Consumer Citizens Online: Structure, Agency, and Gender in Online Participation

An interesting shift occurs within educational settings when the formality of learning environments is relaxed and students are given “free time” on the Internet. Educational websites disappear, music comes on, and different people in the room become experts. The screens, the sounds, the way students interact with technology, and the interactions between them change as they immerse themselves in games, social networks and commercial sites of their own choosing. Students update their profiles on websites, changing their photos as well as their lists of favorite films, television shows, and music. They play games, search for cheats, and find out what other gamers are saying about particular games and gaming systems. They look for clothes, shopping around for the best deals and identifying outfits through which they can express an individual style. One of the popular free-time activities I have observed in these situations is to play with online paperdolls on “dollmaker” sites. Particularly, though not exclusively, used by girls I observed aged eight to twelve, paperdoll sites contain clothes, hair, makeup, and accessories to drag and drop onto curvaceous cartoon-like figures. Wanting to look more closely at this shift between formal and free time, I ran a workshop in a school in London in which girls aged eleven to twelve designed their own dollmaker sites. One of the designs from the project is shown in Figure 1. The clothes, hair, earrings, and purse in this design are all stylized to match current trends. The outfit, with the display of midriff and peeking thigh, suggests a sexualized girl’s body. However, the body itself (colored lurid turquoise) was completely ignored by the girls, treated like a mannequin, and left unchanged from the template provided. On the surface, we could argue that the design reflects the influence of the fashion and beauty industries on girls. Given a space to design a body and clothing, this eleven-year-old produced an image that positions girls as sexual, as needing to be skinny, and as constant consumers of fashion and accessories. However, on the basis of the interviews and conversations I conducted with the girls, I was not willing to describe them as passive dupes of the beauty industries. Similarly, I was unwilling to see their other interactions during “free time” on the Internet as a matter of engagement in senseless violence, as video gaming is sometimes described, or as immersion in music which is manufactured and mind-numbingly dull, as some popular music is sometimes seen. Clearly, engagement on the Internet, even within the context of commercial culture, is not a passive activity. So how can we analyze online activities in ways which account for the power and influence of commercial industries, while at the same time recognizing how young people actively engage with the commodities these industries offer?

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