Cybergirls

Thomas (2004) Digital Literacies of the Cybergirl is a 4 year virtual ethnography in which Thomas created a chatroom called The Palace in 1998. Here she was a participant observer as she conducted interviews, kept transcripts of conversations, and took pictures of the avatars that the users chose.
This article focused on girls and how they chose avatars that helped them embody themselves as their "fantasies desired." With last week's gender discussion on the brain, this did not sit well with me at first--worrying if her example of Christy's transcript that shows she was pleased by how she looked like a "girl in a dolly magazine" and her interpretation that Christie chose her avatar to "live out her fantasy of being a model," generalizes to a lot of girls out there. But when I came back to the article today to write about it, I was not so worked up anymore. Honestly, girls should see their own beauty and if they decide to create beautiful avatars to represent themselves why not. What is funny is that I have never made the avatar on my email because I would be bothered that it does not look like me. But I guess it makes sense that girls may use the web to be someone they are not. Like Freakyweirdo... who made herself goth because she wants to be one. I really hope that her eating disorder was also fictional.
I liked the part where Kitten said she works to "use figures of speech, metaphors and alliteration..and make her language colorful, detailed and full of twists and turns." Wow, talk about a teacher's dream!