I'll preface this by picking up on one of the earlier questions. A lot of this is age-driven. If you look at human development, kids up to about 11 and 12 tend to form their sense of identity through their relationship with their family. Once they hit 12 or 13, things start to shift a bit, generally speaking. The usual path is that we're then trying to break away from the family, get out into the world, explore different identities, and find out who we want to be as an adult. It's fraught with difficulty and lots of mistakes.
To a certain extent, that's also a performativity. One of the reasons you see so many 13- to 22-year-old kids and young adults hyper-performing is that they are developmentally predisposed to try on different identities, get them out there, see what the reaction is, and then retreat into a private space to figure out if that works for them or not.
I think the thing you've raised is that when you do this in a commercialized surveillance space, then certain kinds of identities are privileged—hypersexualized identities, for example. With the eGirls data, and similarly with the work we've been doing on the eQuality Project as well, kids tell us that instead of finding a whole range of ways of being a girl in network spaces, there's just this very narrow hypersexualized identity that's available to them, and performing it is almost protective—i.e., “I have to have a friend on my friends list who does it, or I have to do a little bit of it, because if I don't, I'm trolled.” Then they have to deal with all this incredible negativity.
I think it's interesting to see how the technology does interface with these very old stereotypical concerns around gender and problems of equality. Especially with the eGirls data, girls would tell us things like, “You know, when I'm at school, I don't feel pressure to have the makeup on and do the hair and all this type of thing, but I have friends who went online, just took pictures of the way they normally look, and got attacked immediately.” They were told they were fat and they were told they were ugly.
It's very heterosexist; it's very normative; it's very gendered, and it's very misogynistic. When they're online, they're very careful about performing in a particular way.
As well, our data actually is drawn from a really diverse group of girls. I agree with Rena on everything she said about intersectionality. It's really important to understand how race plays out with gender and how socio-economic status plays out with gender, yet all of our diverse participants indicated that they had to negotiate with this. To go back to my opening comments, they point the finger at the media stereotypes that are embedded everywhere. It's easier for them to push against the stereotype in the real world. Once you're online, it's really hard.