Are Women Free to Construct Their Virtual "Ideal" Place?

Do physical social conventions structures follow women into virtual worlds? Reid-Walsh and Mitchell claim that virtual places of girls are reflections of their physical room –or at least of the physical room they wish to have—; girls’ commonplaces on the Internet are “virtual manifestations of the girl’s bedrooms” (p. 175), according to these two authors. In spite of the similarities that both the real and the virtual room might have, a girl’s physical space is a lot more private than a virtual commonplace. Many teenage girls wouldn’t display online many of the artifacts they have in their real space (the raggedy clothes that they love to wear at home, the mess in their closets, their bug collection, their baby pictures, etc.). Women’s “ideal” virtual places seem to be more a reflection of the “ideal woman” –it might be the same case for male commonplaces—. Which pictures do we post online, the ones where we are perfectly combed hugging our children or the ones that our kids took of us yelling at them? Online places are for the most part social places, and we tend to follow most of the conventions of our real social life. Many times we “stage” our virtual social interactions to what we want our image to be, and that image might just be the one that is expected from us. As a teacher, I have to be careful what I post on my Facebook account because teachers are expected to behave in a certain way (even though I don’t “friend” any of my students). “Cool” girls like to post attractive pictures of them combined with foul language, an image normally not used at home or in the classroom. They adjust their image to the audience, which are other teenagers. Young girls’ virtual spaces are “repositories of images of popular culture,” as Walsh and Mitchell accurately describe them (p. 179); yet, a real bedroom space is much more than that. It is indeed “A Room of One’s Own.”   

Nora