This past weekend, I led a workshop on online journalism as part of Shameless Magazine’s Wire, a series that teaches high school girls the fundamentals of journalism. I learned what exactly it is teens do on the Internet (lots of Facebook, it turns out) and met some probable future feminists.

As an exercise, the dozen or so participants created a group blog — and in the entries I found some glimpses into the minds of 16-year-olds: The sexist origins of Barbie (originally a sex toy for men, not a plaything for girls); why Valentine’s Day sucks (who needs to be one-half of a lovesick pair of puppies?); and the addictive qualities of Facebook (a Petri dish for self-expression, as well as narcissism, jealousy and bragging).

In conversations, I learned that some felt limited in their ambitions, encouraged by parents to choose law or engineering over the volatile world of journalism. Attending this workshop, perhaps, was an assertion of who they were and want to be.

Allison Martell, the organizer of Shameless Wire, told me that most of the girls never used the F-word, but noted that even if not in name, their opinions often overlapped with basic feminist concepts.

It got me thinking: These girls are already questioning how Barbies, relationships and our online identities define them — yet they didn’t need to use feminist as a title.

Feminism can be tracked in waves: The first was suffrage; the second was liberation of the housewife; the third is the intersection of gender with race, sexuality and socioeconomics. The fourth wave doesn’t yet exist, but already the principles of the former waves are infused within women’s psyches — so what’s next?

As blogger Jessica Valenti predicted in a New York Times interview, the next wave is online activism, and it’s not just about women’s roles, rights and responsibilities. The Internet is information democracy — blogs upon blogs upon Twitter feeds connect people talking about global, social, cultural and personal politics. Individualism and opinion, so celebrated these days, can refashion feminism (and other political activism) as an inclusive belief, not a rarified academic pursuit. If people don’t like what they see, they can add to the conversation.

To the girls I met, the usual talking points about careers and working mothers are a given, not an option. They’ve moved into post-”feminism,” as it’s still defined, and it’s time for feminists to as well.