| As an analysis of a popular independent magazine for third wave feminists and its related discussion space website, this study seeks to reveal some understandings into the complex ways that people read, write, and use literacy technologies to develop and understand their identities and communities. While popular culture is generally understood to have no particular redeeming educational value, and in fact, to have a detrimental effect, particularly on female self-concept, this study shows that popular culture in the form of new magazines/webspaces provides no one set of ideological constructs to which girls necessarily aspire. Rather, popular culture in today's context of multiple magazines, communications technologies, and increasing competition for diverse audiences provides a wide continuum of identity choices and alternative lifestyles for girls to emulate or re-fashion for their own unique sense of self. Thus, the meaning is created as much by the reader as the medium itself and new technologies are helping to create these meanings in a powerful social context.;Magazines with website companion spaces provide an alternative form of reader identification and communication that leads to social processes that help girls to refine and construct their self-conceptions and literary capacities in relation to a diverse and immediate community. "Postings" on websites such as Bust.com lead to an improved awareness of language in relation to meaning and help web-based discussion group participants develop their language skills in a relational or contextual manner---a manner that is indicative of a strong sense of audience and a facility with multi-genre writing styles. In sum, this project develops a sense of how social forms of reading and writing that exist outside the boundaries of schools and which are facilitated by new communications technologies are important new spaces for the development of critical literacy. |
