Consumption, Production, Gender, and Social Media Technology

I’m not sure that the types of “virtual collections” we see on Pintrest relate more to traditional consumption/production in ways that would be different from other sites of virtual community. The virtual collecting that takes place within virtual communities like Pintrest, Glogster, Facebook, Guestbook, and many others seems to perform identity through the appropriation and creative consumption of culture. Thus, girls who employ these social media sites seem to enjoy the agency of their subject positions, as creators of their own private spaces, that is, spaces that they control within the public domain of the Web. This space is seen as a “safe space” by girls who use technology and media, creatively, as a way for self-definition and cultural identification. The use of media and technology by girls can further become a type of “bedroom culture” for them that “blurs the division between public and private spaces” (Reid-Walsh and Mitchell 180). It seems that girls’ virtual communities have given them an opportunity to be vocal in ways that weren’t available to them before the age of social media technology. It has thus, provided girls with a space of their own in which to employ agency in the construction of their social and personal identities. However, social media cannot be a panacea for the hegemonic ills of heteronormativity. The mediated space between cultural gender scripts and personal identities illuminates the iterative performance of gender on social media sites and on girls’ personal webpages. Thus, many girls on these sites may be under the illusion that they are creating and controlling their own subjectivities online. When in fact, they are mediating aspects of their own personal identities with cultural gender scripts that help them reinforce and reperform various “material” subjectivities. Contemporary social media technology is, therefore, more surreptitious in its mediation of culture than Television media of the past. With television, we are more aware that the mediation of culture is not our own because the agent mediating heteronormative gender, class, and racial scripts is not us—it is a NBC or TNT. Social media technology, however works differently, as it allows us to become the agent negotiators and mediators of gender and culture within our own social sites. This latter technology may arguably be a more subconscious mediation than the mediation provided by TV simply because it is us—and not a Television Network—who is doing the negotiation and mediation of culture and gender. Therefore, it is up to us on how we use gender and culture on our own websites, and it is up to us to look for ways to resist subconscious reproduction and consumption of heteronormative cultural performances.