‘Twenty‐four seven on the computers’: girls, ICTs and risk

Abstract

This paper explores how girls take up, disrupt, and disavow interest in ICTs in their lives. It examines questions of access and of social risk in relation to computers in the home and how these are nuanced by gender. The paper draws on samples of text from advertisements, government websites and focus group interviews with high‐school girls in Australia in order to explore some of the risks and pleasures computers offer to young people. It considers how hierarchies of use and access in the home, and notions of appropriate female subjectivity and of ‘social risk’ – particularly in relation to chat and internet messaging – thread through their accounts. The implications of these factors for schools are discussed.

Keywords:

• online
• ICT
• social risk
• gender
• female subjectification
• sexualisation

Notes

1. An Australian Research Council Linkage funded project managed by the University of Western Sydney in partnership with Deakin and Charles Sturt Universities, the NSW Department of Education and Training, the Office of Women, Premier’s Department NSW; Department of Education and Children’s Services, South Australia; and Department of Education, Victoria. Researchers on the project include: Professor Margaret Vickers, Associate Professor Kerry Robinson, Dr Carol Reid and Dr Susanne Gannon (University of Western Sydney); Professor Toni Downes (Charles Sturt University); and Dr Julianne Lynch, Dr Leonie Rowan and Dr Catherine Harris (Deakin University). See Lynch (2008) for further analysis of project data.

2. All school names used in this paper are pseudonyms. Quantitative data used in this section of the paper were generated by Dr My Trinh Ha of the Centre for Educational Research, University of Western Sydney. See chapter 2 of Lynch (2008) for further quantitative analysis by Dr My Trinh Ha and Professor Margaret Vickers.

3. The ‘Chatdanger’ link takes them straight to the UK site of Childnet International which promises ‘true stories’ about bad things and has sections dedicated to various media applications including IM. Childnet’s integrity emerges from its inauguration in 2000 on the same day that an internet paedophile was convicted in the UK.

4. MSN is an acronym for the synchronous chat service provided by the MSN Messenger application that was popular at the time of our interviews. Subsequently social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo have risen in popularity with these young people although there has been little empirical research yet into how these are impacting on their lives.

5. At Honey Eater High School, for example, the dearth of women in industry was explained by one girl in essentialist terms as follows: ‘Girls [don’t] like to be isolated, they like to be with their friends, they’re very social so that might have something to do with it… We don’t want to be stuck in one place for like however many hours a day, like, we want to go out and do things, like females might not want to work back in a big company by themselves at night’.

6. ‘Schoolies’ is an Australian end of school year event where graduating high school students (17–18 years of age) descend en masse on holiday destinations such as the Queensland Gold Coast for a celebratory week of carousing, often involving excessive drinking, sex and drugs.