VOF Week 1: (Web 2.0: A New Approach to Women’s Empowerment Issues)

Web 2.0 contains some thrilling opportunities that cover rich user experience, user participation and vibrant content. Web 2.0 offers an exhilarating means of learning and expressing oneself in an interactive manner over information from diverse sources. Interactive becomes interesting and exciting when you can meet people from every corner of the world, make friends with them and learn about their cultures through discussions and visuals. This way, I get to be acquainted with so many places and people that I’ll probably never visit physically in my life time. And this is the most exciting thing.

The freedom and openness that characterizes Web 2.0 offer some unique avenues that have before now been absent in the global movement for the empowerment of the woman. It is understood that women empowerment on a global scale cannot be considered as a uniform issue and treated with stereotyped measures because of the diverse background of women all around the world. The very nature of Web 2.0 offers a solution here. Web 2.0 cuts across physical, social, cultural and emotion backgrounds in one instant. It offers the opportunity for women to interact and share experiences with other women from all over the world. It becomes some kind of giant support group that can provide inspiration that unlocks creative energy, encouragement and consolation all at the same time. By linking different communities and exchanging lived experiences, solutions are swapped and in an instant a local platform becomes a global platform with just one click.

A key concept in the women’s empowerment movement is schooling. Information is knowledge and knowledge is empowering. With its ability to create, share and interact with information between communities, Web 2.0 allows for a spread of knowledge in an entertaining fashion across limitless boundaries in a snowball effect. Through this approach Web 2.0 provides a relaxed but effective way of learning from a vast reservoir of sources.

Personally, Web 2.0 empowers because it provides a platform where issues can be viewed from many angles, thereby making it easy to keep an open mind on these issues. The possibility to hold discussions with so many people on any subject opens you up to all sides of the matter. Web 2.0 presents a channel for expressing opinion and emotion. After growing up in society where lived experiences are considered private and hardly shared, and differing from mainstream schools of thought is severely frowned upon, Web 2.0 becomes a refreshing stage to explore myself and thoughts. In so doing, I discover and build on my strengths, work on my weaknesses and liberate the creative energy within me.