I don't know why, but I just have to force myself to be anything more than the tiniest bit interested in the stories at onlinecaroline.com and planetjemma.com. Having to put in my email address already makes me cranky, and thinking about getting emails from these sites makes me realize that I will probably do what I do with all other emails, which is leave them piling up unread for as long as possible while I assure myself I will read them later. I don't know what it is...I'm still trying to figure out my stubborn resistance to it all. Something about getting these standard responses to my interactions with the characters... I don't really want to fill in my personal details and answer quizzes so I can get these limited replies...won't it probably just come down to how much I can mess with the format and try to get unique responses? I haven't read through all of "Kind of Blue" yet, but I'm immediatly more interested in it. Reading something that I can pretend is personal and real is more captivating for me than reading emails that are trying to make you think they're personal and real because, really, all their trying does is make it more obvious that they're not what they're trying to be. Does that make sense? These are my early impressions so who knows, maybe I'll get more drawn into the stories of "Caroline" and "Jemma"...

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.