As a 13 year old girl the media I paid attention to was the YM Magazine I took on car trips and then eventually the Seventeen Magazine and Sassy Magazine I looked at randomly. My parents didn’t watch a lot of News shows because they called the News shows ”depressing” . So at an early age I was trained to ignore the news and remain ignorant of events that went on throughout the world. In the long term this did nothing for my long term development, and I became a quiet listener taking everything at face value.

What intrigues me about Barbara Wiener’s Highlighting Girls in Youth Media is her definition of collaboration and her focus on teaching collaboration especially when she explains  “that it is not a watered down version of a good idea but a process by by which good ideas build into better ideas and richer intellectual thought. This is an active co-creative process that brings into play different skills and interests and gives the team a sense of ownership and commitment.” I wish that when I was a young woman of twelve, I had an adult female role model to foster the building of creativity within me. Ms.Wiener goes on to identify the way in which youth groups have the potential to empower young women when she says, “This is the leadership model needed for the 21st century—a way of working in which diverse points of view can be harnessed into collaborative, fully realized partnerships for solutions. Youth media programs can help girls lead the way.”

The 16,000 ads flickering across one’s consciousness everyday mentioned by Rebecca Bullen in the reading, The Power and Impact of Gender-Specific Media Literacy seemed like way more than possible. I feel that we are so accustomed to It, that we don’t even realize it’s happening. That statement reminded me of when I visited a friend in Washington State and while we were driving in the car I started to notice that there were way fewer advertisements. Coming from New York where we are bombarded by advertisements, being without was incredibly refreshing. Having no larger than life, blonde, statuesque beauty to look at on billboards was not something I missed.