Writing Machines is the course website for English 170L at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
Planet Jemma and the teenage girl problem
Submitted by Shock and Awe on 27 October 2006 - 8:18pm.
So I just spent some time fiddling around with PlanetJemma. The whole time I had this feeling like I shouldn't be there. Like I had stumbled into a chatroom for teenage girls and what was I doing playing around with the sparkly cursor and bloopy type about boys and some missing girl named Abby and how cool science is? I thought this was maybe just my pretentious version of the "if it's something a teenage girl would like, or could do, it's bad" syndrome we talked about earlier in the semester in relation to some A-list bloggers refusal to view Livejournal as a real blog.
But then I did a little research to see who had created this PlanetJemma and for what purpose. Turns out it's funded by the British Council because "Girls in Britain do well in science exams. Then as they get older, drop the subject like a hot Bunsen burner." Check out this site for more info. So it wasn't my personal shortcomings (or narrow perspective) that caused me to dislike and feel uncomfortable in the site, it's designed specifically to target teenage girls, explaining all the fuchsias.
While I suppose it's a noble cause, I'm feeling a bit disillusioned by the fact that what I took to be a serious hypertext (or at least something along the lines of web art) is really just a strategic part of what is essentially a marketing campaign. I'd hate for the world of web art to be quickly co-opted by the marketing world (see also thisismycheese's post about the Honda ad/game) making it difficult to distinguish between earnest efforts by artists and sites carefully designed using market research.
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jemma
I have spent very little time with Jemma but right from the start I had feelings similar to yours. Although I too am annoyed by the hypertexts that try to ostensibly disguise their purpose, it's not like it took either one of us too long to figure out that there is something fishy, or at least unimpressive about sites like Jemma. It's goal, now that I read your blog and the related link, that seems worthy enough.
That fact about the British
That fact about the British Council funding this website is really interesting. It's surprising that it's partly for educational purposes. This is kind of a roundabout way of getting girls to like science, and I'm not sure if it's effective at all. When I went through the site, I thought, cool she's into astro and sciency stuff, but then the main deal is that her friend's missing, so it seemed more like a teenage soap-mystery-drama than anything education-related at all. But now that you've mentioned that the British Council is funding the site with an educational purpose, it makes sense to me that there's little factoids in Jemma's "Important Notes" section about star-gazing and other science things. Those little notes have nothing to do with Abby, but are still tools in this campaign. The message that I'm getting is that the government thinks that girls will visit this site and watch the videos and think "cool! astronomy uni is so cool! i want to go and be just like jemma!"
Women in science
In addition to the soap-operaish (as opposed to educational) focus you mention, I'm wondering whether the stated goal of portraying Jemma as a positive role model for budding female scientists is actually carried out. I mean, in the video I just watched, Jemma's male lab partner performed the "Banana hamma'" lab experiment according to procedure, carefully handled the materials, successfully transformed the banana into a hammer, etc., and then when Jemma took her turn, she bumblingly dropped the banana thing into the canister of nitrous oxide, nitrous gas started to spill out everywhere, Jemma SQUEALED, and, if I heard this correctly, her lab partner yelled, "Quick, take your trousers off!"
That film clip certainly wouldn't have inspired my 14-year-old self to be "just like jemma" and study science at university. And my 21-year-old self finds it plain irritating.