art-type person. I like to see something like that. […] When I see the big thing of writing, I am totally uninterested. If I see something that is maybe the same amount of writing and it has pictures spaced out between it makes me think, great because it’s not this huge long page of writing. By incorporating visual and aural elements, the audience for blogs may be larger than the audience for traditional texts, not only because of the familiarity of the form and the public nature of online space but by opening up the possibility of more chances at shared interests. By posting an audio file, for example, a girl defines her musical interests. A snippet of a song may encourage further exploration by a reader than had they read only the title or lyrics in traditional text format. And as research has discovered, not only are bloggers more “likely than non- bloggers to engage in everyday online activities such as getting news, using IM or making online purchases,” but sharing and creating content is also far ahead among bloggers than those that don’t engage in blogging activity (Lenhart, “Teen Content Creators” ii).

Blogging Activism Content creating, as something those that design and run personal websites already know, can be a powerful forum for making statements through rhetorical acts—demanding action—by way of voicing interests real to girls and young women. In my experience, I have discovered that girls and young women have plenty to say and not all are silenced. Through the possibilities of non-traditional texts such as zines or other multimodal texts in the digital format, a sense of empowerment can be available to girls, as they do not shut down and allow themselves to be silenced; essentially, they speak through the texts they create. There is activism possible here; social issues that affect girls and young women as outlined in Chapter Four can be discussed, shared and analyzed without censorship from the institutions in which girls and young women interact. As Poster states in his arguments concerning online environments and public spaces, “the relation of cyberspace to material human geography is decidedly one of rupture and challenge” (224) and the issues that fill the spaces of online texts, such as the Pro-Ana website subculture, certainly qualifies for the power of rupturing the comfort of “safe” topics, few of which girls and young women are allowed to discuss in the classroom setting. As Bruce realized when working with her women’s studies students, “when students feel free to speak without interruption to an audience that is willing to

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take them and their ideas seriously, students counteract cultural silencing, which results with dissociation from their interior selves” (120). The blogosphere allows for this room to move these ideas around among girls and young women; interactivity occurs with responses to posts or prompt ideas offered through the asynchronous discussion format of the blog framework. Driver, who works with gay teens communicating in online spaces realizes, “connecting up with other queer youth through new media becomes a vital way for youth to access and sustain links with queer mentors, friends, and acquaintances” (230). For issues such as homosexuality, online spaces offer the platform for girls and young women to present the subject and identity that they have constructed for themselves, not one that has been constructed by social and/or cultural ideologies, or worse yet—not recognized at all. In speaking to girls and young women of the new generation of feminists, Baumgardner and Richards advises, “once you embrace the idea that you can change your world, you begin looking for the tools with which to do so” (Baumgardner 295). For contemporary girls and young women, using Web 2.0 framework, the blogosphere has become a tool of empowerment.

The Curious Case of Tavi Gevinson, Style Rookie An example of the power of Web 2.0 and how girls have appropriated the framework for their own can be found in the work of Chicago middle school student Tavi Gevinson. In March 2008, then 11 yr. old Tavi opened an account on the free blogging service, Blogger. Titled Style Rookie, Tavi uses the blogging format to post her reviews, ideas, images and criticisms of all things fashion. In her first post, Tavi writes, Well I am new here…. Lately I’ve been really interested in fashion, and I like to make binders and slideshows of "high-fashion" modeling and designs. I’d like to know of neat websites and magazines, so comments are welcome. I plan on posting pictures in the future, but for now, I’m just getting started. Yours truly, Tavi (Gevinson, “The New Girl In Town.”). Notice the connections Tavi makes in her first post to characteristics I have noted concerning girls and online spaces: a move to familiar literacy (research from online sources), an introduction that denotes familiarity and a request to the community which involves interactivity through the use of the comments feature on her blog. Tavi recognizes girl space here, given the topic of fashion. She also mentions that she creates binders for her specific interest, similar to

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the zines that were made popular in the early 90s. As unique as zines became, “a girl-driven strategy for empowerment” (Schilt 79), this has transferred to the blogging format, the zine of the new millennium. Tavi’s blog exemplifies the exact online space that girls have begun to occupy for that exploration of subject position(s). Not only is it focused on a popular interest found in girlhood but it is also a place where Tavi can play with her identity. She posts pictures of herself, wearing clothing that she mixes and matches, purchased from vintage clothing stores or fashion labels found in discount bins. This is Tavi’s idea of style and when not critiquing the avante garde of the contemporary fashion scene (labels I have only slightly heard of in passing), Tavi is critiquing her own style sense by justifying her choice of attire in each shot. All this while adding in a comment or two about middle school: “middle school is middle school and as long as I have a lunch period and can create impractical things out of plexiglass for my Chopping Wood and Stuff class, s’all good” (Gevinson, “eeeeeeeeeeegs (eden)”). By summer of 2008, Tavi’s traffic on her blog reached 29,000. Per day (Twohey 3). In a public space with a blog open to any reader that could access the Internet, Style Rookie came under the scope of the fashion industry. By the end of her first year online, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Teen Vogue and several fashion magazines interviewed Tavi. One journalist noted, “Tavi combined her razor-sharp writing skills, precocious attitude and Internet savvy into a high profile in the fashion community, using her youth and small size as bold exclamation points” (Twohey 1) and another, “It’s a well-rounded selection for a fashion- related blog: thoughtful critique, cool outfits, funny pop-culture musings. Not bad for a 12-year- old” (Spiridakis). Tavi became a name among the fashion industry and by the following fall, she was front and center at New York Fashion Week, all while studying for her eighth grade science exam. Within a year of the online publication of Style Rookie, Tavi Gevinson was writing a column for Harper’s Bazaar and keeping an additional blog for UK fashion magazine Pop. She has been photographed at Fashion Week events with industry names such as Karl Lagerfeld (Hintz-Zambrano). Tavi has continued to blog on Style Rookie the same as she did from the beginning, adding in her personal photos from a variety of fashion industry events, including an all-expenses-paid trip to Japan to work with fashion house Rodarte.

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Despite Tavi’s now international recognition within the fashion industry, she still maintains her blog as a part of girl culture, discussing among things such as fashion, her girl space. In addition to posts about fashion shows and designers she loves, Tavi merges that public/private space by posting descriptions and images of her bedroom. When discussing images she comes across online, Tavi writes, their styles all remind me of teenage bedrooms which I am really fascinated by since it’s the environment a person tries to create for themself while constructing new identities and in an attempt to run away within their own home. Then there’s all this old memory sentimental junk lying around even when someone tries becoming a different person, childhood leftovers and embarrassing souvenirs among hair dye and newly discovered music (Gevinson, “COGs in an ideal high school”). Astutely (and perhaps somewhat precociously) offering critical analysis and realizations of her own identity, “my room is coming along slowly and surely, though I guess it’ll be changing all the time. JUST LIKE ME~~~! Real life” (Gevinson, “hey hey guys look at all my stuff”), Tavi’s comments do not veer too far from what my own college-age research participants say about their recognition of girl space, a space of identity building, what I argue is the construction of subject position(s). Here, Tavi shares bits of herself with the expectation that she will receive feedback from readers and with a readership toward 30,000, her comments section is often full of like-minded posts. From Narita, a teenager from the Netherlands, “I really like what I see, the crown wall is great, I want that too but I barely wear something on my head. I'm currently putting up pictures from magazines on my wall” to neon rose from the UK, “haha, i love it. You’re kind of like me, i don’t like it too neat because it feels boring, empty and mainly there is no personality or story behind it. i like things with stories behind them, its interesting,” Tavi’s comments support the community building that I argue occurs in personal websites and blogging communities inhabited by online girls. The issue up for discussion here is the text. This is a format that the now 15 yr. old Tavi knows well, the argument I have been consistently making throughout this project. The multimodality of Tavi’s blog reaches an audience far further than if she were working with traditional, alphabetic text. Not only because of the possibilities the online space has afforded her concerning public audiences but also the content. In some posts, Tavi actually takes pictures of photographs from fashion magazines so she is using multimodality as intertextuality, visual

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representations of visual representations. As one blogger noted in an article about Tavi concerning the questioning of her authorship, But the main argument for Tavi Gevinson’s authorship of her own blog and associated freelance work isn’t her parents’ proclamations of non-involvement, it’s the consistency of her writerly voice, as evidenced by just over 18 months’ worth of frequent posts (Jenna). Because we so seldom see such freedom in a “writerly voice,” recognition of the writing identity I argue that our students have yet to claim, it becomes difficult to accept that given the chance, girls and young women—or all young people in our classrooms, really—are fully capable of expression and creativity and more importantly, thinking critically. It is because of this difficulty in recognizing critical analysis in the writing of girls and young women that Tavi is already seeing her share of backlash. From a series of fashion industry editors who believe that Tavi does not do her own writing on Style Rookie, one editor offers, “I’m not trying to take anything away from her—her love of fashion, her love of style. She’s either a tween savant or she’s got a Tavi team” (qtd in Odell, “Editors Like Tavi”). And when viewing an interview of Tavi at Fashion Week, an Elle editor stated, “You look at her video, and the writing doesn’t sync up with the way she talks about fashion” (qtd in Moore). One designer noted, “No one who wants to read a serious review of a show is going to look at what a 14-year-old thinks” (qtd in Moore), as if her input is no serious contribution to an adult- dominated community. Tavi is self-aware, however, and realizes that her place in popular culture is fleeting. As she states in an interview, “I guess that’s sort of a worry of mine […] That I won’t be relevant anymore, and then I just won’t be able to do things like go to Fashion Week” yet for this online girl, it still comes back to the writing: “If I lost all my readers tomorrow, I would still blog, just because it’s a place for me to get my thoughts down. As I get older, no one will be able to do the ‘Can you believe it? This kid’s thirteen!’ thing” (qtd in Odell, “Tavi Gevinson Hired a Publicist”). For bringing her writing public at only age 11, I see great empowerment through Tavi’s writing for Style Rookie. Not only is she critical of the cultural movements that are in direct line for consumption by her generation, she is thinking without limitation among others in the field in which she has been immersed. For example, early in 2010, well-known and respected fashion photographer Terry Richardson was accused by several models in the fashion industry of

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inappropriate sexual behavior on a variety of photo shoots. The accusations split the industry, becoming somewhat of a scandal with concerns over who would speak against Richardson for fear of ostracizing themselves within the industry. Tavi took her blog on several occasions to offer her own opinion of Richardson’s behavior: ‘You can always say no. It’s the girl’s fault for not saying no. There is a choice. The girl could’ve refused.’ ...the girl should never be put in the position in which she has to refuse. I mean, sure, she could just not say yes, but there’s another person to blame, and that would be the person who could just not pressure a girl into performing those kinds of acts. Remember him? And for what reason, other than selfish pleasure? Nevermind the emotional damage it can do to a person. I don’t think its purpose is in the quality of the photos— nudity in fashion is no longer shocking. And as for the kind of things he has asked models to do to him, you don’t need to get some action in order to take a head-on picture of someone against a wall (Gevinson, “can i just say”). With maturity and logic applied to her writing, Tavi uses her blog as a space for her voice, recognizing harassment against girls not much older than herself. There is no silencing by this teen, what the early Girl Studies scholars say they found in the girls they researched in the 1980s and early 1990s. I am not arguing that digital environments give all girls and young women a voice but it certainly empowers many of them in ways that a space without text—or, at least, text they can own—may not. Tavi uses her blog to critically explore those topics and issues of interest to her. And judging by the traffic Style Rookie receives, of interest to her readers. Tavi ended this post about Richardson by noting, “I was just really really not feeling all this and felt like writing about it and wanted to let it out and take advantage of the fact that I run this bloggy blog myself” (Gevinson, “can i just say”). Critics of Tavi—in addition to doubting that she does her own writing—also tend to dismiss her ideas and efforts. One Los Angeles Times journalist says this about Tavi: “An unlikely muse, she’s not perfectly coiffed, she hasn’t paid her dues, fetched Anna Wintour’s lunch, worked a summer for free, spent herself into debt to look the part or experienced the sting of rejection—yet” (Moore), as if her spot in the fashion community is hardly earned and what she says holds no value. This aligns with Driscoll’s argument concerning how feminists tend to ignore the participation of girls’ efforts toward the feminist movement: “Feminism’s detachment from girls operates by assuming that feminists are formed in the experiences of women rather

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than girls” (Driscoll 134), yet I find many of Tavi’s posts highly feminist in nature. Not only is she critical of the fashion community in which she interacts but also is very outspoken concerning girl culture: Obviously, there’s much more to teenage girls and the thoughts of such than boys with noteworthy eyeballs, but I resent the idea that such thoughts are, in our culture, considered vapid because they’re also considered specific to young females (Gevinson, “alien she”). She also has a keen awareness of such positions women have within the narratives that construct our subject location, recognizing her own subject position in relation: When I say good or pretty or attractive, I mean by the standards that dictate our society, which usually start with being thin and white. I’m not saying I always like how I look, and you may look at the picture above and be like ‘what are you talking about you resemble an opossum,’ but through the very narrow lens of mainstream media, pop culture, etc., I possess some beauty privilege (Gevinson, “when I was just a little girl”). Blogging, for girls and young women, may open up opportunities in writing that may not have been there when traditional forms were the only texts allowed in the composition classroom. Tavi has said the same thing I had been hearing from my students and have noted from my research participants earlier in this project: “I never really liked writing before because at school I never got to write about what I like. […] With my blog, it’s my thoughts, like my brain is being translated onto the computer.” (qtd in Twohey 2). On a blog post concerning teen girls’ clever use of online space (of which Tavi was mentioned), Anna N asks, “Is it possible that the sustained discussion among people with different backgrounds and viewpoints that’s now possible on the Internet is actually making kids smarter?” A good question when we consider the critical discussions they are learning to create when applying their ideas to multimodal, digital texts.

Social Networking As I have argued in Chapter Two, traditional students at the college level know facebook and use it well, even adapting it as part of their classroom underlife. Social networking, for this generation of students, is part of their everyday communication, a literacy that those of my generation had to learn and had to learn fast in order to keep current with those we teach. One

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study conducted with college undergraduates concerning their use of information technology revealed that 81.6% of the respondents admitted to using social networking sites daily (Salaway 12). Indeed, in my own research for this project, all 72 of my research participants noted their participation in social networking sites. When I apply facebook in discussion in my classroom, I never have to worry that one of my students might not have an account; they enter college having had a profile on facebook all throughout their high school years. There is no avoiding a discussion concerning multimodal texts in the digital platform without noting the popular use of social networking sites. For contemporary youth, these sites manage to encompass all the interests of digital media such as music and video, along with socializing opportunities through postings on walls and private messaging. In some social networking sites, blogging is even possible, incorporating the best of Web 2.0, allowing interactivity as the core function. By “friending” someone—note the linguistic shift this generation has created, making friend a verb—a whole community begins to take shape. For girls and young women, social networking combines the benefits of blogging and the socializing of community. Add in the possibility of identity content creation and the platform is ripe for this demographic. The building of “walls” or profiles on social networking sites is not much different than the bedroom culture that has existed in girl space for decades: representations of a myriad of popular culture interests exhibiting a display of representations that a site user chooses in an attempt at crafting a self that is presented to viewers. There are a variety of ways that users can create their identity in these sites. User profiles can include pictures and biological information such as geographical location, relationship status, political affiliation and interests such as favorite movies, books and music. Members begin building their “social net” by inviting “friends.” Members within the social net can be limited by what they read and have access to at the discretion of the site owner. Friends are created through shared interests or shared networks. Social networking profiles are also a large part of personal websites; it is likely that the author of a personal website will include a link to her MySpace, facebook and Twitter pages. I have never seen a personal website since the rise of Web 2.0 in which the user was not well incorporated into online space as a whole—if there is a personal website, there are also profiles constructed in at least one social networking community.

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MySpace One of the most common and most popular social networking communities is MySpace. Initially, the site started as a portal for musicians to display their music. A good forum for this purpose; musicians could upload audio files for their music at their discretion without the management of a record label, placing the marketing of the artists’ product completely under their control, a complete Web 2.0 characteristic. Since 2003 when the site first opened, it has grown “by tens of millions of people, most of them younger than 30” (Altimari). Accessible to anyone with Internet access, MySpace has loose age restrictions—add to it the ease of interactivity of the software and MySpace became one of the first social networking sites that girls and young women encountered before moving onto other communities. Research shows that by the end of 2006, just three years after MySpace hit the net, “55% of online teens had a profile on a social network” (Lenhart, “Teens and Social Media” 5) with MySpace alone, growing 318% in 2006. (Kornblum). With the ability to create profile pages using available templates—with added “skins” found around the Internet, and the potential to upload images and both audio and video, MySpace became another space adaptable for girls to construct their own representation of self; Emily admitted that for her MySpace profile, she often lied about her age when posting. When I asked why, she laughed and acknowledged not remembering why since it was so long ago. In its infancy, MySpace became a training ground, in a sense, for many girls and young women to get familiar with the ways in which social networking functions. All but one of my research participants had a MySpace account at one point. Many of them referred to MySpace as a site that younger girls utilized, and several of them noted that “there are a lot of creepy people on there” (Lindsay), probably due to a lack of age restriction when the site first opened. But all my research participants agreed upon one thing: facebook was a better tool for the college-level student. As Lindsay noted, “because I have facebook it wasn't really necessary to have MySpace anymore.” facebook Only a year after MySpace premiered, facebook became open to the public. A limited public, that is. What made facebook so unique from other online communities was the university connection; membership required an .edu email account in order to join and the university must already be registered with facebook. Without an invite, facebook members were limited in what

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they could read in your profile and prevented from moving into your “global net” your connection to other schools. As with other social networking sites, members chose who were invited into their network and what would be published to their profile. With facebook built around the university community, friends were created not only through shared interests in formed groups but also through common classes and postings of university events. As one of my students explained: “[facebook] was intentionally designed as on online directory to connect people through different schools, but now it’s a place to go while procrastinating doing work” (Cate). The site has since opened to the general public, to anyone with an email address. Though as Lenhart noted, “Even with the new openness, Facebook is still primarily organized around real-world physical communities – first college campuses and later high schools, employers and geographic regions” (“Social Networking Websites” 4). I am realizing that in addition to becoming a great tool for classroom use, my students are recognizing facebook as a form of communication in which I really had to adjust. I might use it as a tool, another text in the classroom but my students tag the site differently: Most college students know that facebook is more than just a website, it’s a way of life. The time we spend searching for people from our classes, reading their favorite movies, and voyeuristically looking at their web shots from last weekend has wasted more of our time than we all care to think about (Cassie). As I have argued for the rhetorical savviness of girls in relation to commercial websites, I think the same needs to be said of social networking community users. Especially when entering these sites at an early age, girls and young women make use of these sites well and use them as a way of connection: “In the end it doesn’t matter whether you are an active wall commenter or thread starter in a group, all that seems to count is that you have a group to be a part of ” (Kaylee), that community recognition never straying too far with the use of the digital platform. And identity, as always, is at issue: “You can maintain a certain feeling of anonymity hiding behind your computer screen and creating a profile that probably gives no insight into your own personality, only showing the person you want others to see” (Tara).

Twitter I don’t want to ignore the most recent of social networking communities that seems to be growing as quickly as MySpace and facebook. While Twitter, online in 2006, is relatively new

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and functions a bit differently than other social networking sites—users are limited to 140 character posts and there is no posting of images or video without going through a third-party web source— it is still a relevant site in social networking. As Fox notes, “the use of Twitter is highly intertwined with the use of other social media; both blogging and social network use increase the likelihood that an individual also uses Twitter.” What makes Twitter so interesting is the possibility of prominence among girls and young women. At the time of this writing, teens in the 14-17 age range use Twitter more than middle school teens (Lenhart, “Social Media” 21) but according to the research, the most avid users of the site are young adults, 18-24 (Fox 9), those we have as students in the college classroom. I have used Twitter in my teaching as I have with facebook but at this point in time, I cannot guarantee that every student in the class has a Twitter account. What makes these statistics among middle school teens interesting is the issue of Justin Bieber. Bieber, a 16 yr. old Canadian singer that has grown in popularity the last two years can credit much of his recognition to Twitter. While the singer is clearly talented and has been backed by already-established R&B singer Usher, Bieber took to Twitter early in his career and began responding directly to “tweets” on his wall. His “followers” grew to well over one million rather quickly. In fact, the three or four months I have added Bieber to my research interests due to his affiliation to girl culture, I have watched his count of followers grow by 2 million—in only three months. His use of Twitter has become crucial to his popularity. In addition to the usual marketing ploy of contemporary popstars, Bieber does the talk shows, the mall appearances and the red carpet interviews but it’s Twitter that has earned the rising star his popularity. As a “trending topic,” the most popular mention on Twitter of the week, it took only a discussion about the US Health Care bill to knock him off the top of the trending list. That only lasted one day and Bieber was back at the top spot, as he had been for almost a complete year (Coen). I note this incident with Justin Bieber as a cautionary tale about statistics and social networking. While the Pew Internet & American Life Project stats can attest to the most popular users of Twitter based on their research—mostly telephone interviews—I want to bring the argument back around to what Driscoll has noted concerning the difficulties of trying to define a “girl market.” I would say the same skepticism should be held forefront with any activity that girls and young women partake. I believe the real data comes from the real life experiences of those entwined in the research. I have witnessed that not all of my students, age 18-24 have

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Twitter accounts (yet). But I see that a 16 yr old popstar can be the most frequently written about topic in a social networking community of 7 million members. Given the fan base of Bieber, I tend to doubt the statistics that note middle school teens hold the lower demographic use in this social networking community. As with the marketing focus of girls and young women, don’t be fooled by their ability to form community and the power such community holds.

Access During the course of this project, I have moved this section at least four times. As access to technology and acquiring a digital literacy seems prevalent to all the chapters in this project, I was uncertain where to place a discussion concerning access. The more I began considering Web 2.0 and its impact on how users enter and construct online space, I realized that information concerning access needs to be placed in relation to a discussion introducing Web 2.0; the framework of this interface, with its community-driven focus could not have come to fruition without user access. However, what is problematic in relation to access is not the communities that help construct online spaces but the communities that are left out of such spaces.

The Digital Divide With the origin of cyberspace, of the many discussions by researchers concerning the possibilities of the new medium, one of access was certainly a prominent topic. Attewell references a “cyber-segregation” (qtd in Attewell 252) in his research, what many communication and social theory scholars identify as a “digital divide” between those who have access to new technologies and those who do not. With prolific use of new technology, both money and education are required to master not only the software but also the hardware. With the cost of the components required for digital technologies to function—and the continual upgraded version of the software—many possible users were initially left out of the newness of the form. While Attewell calls the digital divide a “new social problem” (252), Selfe argues, “technological literacy is incomplete and has led to continuing social inequities” (44). The marginalization that has occurred with new technologies such as the Internet has revealed ongoing “social divisions along race, class, and gender” lines (xxi) in American culture and educational systems.

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Selfe thoroughly identifies a link between technology and literacy as a move that would change the ideology of how the American public would define literacy in the new century and these changes affected access to such technology. She explains how “the Clinton administration came to identify technology as the economic engine that would help address political and economic challenges” (49), thus committing our national education system to defining a successful literacy program as one that included pedagogies of new technologies. This concept of new technologies in the classroom became not only a goal for federal funding but part of a patriotic ideology of how to educate the successful American citizen. By 1996, a program proposed by President Clinton and Vice President Gore was in place to bring “technological literacy” to every student in the nation (3). This drive to equip every classroom in America changed how the incoming generation of children would have access to digital technologies. This isn’t to say that the disparity vanished; in many of these classrooms, the hardware was put into play without trained teachers to run the programs. But gradually, the pedagogy met the technology and a new generation of tech-savvy children emerged from the classroom. Throughout this project, I have been noting the vast numbers of children and teens using new technologies by the end of the millennium. What has quickly surpassed expectations of the cyber-scholars that began their research in the mid-1990s was the jump of minority teens accessing online space. While an imbalance of access will most likely always remain an issue with technology usage, by the data collected in 2004, the racial and ethnicity breakdown of teens surveyed provided startling numbers: 87% Caucasian, 89% Hispanic and 77% of African- American teens acknowledged consistent Internet usage (Lenhart, “Teens and Technology” 4). African-American teens are managing online space well; an “overwhelming majority” of urban, low-income teens aged 16-20 surveyed in ten cities across the US admitted to having daily access (Stokes 172). Early in the rise of online space and during the proliferation of marketing other digital technologies, this divide certainly existed. However, it must be acknowledged that the only youth that were documented in the research using these technologies were Caucasian teens from upper or middle-class backgrounds. Many scholars—myself included—believe that diverse communities of users were there, in cyberspace, just waiting to be recognized. For example, Stokes notes in her research concerning website construction and homepage creation, “black girls’ use of home pages to explore their sexuality has been overlooked, and deserves attention.

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(173). In a discussion concerning the research methods of the First Wave of Girl Studies scholars, Schilt argues, “it is necessary to focus attention on how girls describe their own lives outside the gaze of the researcher” (73) and this logic can certainly be applied to any research enacted concerning youth and digital technologies. It is clear that we have surpassed such a digital divide based on the survey numbers of users collected in the early years of the new millennium. In a 2007 study concerning college students across 103 higher education students, Salaway, et al. found that 98% reported to owning a computer (38) yet another example that the digital divide, at least in the institutional setting, seems to be closing.

In the Institutional Setting The digital divide that separated users by access was especially felt in the school systems. As Attewell argues, “school technology fits a digital divide scenario quite well” (253), with “Schools tend[ing] to build computer labs because they lack the funds to put a computer on every child’s desk” (254). With a dearth of trained instructors teaching in the digital platform, the pedagogy would certainly be affected by such new technologies, though don’t traditional teaching methods require just as much attention? Any change in curriculum, whether it is an adaption to new technology or new alphabetic course texts should be discussed and considered by those that structure the program criteria. Where access is an issue is when the institutions are not keeping current with the need of its students. With a generation of children getting online in pre-school, if the school environment lacks such technology, students are not hesitant to “express frustration when core technologies are not available or accessible when they need them” (Salaway 86). Such students expect their familiar literacy to learn by: Internet access, working computers, access to email and other IT specific services. Given the ability to multitask with such media, these students may actually struggle with comprehension if their learning environment is hindered by a lack of technology. When I allow students to listen to their mp3 players while drafting their ideas, almost all of them plug in to listen to music while they write. Many express their need for music in which to “write by.” Again, the familiarity of digital literacy enables this generation of students to process their ideas in a platform that they know and can control. Social networking sites, especially, allow for users to not only control the content of what is constructed by them for sharing with peers but

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also give teens an idea that they are “part of a group of like-minded friends,” as research from focus groups has revealed (Lenhart, “Teens, Privacy & Online Social Networks” 14).

Conclusion One of the largest and often argued issues where girls online are concerned is undeniably safety- related. Stories of online predators currently guide many televised news shows, which set up sting operations to catch adults preying on adolescent girls. The reality, however, is that girls are smarter than many give them credit. As Lenhart and Madden discovered, “When teens, particularly girls, talked about protection of their privacy online, their main concern was the protection of their physical self—if a piece of information could easily lead to them being contacted in person, girls would not share it readily” (Lenhart, “Teens, Privacy & Online Social Networks” 17). Again, this is a literacy that these contemporary girls and young women are born into and they know how to protect their space. On message boards, “communication with strangers was relatively infrequent” (Gross). In chatrooms, girls often react to people they do not know or do not recognize as a member of the community by either ignoring the posts or having the user banned by the site owner. Many girls make their profiles in social networking communities private, accessible to only friends they approve; “Increasingly, tech-savvy adolescents are aware of the risks in online socializing and are developing their own strategies for staying safe in cyberspace” (University of Illinois). Much of the concern surrounding the predatory actions toward girls online is often just hype with the same stories being repeated in different formats. In reality, “what the public usually reads are the most extreme or striking statements” (Attewell 253). Of course this is not to say that girls are not preyed on when they enter online space; enough stories have been made public of girls that have met in person with people they met online. Cyber-bullying has become a relevant concern, especially within social networking communities. And teen girls have come forth to admit that they often feel pressured by their peers into divulging personal information about themselves that they would prefer to keep private. With online space so malleable and so unregulated, the risks are plentiful. The best action to take is to not only make sure that girls and young women are educated in online safety but to educate parents as well, into understanding the importance of allowing and making accessible such a space for their daughters.

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Ultimately, the possibilities of online social space are what bring girls and young women to online practices. This space that is not censored or controlled allows for community building in any form, a log of digital pen pals for girls to argue, laugh, criticize, share, advise, seek with, all in the name of exploration. Identity that is created and revised and discarded after use is capable here, in a space that does not confine or judge. Within the environment of social networking, girls can find remnants of themselves, or ideas on how to make themselves whole. Within the communities of social networking someone is always online somewhere, all the time.

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Conclusion From the Social Scene to the Academic Screen: Implications for the Field

Introduction For fall semester, 2008, I used blogs in my first-year composition course for the first time. I was hesitant at first, as resistant as many writing teachers about bringing new technologies into the composition classroom—despite my successful use of digital tools in teaching writing—as I was worried about my students being so overwhelmed by the technology that they would lose focus on the actual lesson. But I was teaching at a new college with a new student population and it seemed fitting to introduce something new for me also, along with my students. There are many differences between the students I teach at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (HWS) and the Miami University students I taught during my graduate work. Many of my HWS students are first-generation college students and several of them, first-generation American citizens. They bring to the classroom a completely different ethnic experience and popular culture than did my Miami students. For these students, English may be their second or even third language. Their popular culture is not only born from multicultural communities but their communication styles vary depending on their cultural background. Since I had designed my course theme around American Popular Culture with a heavy blog element, by the end of the first week of classes, I knew I had a challenge. What I didn’t account for was the difference in digital literacy among my students. While my previous three years of teaching in the digital classroom at Miami allowed me interaction with a student population that was quite familiar with digital technologies—many having been exposed to new technologies in their high school or even middle school educations—the student population at HWS are demographically different than the students with whom I was familiar; my new students were the students I had been writing about, only never had taught in the classroom. As HWS is situated in central New York, our student population is comprised of many students that live in Manhattan or one of its boroughs, the majority coming from Harlem, Queens and the Bronx. I can expect that several students in any of my classes graduated from inner city high schools. While these students have succeeded academically to be

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eligible for admission to the colleges, many of them did so without access to the technological environments that my students from Miami may have had in their early education. Writing about lack of access to technology and actually seeing it in action certainly had me leap from theory to practice, a move that we all strive for as scholars. The experience, which I initially thought would change everything about my scholarship, actually has only enforced the arguments I have been making with this project. Despite the lack of familiarity with new technologies many of my students brought to my composition course, they are still traditional- age college students. While many struggled at first attaching peer drafts to emails, by the second week, all my students had adapted to the blog element of the course. As Oblinger argues, while this generation may still struggle with access issues where new technologies are concerned, there is nevertheless “widespread access to technology” around them, and ultimately, they are immersed in technology somewhere and thus, they are “able to intuitively use a variety of IT devices and navigate the Internet” (9). This was true for many of my HWS students. They weren’t limited to using new technologies solely in my classroom; as with David, the student I referenced in Chapter Two, these students were using many digital components such as gaming consoles, smartphones and mp3 players outside of the classroom and course management software inside classrooms in addition to mine. My students surprised me with their adaptation to the technologies I threw at them. Peer response in the digital platform was strongly favored—as it has been with most students in the past—as students did not miss managing paperwork and peer feedback is immediate. Chat class became an excellent element for both critical discussion and community building as moments of underlife occurred in this space; many of my students, for example, playfully slipped into Spanish when teasing each other. As a generation of students that come from multicultural homes, they bring such familiarity into the classroom. The blog element, however, has been the biggest surprise and largest success of my pedagogy since I began teaching at HWS. While I designed the blog element to be employed for in-class writing, such as freewrites and assignment brainstorming, I allowed for students to use their blogs for writing outside of class. What surprised me was how many of them actually did so. One student, for example, wrote an entire entry on his collection of sneakers; I encouraged him to use this as a beginning draft for an autoethnography of his place in popular culture (their first full-length paper assignment), while

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another student’s comments on the course blog (where I contribute my own in-class writing) led to class discussions in both sections of classes. For the blog platform, I chose free weblog software, one of the many that require only a registration of user name and password and are publicly accessible to anyone with access to the Internet, made all the more manageable with Web 2.0. As my two sections of WRRH100: Writer’s Seminar I were taught in a laptop classroom with the college providing the laptops, I knew that students would not only have access to the Internet during class but also technical support, should there be any problems with the hardware. Many of my students took to their blogs enthusiastically, adding various forms of media such as audio and video. And since I embedded links to all students’ blogs from both course sections into the course blog, they visited each other’s blogs and commented freely. Kress writes, “the new technologies have changed undirectionality into bidrectionality” and that “authorship is no longer rare” (6). While his argument addresses the loss of power of the author due to the accessibility of text and issues of ownership, I argue that my students did not easily dismiss power that comes through ownership of the text. In the digital environment, students are able to move into spaces of multimodality, integrating various forms of their familiar digital literacy, creating a new text that becomes their own. This has been proven by the various examples I have provided throughout this project. Through personal websites, through comments on tag boards, constructions of blogs, participation in social networking communities, online space has provided youth, a space for exploration, for analysis, for play, for critical thinking—especially for girls where subject locations are crucial to the recognition of girls for girls’ sake. Students came to me in excitement that their blog post had been spotted through a Google search engine, and when they received comments on blog posts from people outside their school and social communities. Knowing they have reached an audience for their writing has kept students writing outside of the class environment—I saw that they were using their blogs as places for exploration far more than I had hoped when I initiated the use of the software. Many students found a free space for their writing and they had fun with it, something that until this first college composition course, many had not experienced. Several students have maintained their blogs, some a full academic year later.

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Digital Literacy and the Institutional Setting Utilizing technology in the writing classroom at the high school level is not currently happening as often as it is in universities and colleges across the country. Some of this may be due to in the expense of building digital technologies into the physical structures of learning institutions. However, one of the issues that may prevent technologies from becoming part of middle school and high school curriculum is what Selfe identifies as the “technology-literacy link” (37), wherein the social dynamics of defining literacy prohibit the integration of technology into composition pedagogy. As Selfe argues, there is “misdirection associated with the current definition of technological literacy” (xx), one that is effected by the input of government initiatives, private sector businesses, educators and parents (xxi), all of whom have a voice in how to bring new technologies into the school systems, arguing what age, which tools, and how technology should be taught. This in turn has left our students with uneven education in digital technology by way of access, curriculum and options. I have noticed that this uneven symmetry among students’ knowledge in using digital technologies varies among classes. I am not going to argue that all my students have come into my courses ready to build a website, but I will argue that the exposure to new technologies within their social communities certainly makes each student I teach fully capable of working with any technology I apply to the curriculum. And as is often the case, my own lesson plans are usually fully revised by the end of one semester to the next by the things my students have taught me about digital literacy. I designed the website assignment, for example, to be very basic so that my students were not overwhelmed by the technological requirements, thus keeping their focus on the rhetorical purposes of the project. Some students produced websites using style sheets, flash buttons and animated graphics in GIF format, none of which I taught in class or workshops. For many of these students, it is this initiative that seemed to be curbed at the high school level. As one Miami student noted: “I wrote papers all the time in high school consisting of narratives and expository writing mostly. I was never asked to add audio, images or video.” (Pre-Survey 8.38) This lack of access to new technologies in the high school classroom is indeed recognized by our students in the college classroom, as my research with Miami students revealed. When surveyed, the overwhelming response to the question, “What type of writing did you do in high school?” was met with a statement on the lack of technology or assignments that integrated

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multimodal elements. Many students recognized the use of traditional forms of writing: “The types of writing I did in high school did not involve technology. We usually stuck to the traditional essay” (Pre-Survey 8.2), while others specifically noted the lack of multimodal options: “I did standard writing. I didn’t have any assignments that required me to use any multimodal elements.” (8.9); “Term papers, short answer responses, 1-2 page essays. None of these ever required multimodal elements.” (8.104). Students, who we know from the data collected are using digital technologies in their social communications on a regular basis, seem to be entering into the institutional setting without the option to carry forward the familiarity of their digital literacy: “we send students the message that the only literacy that matters to composition teachers is the verbal. Having been born into a digital world, though, they know much better” (Handa, “Letter from the guest editor” 6). In addition, the styles which are most recognized in composing in the digital platform are often dismissed as not adhering to academic writing codes, and this also plays a part in how students relate to composition. Their placement in an institution that limits them by way of the freedom to compose in familiar forms and styles may hinder many students from learning the composition process and how writing might directly relate to their needs and purposes. As I have argued throughout this project, it is this writing done through pre-college experiences by girls that help girls and young women connect with those experiential moments that writing might access. The realization for girls that recognizing a writerly self may help construct a subject position(s) as I have proposed with this project is crucial to success in the institutional writing classroom. I could see these connections through speaking with my research participants; as Katie discussed a specific email she composed to send to her father, she noted “It was long, like a page and a half. All I was writing about was the stress of getting housing next year. But I ended up working through it,” recognizing that writing enabled her to sort through her thoughts on a tense subject. In many of the discussions with my research participants, they noted their distaste for writing in high school. Erin noted, “In high school it was usually that you had to do a stupid essay. It was so long and there was no creativity allowed. In high school I never knew that there was something like a [visual] essay or something like that. It was like, ‘this is how it’s going to be and you’re going to do it this way.’” For Katie, writing requirements in relation to her course work was problematic:

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I have a problem writing about things that don’t…If I’m reading a book and nothing really pops out to me that I don’t want to write about, I have a problem with finding things and writing about [a subject] I don’t feel anything about it and I don’t really care to write about it. She recognizes her need to adhere to academic requirements, however, “For class it’s a lot more formal. In high school I was taught to write formal all the time. I had trouble with that in my first semester here [at Miami]. I am a little better now,” demonstrating that she had to learn academic codes in order for her writing to be successful in the composition classroom. For many girls and young women, this lock into traditional, linear forms of writing—often, academic style which restricts the writer to alphabetic text—limits any possibility for hybrid forms of writing styles, no metanarratives that digital texts might allow, for example. As so many girls and young women are fond of the personal narrative as evidenced by their personal websites as outlined in Chapter Four, academic writing in this example becomes an issue concerning gender construction and the biases that occur in institutional settings. Much research has been conducted concerning gender bias in the institutional setting and how this has affected girls’ learning processes. The 1992 release of the AAUW Report, How Schools Shortchange Girls: A Study of Major Findings on Girls and Education addressed the educational experiences for girls from pre-school through high school, looking at not only classroom curriculum and environment but also the bias found in several testing applications, including the SAT. Ward and Benjamin, in their research of the history of the field of Girl Studies concluded, “all American girls are influenced by, and must negotiate, persistent gender bias in institutions” (Ward 21). Pipher, in her therapy sessions with girls observed, “If I ask who writes most of the material they read at school, they know it’s men. If I ask who is more likely to be a principal, they say a man” (41). And when Brown and Gilligan spent four years researching a girls’ private day school, they noted: “in listening to girls’ and women’s voices, we listen for and against conventions of relationships within a society and culture that are rooted psychologically in the experiences of men” (Brown 29). This experience is often what girls in the classroom face, a tendency to support male before female students by way of teacher-student interaction, sexist language in textbooks and tests, and differing teacher expectations for male and female students. For many girls, this bias is recognized outside of the classroom and throughout the institution as a whole. Katie reveals the problems she had with her teachers while

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in high school: “There were a lot of coaches that were teachers—the basketball coach would treat me like shit. We would get into a fight every day. I remember he called me ugly one time. I’ll never forget it. He was joking, but still.” Lindsey discussed how in high school she had to specify to people that she played ice hockey, “Just because I’m a girl they’re surprised; at first they think its field hockey. And I have to say, no it’s really ice hockey.” This is an example of the conventional ideologies of female athletes playing sports that are deemed feminine or masculine (based on what is deemed safe or unsafe for girls). When I asked Lindsey if she felt her high school treated her team fairly, as a female sports team playing a traditionally male sport, she admitted, “I think in some ways they did; for the most part they were fair. Like everyone will get crappy practice times sometimes. But I think they would give preference to the high school boys’ teams,” she concluded, recognizing a hierarchy based on gender that dictated how her team was treated by the high school athletic department. This gender bias leaves girls with a socially constructed identity position that allows little possibility of agency: “high school girls in public institutions are interpellated as among the most powerless, insignificant, and self-effacing categories of people” (Bruce 10); this is the female student who arrives in our college composition classrooms. When we lock them into linear forms of writing and traditional modes of writing process, these female students run the risk of being limited in their exploration; they try to compose within the pre-assigned writing process and format unless we allow these students to work within a hybrid of forms. These writing experiences thus turn girls and young women into passive writers, accepting and locking themselves into academic genres with the assumption that this is the only form available to them as writers. This is one of the many reasons students tend to not recognize their writer identity. There is no consideration of other forms, no realization and acceptance of multimodality in their writing. When given the opportunity to play with writing, to use forms in which they are familiar and recognize—much of what they are doing outside of the classroom—girls and young women manage to navigate their writing in ways to use it rhetorically, finding real purpose in what they produce with the texts they create. As I have shown through the case study of pro-ana websites in chapter five, girls are keenly aware of the purposes of their texts and manage to command the mediums in which they plan to prompt action through such purpose. As we are learning, “many literacy researchers study girls’ reading and writing as contexts where girls ‘construct’ their

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identities through interaction with many cultural messages” (Cherland 87). Bruce noted in her work with female students in an Introduction to Women’s Studies class, “these students learn to use writing processes strategically—for academic, personal, and political gain” (116). If such students are adept at using writing strategically, as Bruce agues, we should allow these female students who have been immersed in new technologies and have adapted such technologies as their own form of literacy to continue the same exploration in the classroom as they do in their online social communities, thus making a move toward creating a recognized subject position(s). If the literacy is already there in digital form, prohibiting it (or not encouraging it) creates that divide that my research subjects referenced between what they write in school—structured, linear forms—and what they write outside of the classroom environment. When Lindsey and I discussed the differences between writing in class and out of class she noted, “for outside of class I don't care as much about you know, finding perfect wording, and sentence structure and all that kind of stuff” but this doesn’t mean she ignores the requirements of academic writing, just that she feels the limitations placed on her by the form. All my research participants fell into that place where Bruce notes, of learning to use writing strategically. They know the differences and recognize the requirements. Jenn had this to say about the differences between a semester in my class and her current semester of composition: “I enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere [of your class] where I felt free to express my opinion about the topics we discussed. When I say relaxed I do not mean unstructured.” Through our research in gender equality in the classroom setting, we acknowledge that “When students enter a computer-equipped classroom, they confront a world that is doubly male: 1) the masculinist computer world, and 2) academia, a patriarchal institution” (Gerrard 190) and one way to prevent our female students from feeling powerless and passive is to encourage their participation in forms of composition in which they feel most creative. As I have argued throughout this project, girls are rhetorically savvy when it comes to audience awareness and purpose of online forums and communities; their input into online spaces makes it clear why they might “reserve their most engaged writing performances for self-selected audiences whom they value more highly than their teachers” (Bruce 40) if teachers in the composition classroom do not allow for such creativity. Driscoll claims “Cybergirls are […] required to make a space within the discourse they oppose” (276) and I certainly see this claim supported by the visual choices girls make in the digital rhetoric they use, as girls and young women are already

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managing one form of literacy and making it their own. The discourse (and style) traditionally required in the composition classroom is often challenged by these “cybergirls” that Driscoll references through the writing they do in their social spaces. As teachers of writing we may see major benefits in the learning of composition in the college classroom by allowing a move away from traditional invention exercises of writing to better incorporate the writing done in social spaces. The freedom of exploration it might encourage in our female students could be invaluable toward their realization of not only a writing identity but also a girl-created subjectivity. This move away from traditional modes—the forms that digital technologies seldom accommodate—is already being adapted in several composition classrooms. Freewriting, a huge part of the base of process writing and an invention exercise that is easily adapted into new technologies, is highly effective for exploratory writing. With digital technologies, the ease of peer collaboration and response is fluid with just an exchange of email address or blog URL. Students are building a writing community full of variables such as accessing larger audiences (and in the case of the Internet, public audiences). Identity construction has a much larger “space” in which to grow than of the writing is limited to traditional forms. When I discussed the structure of writing with my research participants, Erin admitted that she preferred being left to freewrite—what she calls “free flowing writing”— for her writing process: How does the writing that you do for class differ from the writing you do outside of class? For class it’s a lot more formal so I watch out for grammar and things like that but when I’m just writing I just go with it. Which would you prefer if given a choice in class? I think if I was given a choice I would obviously go with free flowing writing because it’s more natural for me. Because with formal writing I have to look back and make sure everything is okay. With free flowing, I don’t even have to look at what I’m typing I can just figure out, what’s in my brain ends up on the screen. This isn’t to say that the mechanics of writing shouldn’t be taught to our students, but perhaps that the processes that our female students find more explorative should be encouraged. As Bruce argues, “Theirs is not so much a matter of ‘finding a voice’ but rather of ‘opening their mouths’ in a space that allows their voices to be heard” (223). It is likely that since so many of

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our students come to our composition classroom already writing—though not recognizing their writing identity—allowing a space for the literacies they know will lead them closer to success as academic writers.

Students and the Traditional Writing Process In my interview with Carrie, I heard a statement that is typical of the research I have been finding when speaking with students of traditional college age: “Basically if I didn’t have a computer, I would die. Everything I do is on the Internet. Every type of writing.” Not only are they of a generation that has lived with technology most of their lives—who Diana and James Oblinger call the Net Generation, or Net Gen—but they view technology differently than generations past. Google has become a verb, as has Instant Messaging, IMing: it is an action, not a technology. Students often use the word talk when they describe text messaging or instant messaging. Software blends into the background; it enables certain activities to occur, but it is not new, novel, or customizable—all part of the Net Gen’s definition of technology (Oblinger 12). As the statistics in Chapter Two can attest, immersion in technology from a young age is typical for these students and probably accounts for why even students new to computers in the classroom were able to adapt so easily. This generation of students tends to view technology less as a tool as most teachers might use it but more as an enabler of activity they can visit or leave. When Emily and I were discussing various websites for analysis she said, “Oh, I have been there. In fact, I remember going to it in middle school” (Emily), as if the website were a physical space, and a familiar one at that. As many scholars will argue, they just think differently about technology: “They develop hypertext minds, they leap around” (Prensky, qtd in Oblinger 9). Alexander notes “the computer figures as an ‘accomplice’ in adolescent rebellion, in an attempt to define one generation over and against previous generations” (4); this certainly can be proven by my current students’ use of Spanish in our chat forums, especially since they knew I don’t speak the language. Those students that have been using technology for some time are self-assured and certain about its usefulness. When more than 20,000 undergraduates were surveyed about their use of technology in relation to their course work, 70.5% noted that it helped them with research, while 60.9% admitted that it improved their learning (Salaway 16-17). When one Miami student

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was asked what they hoped to learn their first semester of College Composition, this student focused on software, fervently asserting, “We were just told to read 15 pages on how to use Word, which I found pretty much near ridiculous. We’ve all been using Word since we were eight. We know how to use it.” (Pre-Survey 12.296). When Erin and I discussed her technology use online, she was familiar with many different uses of technology besides visiting websites. These included posting on message boards, participating in chat and downloading ringtones and music. I asked her if she ever pirated music and she admitted, “No, I don’t want to have to deal with the stuff I would have to deal with if I used [pirated music sites]. I don’t worry about the whole fear of it, I just don’t want to have spyware running around in my computer.” For Erin, it wasn’t fear of repercussion for taking part in an illegal activity but more a concern over having something that wasn’t under her control downloaded to her computer. The shifting landscape of the digital classroom has provided the composition instructor with new forms for teaching writing. As a tool, the digital platform allows for encouragement of a different type of interaction and thus forges a different type of writing community. As “computers make it especially easy to bring together students who might otherwise dismiss one another” (Gerrard 192), writers of different levels and interests are able to interact both physically and virtually. Given that so many students spend so much time online, bringing this forum into the composition class will ensure that students are taking part in their familiar literacy. While some might expect disassociation among participants in the writing classroom due to a virtual space as part of the classroom element, studies find that “students in the computer classrooms talked with their classmates and with their teachers much more frequently” (Palmquist 253). This could be due to that familiarity of the form. When I asked Beth about the differences between the traditional classroom and the digital classroom, she confessed a preference for her previous semester’s digital class since the community was closer and often conversed beyond the physical classroom through email and chat. She compared her traditional composition class to the digital composition class she took with me, “I don’t even know people’s names in my class right now. And it’s probably the same class, like same size. And I couldn’t tell you half their names” (Beth). I certainly see this with my most recent students and their blog use—though I didn’t assign any blog writing outside of class time, students often read and commented on each other’s blogs at times other than when class met. Concerning facebook, my research participants reported spending at least two hours a day surfing; it is also a solid forum

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for community interaction. I have never had a student unfamiliar with the site, and I often use it as a text reference in class discussion. Students are so comfortable with the site that many stopped emailing me at my school address and chose to contact me directly through facebook. In addition to the building of a familiar community, the digital classroom tends to lend itself to group recognition. Eldred noticed when reviewing her students’ bulletin board responses, “The responses also seemed to join them as a class, to increase their sense of identity as part of a group, and to reinforce the idea that they could hold an opinion about the novel that differed from mine” (242) and her experience made her realize “instead of an academic exercise, writing in the electronic classroom can become a project which networks individuals into a larger group” (241). There is a sense of identity that is growing here, one in which students are recognizing themselves as participants in a group. For young women at the college level, this is a step toward recognizing the various subject positions that they may claim. For all students, this is an opportunity to emerge as self-recognized writers. It is this recognition that makes many students now critical of the traditional writing process. Several admit in the video interviews and on both sets of anonymous surveys the ease in which the digital classroom enabled their writing process: The thing I probably enjoyed the most is that we actually got to write on our computers in the classroom as opposed to a normal English class where you just brainstorm on some paper in the class and you would have to go home and then start typing” (Vid 4); it made everything more applicable to modern day. I felt like the writing came easier (ENG111/112 Survey 12.38). Palmquist has noted, “students seemed much more interested in writing during class in the computer classrooms, the presence of computers in the computer classroom greatly expanded the range of activities that could be carried out” (225). I have certainly seen this in my classroom with pre-writing activities; my students tend to do less hedging when asked to freewrite or brainstorm topic ideas, and they often leave class with the currently assigned project already started. When Carrie and I discussed what she liked about the digital classroom, she said “research was easier because it was right there in front of you, you don’t have to wait until you get home,” admitting specifically “I’m one of those people that if I got an idea, I am going to go in and write those ideas, even if they don’t make sense, they make sense to me because then it reminds me of what I was thinking about” (Carrie). Writing in the digital classroom also

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changes the quantity of writing that is done. In one semester, my students more than tripled their pages of text compared to the number of pages drafted in the traditional classroom. For several of my research participants, that accommodation to their personal writing habits, as for Carrie, was important. Erin notes, “I can type faster than I can write. […] if I have to write fast my writing gets all messy and scribbly and I don’t like it so I have to go back and rewrite everything.” And Katie claims, “Being able to turn [papers] in online was much more flexible than having to print out everything, bring it in a folder and hand it in. And I liked having it on my computer; I can keep it in my records.” It isn’t just the immediate connection to writing in the classroom that students are recognizing. What they are seeing is how effective their writing process has become now that they are using a literacy they already know: “People emailing you with their ideas—they were more open and they were able to say what they wanted to say. I think being through email they would have been able to say it a little bit more [honestly than] face-to-face” (Katie). These students are using a format they already know and are mostly comfortable with, a digital process that offers them the opportunity to not only focus on the lessons taught concerning rhetoric but to adapt their familiar literacy to any newly-learned ideas about their writing process. When Wickliff and Yancey worked with students on their honors projects in 1999, they noted, “few have the skills or experience writing in this medium” (Wickliff 180). This is certainly not the case ten years later for Net Gen students. Nearing the end of their first semester in the digital classroom, many students recognized the marriage between how they use the digital platform with what they have learned about writing: “I have learned different ways to incorporate my writing within digital formats.” (Post-Survey 13.148); “I learned that a paper [could] take many forms.” (Post-Survey 13.169). These students’ testimonies are evidence of the possibilities that can occur when teachers choose to utilize digital technologies in the composition classroom. The limits here are not on the capabilities of the students but the willingness of the composition teacher to integrate digital technologies into their pedagogy.

Teachers and the Digital Composition Classroom For many teachers of composition, just balancing the day’s lesson can be struggle enough; add in technology and it may turn many composition instructors away from trying to include digital elements in the writing classroom. This may be why current arguments are being

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made for more training for all teachers where information technology is concerned (Salaway 13). What teachers of composition need to be cognizant of is how useful digital technologies can be in aiding the pedagogy of composition. As Warnick argues, “[…] we may have to change our expectations of what texts are and how they function” (75). The first step in this recognition is in knowing that new technologies are a form of literacy in itself: “lessons that educators can relearn about literacy, specifically by paying attention to technology and the ways in which technology is currently being approached in our culture at large and within the public school system” (Selfe xxii). Many teachers resistant to bringing new technologies into the composition classroom argue that they don’t want to turn their writing course into a course on information technology. What they fail to understand is how digital technologies can enhance composition pedagogies, for example, as Carolyn Handa argues, “the study of visual rhetoric in this age of computers and the Web should be conducted by rhetoricians as much as it is now by artists, multimedia designers, and Web technologists” (Handa, “Letter from the guest editor” 4). It is the responsibility of these rhetoricians and teachers of composition to be aware of the pedagogies of varying literacies, such as a digital one, if girls are to be taught writing in the institutional setting. For girls to play so fluidly with constructing subject position(s) in an environment other than that of the institution is proof of the possibilities of identity exploration. We do a disservice as educators by not allowing such exploration of hybrid forms of literacy in our classroom. Visual elements are as much a text as the alphabetic text that writing instructors have already been teaching. By including new technologies and all of the text they might encompass—verbal, visual and aural—we open up the possibility for new ideas, new insight and certainly, writing success. Making the leap from the traditional composition course to one that fully integrates digital technologies is not a pedagogical act that can occur overnight; not only will it affect familiar pedagogies for the instructor but it will also change the way students react to the expectations teachers have for their students’ writing. Assessment concerning digital texts will need to be addressed, as the criteria for grading digital texts usually encompasses elements that are not found in traditional, alphabetic texts: visual texts will include essentials such as images and color; aural texts will need to be assessed for things such as intonation, pauses, editing of various sound elements. Students will need a clear understanding of how much of their effort in the composing process may or not be affected by their knowledge of the technology used to

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produce their final products. Teachers will also need to expect a learning curve for themselves, much like that of our students learning new writing processes. Romano argues “[…] teachers in computer-mediated environments necessarily test the uses of electronic technologies for writing instruction on the spot, by trial and error, risking chance outcomes” (251) and such risks should be anticipated; not every assignment will succeed as flawlessly as planned just as it doesn’t always succeed in traditional composition classrooms. There can be no assumptions made when teaching with new technologies. The change in my pedagogy, for example, was most effected by a shift of college settings. At Miami, my students required very little time to learn the basics of technology such as saving files or navigating Blackboard, a course software tool that I used for managing student assignments. At HWS, however, I have had to build extra time in my lesson plans to allow for my students to familiarize themselves with the technical part of the digital classroom. Though as I argued earlier in this chapter, this learning curve is short for many students as they catch on to both the hardware and software requirements quickly. The key here is in understanding the needs of our students: “it is our responsibility to come to understand the complexities of how computer technology facilitates or fails to facilitate learning within each population of students in our classroom” (DeWitt 234). As teachers of rhetoric, we need to resort to what we know about rhetoric in relation to our pedagogy: what is the purpose for teaching with digital technologies? When we bring such tools into the classroom, we should reflect on the goals we have in teaching, as “[…] we need to think more critically about how these digital innovations impact our writing classes in terms of rhetoric and literacy” (Handa, “Letter from the guest editor” 1). To add new technologies to our composition pedagogy for the sake of making teaching easier should not be the goal here; having our students connect their familiar literacy with the theories of rhetoric and composition that we are teaching them should be the aim, as should enhancing their exploratory and creative powers.

Conclusion It was of no surprise when all eight of my research participants told me they would seek digital courses throughout the remainder of their academic career. Only Emily was able to register for a second semester of composition in the digital classroom; both Beth and Erin made it a point to tell me how frustrated they were that they were not able to get into a digital section.

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Both of them had grown so used to the format, they found that stepping back to the traditional classroom setting was a difficult transition. Beth acknowledged, “not electronic and all paper again is making me go crazy. I got so used to doing everything on the computer and just sending it [to my peers].” The familiarity of the format enabled some of these students to connect with the lessons being taught by their composition teachers in ways that may not have happened in the traditional classroom: “I was very impressed with the way it all turned out. I could not believe I had made my very own web site with working links and even external links. […] Out of all the projects we did this year this one was definitely the most rewarding experience for me” (Matt). As Turkle has argued at the onset of merging new technologies into the academic sphere, “If we cultivate our awareness of what stands behind our screen personae, we are more likely to succeed in using virtual experience for personal transformation” (Turkle, “Identity Crisis” 90). Given the positive affirmations from students learning in the digital classrooms, such personal transformation is often evident. This conclusion supports many of the reasons why a move to digital technologies in teaching composition would be beneficial to students. For teachers of composition, the implications are found in opening up options for space to teach—no limitations on the physical space when virtual space is unlimiting. In addition, as traditional college-age students are already coming in with expertise knowledge of these tools of digital literacy, composition instructors can use their time for a focus on the lesson at hand. Though the focus here is really on the implications for approaching and embracing identity construction and subject positions; students’ own testimonies have provided the best support for my argument. That so many of the students surveyed and interviewed responded so favorably to the switch to a digital platform for learning college composition and rhetoric should attest to the need for teachers of composition to makes these changes in their pedagogy.

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APPENDIX A Solicitation Email for Request for Participation in Recruiting Research Participants

Dear Digital Writing Collaborative Instructors,

I am currently collecting data for my dissertation entitled, “Beyond Digital Play: Introducing Girl-Created Subjectivity To the College Composition Classroom” in which I will be exploring college students’ digital literacy practices, focusing most fully on how young women locate subject positions in their online digital literacy practices with the goals of moving such subjectivity placement and literacy practice into the college composition classroom.

I am writing to request your help in recruiting students to take part in my research. I will be recruiting for two aspect of my study: (1) an anonymous online survey for which all students at least 18 years of age are eligible to participate, and (2) face-to-face interviews with female students. You may choose to help me recruit with either the first, second, or both parts of my research. At this busy time of year I appreciate your help.

The first part of my study involves answering an anonymous online survey concerning online activity and the writing process. This survey should take approximately 15 minutes to complete. I am requesting that you please share the survey link with your students by cut-and-pasting the attached emailing to all students. If you have the time, you could set aside 15 minutes of class time for students to complete the survey, reminding them that their participation is not a requirement of the course and that they may choose to pursue other work rather than complete the survey.

For the second part of my research, I am recruiting female students (only) to meet with me for face-to-face interviews. For this recruitment, I would need to come to your class for no more than five minutes to explain my project and to hand out a consent form.

If you are willing to help me with recruitment, please email to let me know and with which days/times when I might come to your class to recruit interview participants.

This project has been reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB Approval # 07-404).

I thank you for your participation in getting this project moving and I especially thank you for the time you have allowed me.

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APPENDIX B Consent Form to Participate in an Interview Study

Researcher: Michele Polak, Miami University Title of Study: Beyond Digital Play: Introducing Girl-Created Subjectivity To the College Composition Classroom

The purpose of this study is to explore the applications of digital literacy in the college composition classroom. As a first-year female student taking at least one composition course in a digital classroom, you are asked to participate in a study that will research how teachers of writing can better integrate the forms of writing that girls are doing online into the curriculum of college composition classes. Participation in this study is not a requirement of your composition class and your grade will not be affected should you choose not to participate.

As an interview participant, you will be involved in two separate interviews where you’ll be asked a series of questions about your writing process and online activity. The first interview will be face-to-face and last approximately an hour. Any needed follow-up interviews for clarification purposes will take place through email. The face-to-face interview will be audio taped for transcription purposes. This interview will take place at a time convenient to you in one of the computer classrooms on the Oxford Campus of Miami University.

By consenting to participation in this study, you agree that the contents of this research will be used by the Researcher only for the purposes of her academic research and teaching, including sharing with colleagues at academic conferences and in academic publications, and that your anonymity will be respected (your real name will not be used, and no personal details will be disclosed that could reveal your identity).

You may choose whether to allow inclusion of writing assignments you may have done in either ENG111: College Composition or ENG112: Composition and Literature for inclusion in this study. Such assignments include (but are not limited to): in-class freewrites, brainstorming ideas, paper assignments or any other form of digital writing. You may also choose to share with the researcher the URLs of any personal websites or blogs that you may own and/or maintain.

Your identity will remain confidential. Your anonymity will be protected through the use of a pseudonym.

All information collected will be kept in a secure manner. Electronic data, including personal website or blog screen captures will be stored on a password-protected, non-networked external hard drive. Hard copy data will be kept in a locked filing cabinet at the Researcher’s home for a period of between 5-10 years after the date of publications (e.g., dissertation, possible book and journal articles) and will only be available to the researcher.

You may withdraw from this study at any time. There are two copies of this consent form, one of which you may keep.

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If you have any questions about this research project or if you wish to withdraw at any point after giving consent, you may contact the Researcher at any time: Michele Polak: Miami University, 336 Bachelor Hall, Oxford, OH 45056; Voice: 513-255-0004; email: [email protected]

You may also contact the Faculty Advisor for this study: Dr. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson: Miami University, 356A Bachelor Hall, Oxford, OH 45056; Voice: 513-529-1393; Fax: 513-529-1392; email: [email protected]

If you have any questions or concerns regarding your rights as a study participant, or are dissatisfied at any time with any aspect of this study, you may contact the following university office: Miami University, Human Subjects Institutional Review Board in the Office of Advancement of Research and Scholarship, 102 Roudebush Hall, Oxford, OH 45045; Voice: 513-529-3734; Fax: 513-529-3762; email: [email protected]

By signing this form, you are indicating that you are at least 18 years of age and that you are voluntarily agreeing to participate in this study. You understand that you are under no obligation to participate and you may choose to withdraw from the study at any time for any reason. You know that you are under no obligation to answer all of the questions and may choose to not answer any question at any time.

Your signature is confirmation that you have read and understand the above information.

YES, I agree to participate in this study:

______Signature Date

______Printed name

I prefer to be contacted by ___ phone or ___ email to set up an interview. My contact information (email and/or phone number) is:

______

NO, I do not agree to participate in this study:

______Signature Date

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APPENDIX C Notational Interview Questions for Face-to-Face Interviews

Personal information (as identifiers) What is your current age? At what age did you begin using the Internet? Did you attend a co-ed or same sex high school? Were you in a digital classroom for ENG111?

Online accessibility Do you have a computer of your own? On a typical school or work day, how much of your time do you spend on the internet for leisure? On a typical school or work day, how much of your time do you spend on the internet for school?

Identity Do you know someone that you ONLY talk to online using email, IM or chat?

Have you ever changed the following things about yourself when you go online: age gender ethnicity descriptions of appearance do things that you never do in real life pretend in other ways

Have you ever used the Internet to seek advice whether for personal or school-related research? On what topics?

Have you ever experienced an instance in high school or college when you felt that you were being treated differently because you are a girl?

When I say the term girl space, what does it make you think of? Can you define girl space for yourself?

What type of online activities do you partake in? Why?

Which of the following sites do you visit on the Internet? Why?

The Writing Process Do you do any writing outside of your required school work? In what form?

How does the writing you do for class differ from the writing you do outside of class?

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Was there ever a time in your high school or college English class when you felt that the writing you were asked to do was too limiting or structured, i.e., the assignment didn’t allow you to express yourself freely?

Given the choice to create your own assignment for a composition class, what type of writing would you prefer to do?

Have you ever been denied the opportunity to use new technologies for your writing assignments in high school or college (providing that new technologies were available)?

When you found yourself faced with writing in a digital classroom, how did you feel? Were you excited, scared, apprehensive, etc.?

If you were required to take another composition class further in your college education would you seek out a digital classroom setting if the sections were available?

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APPENDIX D Survey: Gauging Digital Literacy In and Out of the Composition Classroom

This survey is part of Michele Polak’s dissertation study: “Beyond Digital Play: Introducing Girl-Created Subjectivity To the College Composition Classroom.” This survey will take approximately 15 minutes to complete. You must be at least 18 years of age and you must be taking composition in a digital classroom (either Bachelor Hall 254 or 256). The results of this survey will be used to gauge digital literacy usage and the writing process in the goals of better integrating online activity into the college composition classroom.

The results of this survey are completely anonymous and are not traceable to you or the computer you are using to take this survey. Your course participation and course grade for ENG112 will not be affected by your decision to participate (or not) in this survey. Your instructor will not know whether or not if you participated in this survey. You may skip any question you choose in this survey.

Which gender do you identify with? Response Response Percent Count male 38.9% 28 female 61.1% 44 transgender 0.0% 0 answered question 72 skipped question 0

What is your current age? Response Response Percent Count 18 31.9% 23 19 63.9% 46 20 4.2% 3 21 0.0% 0 22 or older 0.0% 0 answered question 72 skipped question 0

At what age did you begin using the Internet? Response Response Percent Count before 6 years old 31.4% 23 8-10 years old 63.9% 46 11-13 years old 4.2% 3 14-16 years old 0.0% 0 after 17 years old 0.0% 0 answered question 72 skipped question 0

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Did you take ENG111 in one of the digital classrooms (either Bachelor Hall 254 or 256)? Response Response Percent Count yes 49.3% 35 no 50.7% 36 answered question 71 skipped question 1

Do you have a computer of your own to use while you are at school? Response Response Percent Count yes 98.6% 71 no 1.4% 1 answered question 72 skipped question 0

On a typical school or work day, how much of your time do you spend on the internet for leisure? Response Response Percent Count

1 hour 19.4% 14 2 hours 23.6% 17 3 hours 26.4% 19 4 hours 15.3% 11 5 hours 11.1% 8 6+ hours 4.2% 3 answered question 72 skipped question 0

On a typical school or work day, how much of your time do you spend on the internet for school? Response Response Percent Count 1 hour 29.6% 21 2 hours 29.6% 21 3 hours 21.1% 15 4 hours 14.1% 10 5 hours 2.8% 2 6+ hours 2.8% 2 answered question 71 skipped question 1

Which type of online activities do you partake in? (You may select more than one choice.) Response Response

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Percent Count email 100.0% 72 chat 77.8% 56 contribute to blog(s) 11.1% 8 create and maintain your own blog 9.7% 7 contribute to message boards 18.1% 13 shop 61.1% 44 download music, videos 73.6% 53 gaming 34.7% 25 participate in RPGs 6.9% 5 manage personal homepage 13.9% 10 webcam 13.9% 10 create podcasts 1.4% 1 send pictures or stories 44.4% 32 offer advice to others 9.7% 7 fill in forms about myself 9.7% 7 sign petitions 8.3% 6 vote for something/someone 13.9% 10 Other (please specify) 15.3% 11 answered question 72 skipped question 0

Which of the following sites do you visit on the Internet? (You may select more than one choice.) Response Response Percent Count community building sites such as: Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal 100.0% 72 blogs: personal, celebrity gossip 22.2% 16 search engines/research such as: Google, AskJeeves, Yahoo 88.9% 64 exam revision sites to help prepare for a test or exam 30.6% 22 webzines 2.8% 2 shopping 58.3% 42 fansites 11.1% 8 video sites such as: YouTube, ebaum 79.2% 57 films, television 48.6% 35 music, bands, pop groups, singers 47.2% 34 sports, sport teams 55.6% 40 clubs, groups, or sports teams that you are a member of 29.2% 21 computer/video games 25.0% 18 mobile phone sites such as: ring tones, logos, sending text 18.1% 13 messages podcasting sites 2.8% 2 creative sites to make something such as: drawing, painting, story 12.5% 9 hobbies or particular interests 34.7% 25 jokes or humor 40.3% 29 Other (please specify) 4.2% 3 answered question 72

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skipped question 0

Do you do any writing outside of your required school work? Response Response Percent Count yes 23.6% 17 no 76.4% 55 answered question 72 skipped question 0

If you answered yes to question 10, please describe what type of writing you do outside of your required school work:

Response Count 17 answered question 17 skipped question 55

If you answered yes to question 10, please explain how the writing you do for class differs from the writing you do outside of class? Response Count

17 answered question 17 skipped question 55

When you found yourself faced with writing in a digital classroom, how did you feel? Were you excited, scared, apprehensive, etc.?

Response Count 61 answered question 61 skipped question 11

If you were required to take another composition class further in your college education would you seek out a digital classroom if the sections were available? Response Response Percent Count

yes 94.4% 67 no 5.6% 4 answered question 71 skipped question 1

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APPENDIX E General Student Consent Form

I, ______, agree to participate in an ongoing research project concerning first-year college composition in the computer classroom conducted by Michele Polak, of the Department of English, Miami University. The purpose of this research project is to understand the pedagogical implications when merging online social activities with first-year composition in a digital classroom environment. I understand that the research utilized for this project will be culminated from my input into class assignments, freewrites and in-class discussions.

I understand that the contents of this research will be used by the Researcher only for the purposes of her academic research and teaching, including sharing with colleagues at academic conferences and in academic publications, and that my anonymity will be respected (my real name will not be used, and no personal details will be disclosed that could reveal my identity).

I understand that my identity will remain confidential. My anonymity will be protected through the use of a pseudonym when the Researcher is analyzing the material in her publications and conference presentations of this research.

I understand that any data collected will be kept in a secure manner. Electronic contents will be stored on a password-protected, non-networked external hard drive. Hard copy data will be kept in a locked filing cabinet at the Researcher’s office for a period of between 5-10 years after the date of publications, and will only be available to the researcher and her advising committee.

There are two copies of this consent form, one of which I may keep.

If I am concerned about any of the research used for this research project, I understand that I can contact the Researcher at any time for further information about my rights as a research participant.

______Researcher’s signature Research Subject’s signature

______Date Date

Michele Polak Department of English Miami University [email protected]

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APPENDIX F Miami University First-Year Composition & Computing Survey, Early Fall 2006

This survey will take approximately 10 minutes to complete. You must be 18 years old to complete this survey, and you must be enrolled in one of the Digital Writing sections of English 111, classes held in the Wireless Laptop Classroom (Bachelor 256) or in the English Department Computer Lab (Bachelor 254).

The results of this survey will be used by the Director and staff of College Composition to assess students' learning and perceptions of the course curriculum in the digital sections of English 111.

The results of this survey are completely anonymous and are not traceable to you (or to the computer you use to complete the survey). Your decision to complete this survey will not affect your grade or standing in English 111. Participation is completely voluntary.

You may skip any question you wish. When you are finished, be sure to click "Done." (Note: You must complete this survey in one sitting; once you've started it you can't stop and restart it.)

Thank you so much for your time. Your participation in this survey will help the College Composition program evaluate and revise the curriculum.

If you have any questions about this survey, please contact the Coordinator for Digital Writing, Heidi McKee. [email protected] 513-529-2635

1. Gender Response Percent Response Total Female 61.5% 208 Male 38.5% 130 Transgender 0% 0 Total Respondents 338 (skipped this question) 0

2. If you are enrolled in a laptop section, are you using a MAC or a PC (a PC is any computer that's not a MAC). Response Percent Response Total MAC 23.8% 74 PC 76.2% 237 Total Respondents 311 (skipped this question) 27

3. If you're in a section using laptops, are you using a laptop purchased through the Miami Notebook Program? (If your class is in Bachelor 254 in the computer lab, click N/A.)

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Response Percent Response Total Yes 44.7% 148 No 35.6% 118 Not sure 0.6% 2 N/A (not applicable) 19% 63 Total Respondents 331 (skipped this question) 7

4. Before the first class met, did you know that your English 111 section would be taught using computers in the classroom? Response Percent Response Total Yes 28.5% 96 No 67.7% 228 Not sure 3.9% 13 Total Respondents 337 (skipped this question) 1

5. Why did you sign up for the College Composition section in which you are currently enrolled? (You may select more than one choice.) Response Percent Response Total Time/Fit my schedule 84.6% 286 Wanted to be in a computer classroom 7.4% 25 Wanted to be with friends in same section 1.2% 4 The location of the classroom in Bachelor Hall 5.3% 18 Other (please specify) 14.8% 50 Total Respondents 338 (skipped this question) 0

6. What types of writing on computers do you do? (You may select more than one choice.) Response Percent Response Total None at all 0.3% 1 Papers / Digital Compositions for school 95% 321 Personal / Creative writing 34% 115 Web site (creating your own) 12.7% 43 Email 95.9% 324 Instant Messenger 93.5% 316 Blogging 11.2% 38 Facebook / other social networking sites 94.4% 319 Participation in an Online Discussion Forums 10.4% 35 Computer Gaming 24.3% 82 Programming 4.4% 15 Other 3% 10 Total Respondents 338 (skipped this question) 0

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7. When you write, how often do you include multimodal elements (e.g., sound, video, audio) in your compositions? Never (1) Seldom (2) Sometimes (3) Often (4) Always (5) Response Average Audio (music, recorded voice etc.) 58% (194) 26% (87) 8% (26) 6% (21) 2% (8) 1.70 Photographs / Still images 16% (55) 34% (114) 34% (114) 14% (46) 2% (6) 2.50 Video 66% (219) 24% (79) 8% (27) 2% (5) 1% (2) 1.47 Total Respondents 337 (skipped this question) 1

8. Describe the types of writing you did previously in high school. Did any writing assignments ask you to include multimodal elements (e.g., audio, images, video)? Did any assignments involve writing for the Web? Total Respondents 311 (skipped this question) 27

9. When you are writing (whether in or outside of school), how often do you think of the following issues? Never (1) Seldom (2) Sometimes (3) Often (4) Always (5) I'm Response not sure Average what this means The audience to whom you are writing 2% (8) 8% (26) 25% (83) 39% (132) 26% (89) 0% (0) 3.79 The context for which you are writing 1% (2) 3% (10) 20% (66) 39% (131) 37% (124) 1% (3) 4.10 The purpose for which you are writing 1% (4) 3% (11) 13% (45) 36% (122) 46% (153) 0% (1) 4.22 The technologies which you are using to write 10% (35) 37% (125) 34% (114) 11% (38) 6% (21) 1% (4) 2.65 The modes in which you are writing 7% (25) 21% (72) 37% (123) 15% (50) 7% (23) 13% (42) 2.91 The genres in which you are writing 4% (15) 17% (57) 33% (111) 31% (106) 12% (41) 2% (7) 3.31 Your writing processes 3% (9) 11% (36) 26% (89) 38% (129) 22% (75) 0% (0) 3.67 The final form and product of your writing 0% (1) 2% (8) 10% (33) 28% (94) 59% (198) 0% (1) 4.44 Total Respondents 338 (skipped this question) 0

10. When you are researching for a paper, what electronic, online resources have you utilized before and for how often? (Please answer each item.) Never (1) Seldom (2) Sometimes (3) Often (4) Always (5) Response

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Average Google (and other search engines) to find web pages 1% (3) 1% (5) 7% (24) 40% (134) 50% (168) 4.37 Library / School Databases 2% (8) 15% (48) 36% (120) 34% (111) 13% (43) 3.40 Government Sites / Databases 8% (26) 26% (86) 43% (139) 19% (62) 4% (13) 2.85 Magazine / News Sites (e.g., CNN, Time) 4% (14) 25% (84) 42% (139) 23% (77) 5% (16) 2.99 Listservs / Online Discussions 53% (174) 29% (96) 14% (45) 3% (9) 1% (3) 1.69 Blogs 71% (232) 22% (72) 6% (20) 1% (4) 0% (0) 1.38 Wikipedia 20% (65) 18% (59) 31% (101) 23% (77) 8% (27) 2.82 Total Respondents 334 (skipped this question) 4

11. How effective and helpful do you think it is to have classmates read drafts of papers and give feedback (often called peer response or peer review)? Not at all (1) Seldom (2) Sometimes (3) Often (4) Always (5) N/A Response Average Effectiveness of Peer Response / Peer Review 2% (8) 9% (31) 38% (126) 32% (107) 18% (62) 1% (2) 3.55 Total Respondents 336 (skipped this question) 2

12. What are your goals for College Composition? That is, what do you hope to learn this semester? Total Respondents 298 (skipped this question) 40

13. Thank you for completing this survey for the College Composition Program at Miami University. If you would like to make any further comments, please do so in the space below. Remember to click "Done" when you are finished with the survey. Thanks! Total Respondents 18 (skipped this question) 320

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APPENDIX G Miami University First-Year Composition & Computing Survey, Late Fall 2006

The results of this survey will be used by the Director and staff of College Composition to assess students' learning and perceptions of the course curriculum in the digital sections of English 111.

The results of this survey are completely anonymous and are not traceable to you (or to the computer you use to complete the survey). You may skip any question you wish. When you are finished, be sure to click "Done." (Note: You must complete this survey in one sitting; once you've started it you can't stop and restart it.)

Thank you so much for your time. Your participation in this survey will help the College Composition program evaluate and revise the curriculum.

If you have any questions about this survey, please contact the Coordinator for Digital Writing, Heidi McKee. [email protected] 513-529-2635

1. Gender Response Percent Response Total Female 64.7% 178 Male 34.9% 96 Transgender 0.4% 1 Total Respondents 275 (skipped this question) 0

2. If you are enrolled in a laptop section, are you using a MAC or a PC (a PC is any computer that's not a MAC). Response Percent Response Total MAC 26.4% 61 PC 73.6% 170 Total Respondents 231 (skipped this question) 44

3. If you're in a section using laptops, are you using a laptop purchased through the Miami Notebook Program? (If your class is in Bachelor 254 in the computer lab, click N/A.) Response Percent Response Total Yes 42% 105 No 40% 100

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Not sure 0.4% 1 N/A (not applicable) 17.6% 44 Total Respondents 250 (skipped this question) 25

4. Before the first class met, did you know that your English 111 section would be taught using computers in the classroom? Response Percent Response Total Yes 21.2% 58 No 75.5% 207 Not sure 3.3% 9 Total Respondents 274 (skipped this question) 1

5. What types of writing on computers do you do? (You may select more than one choice.) Response Percent Response Total None at all 0% 0 Papers / Digital Compositions for school 97.1% 267 Personal / Creative writing 49.1% 135 Web site (creating your own) 27.3% 75 Email 96% 264 Instant Messenger 91.6% 252 Blogging 22.5% 62 Facebook / other social networking sites 93.8% 258 Participation in an Online Discussion Forums 30.5% 84 Computer Gaming 30.9% 85 Programming 6.9% 19 Other 3.3% 9 Total Respondents 275 (skipped this question) 0

6. When you write, how often do you include multimodal elements (e.g., sound, video, audio) in your compositions? Never (1) Seldom (2) Sometimes (3) Often (4) Always (5) Response Average Audio (music, recorded voice etc.) 37% (101) 36% (98) 21% (57) 4% (10) 2% (6) 1.98 Photographs / Still images 8% (23) 23% (64) 42% (115) 22% (61) 4% (10) 2.89 Video 47% (128) 33% (89) 17% (47) 3% (7) 0% (0) 1.75 Total Respondents 273 (skipped this question) 2

7. Describe the types of writing you have done this semester at Miami (both in your College Composition course and in other courses). Did any writing assignments ask you to include

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multimodal elements (e.g., audio, images, video)? Did any assignments involve writing for the Web? Total Respondents 235 (skipped this question) 40

8. When you are writing (whether in or outside of school), how often do you think of the following issues? Never (1) Seldom (2) Sometimes (3) Often (4) Always (5) I'm not Response sure what Average this means The audience to whom you are writing 0% (1) 3% (7) 20% (54) 40% (109) 37% (102) 0% (0) 4.11 The context for which you are writing 0% (0) 1% (3) 7% (19) 49% (135) 42% (115) 0% (1) 4.33 The purpose for which you are writing 0% (0) 1% (4) 5% (14) 38% (103) 55% (150) 0% (0) 4.47 The technologies which you are using to write 8% (22) 25% (67) 35% (95) 19% (53) 13% (35) 0% (1) 3.04 The modes in which you are writing 4% (10) 16% (44) 31% (84) 24% (66) 12% (32) 13% (35) 3.28 The genres in which you are writing 3% (8) 14% (37) 29% (78) 36% (98) 18% (48) 1% (3) 3.52 Your writing processes 3% (7) 11% (31) 24% (65) 34% (93) 28% (75) 0% (0) 3.73 The final form and product of your writing 1% (2) 2% (6) 4% (11) 25% (68) 68% (186) 0% (0) 4.58 Total Respondents 273 (skipped this question) 2

9. When you are researching for a paper, what electronic, online resources have you utilized before and for how often? (Please answer each item.) Never (1) Seldom (2) Sometimes (3) Often (4) Always (5) Response Average Google (and other search engines) to find web pages 0% (0) 1% (4) 6% (16) 37% (102) 55% (151) 4.47 Library / School Databases 4% (10) 11% (31) 36% (97) 41% (111) 9% (24) 3.40 Government Sites / Databases 6% (15) 28% (76) 41% (110) 24% (64) 2% (6) 2.89 Magazine / News Sites (e.g., CNN, Time) 5% (13) 18% (50) 35% (95) 37% (101) 5% (13) 3.19 Listservs / Online Discussions 39% (105) 36% (95) 18% (49) 6% (15) 1% (2) 1.92 Blogs 54% (147) 33% (89) 11% (30) 2% (5) 0% (1) 1.62 Wikipedia

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21% (57) 23% (62) 30% (82) 20% (54) 6% (17) 2.68 Total Respondents 273 (skipped this question) 2

10. How effective and helpful do you think it is to have classmates read drafts of papers and give feedback (often called peer response or peer review)? Not at all (1) Seldom (2) Sometimes (3) Often (4) Always (5) N/A Response Average Effectiveness of Peer Response / Peer Review 2% (5) 8% (22) 23% (62) 34% (92) 32% (87) 0% (1) 3.87 Total Respondents 269 (skipped this question) 6

11. What were your goals for College Composition? That is, what did you hope to learn this semester? What did you learn this semester? Total Respondents 230 (skipped this question) 45

12. What was your favorite writing assignment in College Composition this semester? Why? What was your least favorite? Total Respondents 233 (skipped this question) 42

13. How have your understandings and perceptions of writing and the writing process changed this semester? Total Respondents 217 (skipped this question) 58

14. Thank you for completing this survey for the College Composition Program at Miami University. If you would like to make any further comments, please do so in the space below. Remember to click "Done" when you are finished with the survey. Thanks! Total Respondents 27 (skipped this question) 248

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APPENDIX H Consent Form for Participation in a Research Study, Miami University First-Year Composition & Computing, Fall 2006

Researchers: Heidi McKee, Coordinator of Digital Writing Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, Director of College Composition Phil Bickel, Abby Dubisar, Kristen Moore, Gina Patterson, Michele Polak, Leah Wahlin, Digital Writing Instructors

Title of Research Study: Digital Writing Students: Perceptions of Teaching and Learning with Computers

This study focuses on Miami University’s first-year students’ perceptions of the teaching and learning in the Digital Writing sections of English 111 offered in Fall 2006. As a student in a digital writing section, you are being contacted to participate in this research study. Participating in this study is not a requirement of your college class, and your grade and instruction will not be affected if you choose not to participate. If you choose to participate, at the end of the interview you will receive a $5 dollar gift certificate to the coffee shop in King Library.

This study will consist of a 20-minute videotaped interview and the collection of electronic copies of selected writing assignments completed in the course. From each section, three students who sign “yes” on this consent form will be randomly contacted to schedule an interview. If you sign “yes” on this form and you are one of the people randomly selected for an interview, this interview would occur in a classroom or office in Bachelor Hall at a time convenient to you. (Note: If your teacher is one of the people listed above and if you are selected for an interview, the interview will not be conducted by your teacher. Your teacher will not know if you agreed to participate in the study or not.) At the time of the interview, you would be asked to transfer onto the College Composition Program’s USB drive digital copies of selected assignments.

If you do not wish to be videotaped or if you do not wish to share examples of your work or if you are not 18 years old, please sign the NO line on this consent form.

The interview would be conducted by one of the above researchers (not your teacher) who would ask you questions about your classroom and learning experiences in the Digital Writing sections. Questions such as, what did you enjoy most about working with computers in the classroom? In what ways, if at all, do you feel your learning and writing benefited from having access to computers and other digital technologies in the classroom? What recommendations would you make for the College Composition Program to better support students learning in the Digital Writing sections?

After the semester is over, the raw video footage of all students interviewed (approximately 30 will be randomly selected) will be edited together to form shorter videos capturing students’ perceptions of the Digital Writing sections. These edited videos will be shown to instructors, students, and administrators at Miami University to help show the impact of Digital Writing. The edited videos will also be shown at conferences (such as the College Composition and

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Communication Conference) or presented in web articles (such as for the journal Kairos: A journal of rhetoric, pedagogy, and technology).

Because the videos are recording your visual and audio likeness it will not be possible to keep your identity anonymous. You may, however, to choose a pseudonym to be referred to with. If you choose a pseudonym, most people watching the videos will not be able to determine your real identity; however, it may be possible for the few people who know you to be able to recognize you in the video.

By agreeing to participate in this study, you will give permission to be contacted for a 20 minute videotaped interview and you agree to share digital copies of selected writing assignments.

As mentioned above, your decision to participate in this study is not a requirement of your college class, and your grade will not be affected should you choose not to participate. Your instructor will not see these consent forms until after the semester is over and grades have been turn in to the registrar. Also, if you agree to participate in the study and then later decide you would like to withdraw, you may do so in the following manner:

• Contact Heidi McKee, the Coordinator of Digital Writing Instruction. She will withdraw all information related to you from the study (513-529-2635 office; 513-523-8403 home; [email protected]).

If you would like to discuss your rights as a participant in a research study, or wish to speak with someone not directly involved in the study you may contact Miami University’s Office for Advancement of Research and Scholarship (513- 529-3734; [email protected]).

* * * * * * * * When signing “yes” on this form I am agreeing to voluntarily enter this study. I understand that, by signing this document, I do not waive any of my legal rights. I have had a chance to read this consent form, and it was explained to me in a language which I use and understand. I have had the opportunity to ask questions and have received satisfactory answers. A copy of this Informed Consent Form has been given to me.

YES, I agree to participate in this study:

______Signature Date

______Printed Name Email

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NO, I do not agree to participate in this study:

______Signature Date

______Printed Name

***If you signed “yes” on this form, please write down times you might be free for an interview. All interviews will be held in Bachelor Hall, Room 338 between the hours of 8am and 5pm.

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APPENDIX I Notational Interview Questions, Miami University First-Year Composition & Computing, Fall 2006

Have you declared on a major yet? When you enrolled in your English 111 course, did you know it would be a digital writing section? If not, why did you choose to stay in the course? What did you enjoy most about writing with computers in the classroom? What did you enjoy least about writing with computers in the classroom? Can you say a little bit more about working on things at home? In what ways, if at all, do you feel your learning and writing benefitted from having access to these different technologies in the classroom? What was your favorite writing assignment in the class? What was your least favorite writing assignment in the class? Do you think having access to computers in the classroom helped facilitate your writing process? What have you learned in English 111? Would you recommend to other students to enroll in a digital writing section? Are you enrolled in a digital 112 section? Do you own a Miami notebook? Can you describe your experience with the Miami Notebook program? If not, do you feel you received adequate support for your laptop? If you were talking to other teachers and/or administrators here at Miami, what you like to say about the laptop classroom? Do you have anything else you would like to add?

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