Can you see me now? : the digital strategies of creative girls

The digital strategies of creative girls aims to make visible girls as creative developers of the Internet and new technology, which has been investigated through interviews with students, artists, project managers and entrepreneurs. Why do so many girls choose to blog? What is it that influences girls’ choices of new technology? How is digital creativity affected by gender norms? The prevailing social gender norms appear to be reflected on the Internet as digital gender norms, where girls and boys seem to prefer different communication tools. While working with the question of digital gender, I have developed the hypothesis of aesthetic technology namely that girls often have an artistic approach towards technology. Girls mainly learn technology for a reason, planning to do something once they have learned the technique, and their goals often have aesthetic preferences. The issue of girls learning technology, becoming technical, is clearly more complicated than one might first think in relation to gender norms. Even though young girls are often just as interested in technology as young boys are, it is difficult for them to keep or adapt their technical interest to normative femininity, as they enter their teens. Another problem is that expressions of technical competence or innovation, which do not correspond to the predominant male norm, might be hard for us to see. Creative girls who undergo education within the digital field can easily end up in a situation where they must first work with equality and become entrepreneurs in order to have a chance to practice their profession.Finansierat av Internetfonden.SE