Girl Wide Web 2.0 Video Review

Here is my video review of Girl Wide Web 2.0. First let me preface this by saying that I don't consider myself a very good speaker, so sorry for all of the "umm"s and the stumbles. Also, I'm sorry for the annoying watermark on the video. The software that I downloaded to make the video was a trial, and it didn't tell me until I was done making the video that it was going to add a watermark to it. Yay for hidden stipulations.

Read my Goodreads review here.

Girl Wide Web 2.0 edited by Sharon R. Mazzarella

Image from here

Girl Wide Web 2.0 (check it out on Goodreads or Amazon) is about how girls and women are renegotiating their identities through means of the Internet. The book is written in a series of essays; each author has taken a specific subject of the Internet which girls and women that are participating in and has analyzed how their culture has redefined how they represent themselves online. In the foreword, Dafna Lemish writes, “Through the variety of possibilities of engaging others online, girls … explore new opportunities to express their voices, and so the Internet is involved in self-growth. Some practices involve the construction of very private and individual identities and a creative process of expression. Others experiment with social relationships and create communities of ‘sisterhood.’”

I liked this book and appreciated the perspectives that it had on the evolution of identity online. While there was a lot of valuable information in the book as a whole, there were two particular chapters that I found useful as far as expressing online identities from different cultures: “Degrees of Caution: Arab Girls Unveil on Facebook” and “East Meets West: Is There a Difference Between Tai and American Girls’ Use of the Internet and Negotiation of Identity?”

Girl Wide Web 2.0: A Look into Digital Identity

I want to continuing exploring identity, so for my book I chose Girl Wide Web 2.0: Revisiting Girls, the Internet, and the Negotiation of Identity. I'm hoping this book can explain more about how digital identity varies from different cultures and locations.

Preview

Through the preview of the book, it looks like the book does spend some time defining the differences in which girls determine their digital identities, but it also looks like it spends some time with some of the methods that are used online, such as MySpace and fangirl websites. It seems to spend a lot of time on the online communities that girls participate in, which is helpful for defining their identities.

Early Social Proof

No one responded to my update on Twitter. I was unsuccessful doing searching for conversations about the book as well. I'm going to try to reach out to one of the contributors of the book, because it looks like several of them are on Twitter. We'll see how that goes.

Similar Books

Instant Identity (Mediated Youth) by Shayla Thiel Stern
Growing Up Girls: Popular Culture by Sharon R Mazzarella
Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott

It looks like these books are pretty similar in their intent except for the last one Grown Up Digital. This one's intent lies more along the lines of how digital culture is changing and how the "net generation" is changing it.