Mazzarella, Sharon. (Ed.). Girl Wide Web: Girls, the Internet, and the Negotiation of Identity.
Raphael, Chad
Mazzarella, Sharon. (Ed.). Girl Wide Web: Girls, the Internet, and
the Negotiation of Identity. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Pp. x, 225.
ISBN 0-8204-7117-8 (pb.) $29.95.
If media effects researchers have raised alarms about what popular
media do to girls by offering unhealthy body images and stereotypical
role portrayals, cultural studies scholars tend to ask what girls do
with media. The 11 essays in Girl Wide Web--all of them focused on how
young women explore and manage a sense of self online--clearly emerge
from the cultural studies paradigm.
Chapters pursue the central theme of girls' identity
development through the Internet by exploring commercial Web communities
for girls, alternative online magazines, fan sites produced by girls
themselves, communication in newsgroups and via instant messaging, and
even discourse about girls and the Internet in the mainstream press.
Contributors also model a broad range of methods for studying online
communication, including interviews, participant observation, content
analysis, textual analysis, and survey research. However, the
perspective is limited mainly to American girls and U.S.-based Web
sites, except for Divya McMillin's ethnography of girls'
incorporation of the Internet into their lives in Bangalore, India.
The authors' conclusions echo familiar cultural studies
insights into how youth interact with media in active and complex ways,
offering a corrective to some effects research and mass media scare
stories that present girls as victims of the Internet. Several essays
emphasize that girls do not simply imitate, but appropriate and comment
on commercial popular culture in the sites they create themselves.
Contributors tend to present girls as culturally savvy negotiators of
the online world, despite, as Lynne Edwards' chapter demonstrates,
media panics that often portray the Internet as a dangerous place for
girls where sexual and commercial predators lurk behind every mouse.
Girls also emerge as technologically adept users of the Internet,
despite common concerns about a gender gap in computing abilities.
Girl Wide Web, or chapters from it, would be accessible for
undergraduates in courses on media and youth, gender and media, or
cyberculture. References follow each chapter, but there is no index.
--Chad Raphael
Santa Clara University
