The overall Digital Girls program is internationally-focused and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We examine the knowledge of digital technology that Canadian, British, and South African pre-teen and teenage girls are acquiring through computer play on and off the Internet. We consider – and contest – the “digital gender divide” that is said to exist and examine girls’ voluntary engagement with technology. We are interested in mapping out the emergence of a particular digital literacy that includes technical knowledge, social uses of technology, and moral and ethical decision-making. For more information about the Digital Girls program, please see the Overview of the Digital Girls Program.
A number of projects are being conducted within the overall Digital Girls program. Please see below for more information on these. More project descriptions will be coming soon.
In this project, we use artefacts from digital play culture to access girls’ views and provoke memories and evocative experiential descriptions. Girls have the opportunity to meet to talk about how they use the Internet, how they got started, how the use of Internet is regulated in their homes, what uses they make of the net and computers (e.g. computer games), how they handle and download information, the kinds of information they seek, data about websites they like and dislike (including their own web pages), chat room behaviours, fears and joys, and so on. Within these categories we are interested in knowing about both their creative production activities (signing guestbooks, participating in creating their own creative art works, designing their own websites), as well as their activities as consumers. We also examine the ways in which girls’ everyday uses of the Internet serves to provide them with information about body, identity and sexuality.
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