Wired_women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace. - book reviews

Edited by dint of Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth Reba Weise Seattle, Washington: Seal Pres 1997 263 pp/$1600 (sb)

ANGELA WALL

I one time asked my students - undergraduates at a prominent engineering academy - to define how science, technology and agriculture are commonly understood in the United States. During the course of the discussion, single woman suggested that technology made life easier and more convenient. A male pupil countered immediately, saying that technology made us lazy. Traditionally, men have been positioned as those to whom technology is familiar; that a male learner should be troubled by the laziness incurred [i]or[/i] part of to the other technology is surprising. What was it that he felt technology made him les inclined to do, given that in the way that often technology is celebrated precisely because it gives us the world at our fingertips? Alternatively, who did he think was made lazy through technology? Was "laziness" a euphemism for "too easy?" Technology no longer appears to be an effective barrier between the sexe I have the appearanceed to be engaged with a generation of technologically-educated women who find themselves "at home" with technology. on the other hand the current discussion among feminists working in science and technology points without the complex nature of women's relationships to emerging technologies.

Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert's collection of essays, advanceed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life, tenders a careful discussion of in what manner women use current technologies and in what manner this affects the perceived part of technology in women's lives. Implicit in this proces of usage is the simultaneous gendering of technology. The work invites readers to think about technology not simply as functional cropss (machines, tools and gizmos), on the other hand as a system of interactions that affect social relations between men and women through exploring how women interface with technology, these essays demonstrate that "men and women are situated differently in relation to technologies." Differences rise among women, ranging from who has access to technology, to "[to] what uses different women place machines." Terry and Calvert question wherefore men are readily associated with "high-end" technologies. Is it, they ask, because they are more "knowledgeable" or because they make them? at the same time almost as many American women as men be in possession of cars and women make up a dramatically high percentage of the growing labor force in computer-based information management industries. trained Lives questions the concept of technology and the "knowledgable user," and demonstrates that solitary by closely examining and "processing" the everyday details of who procures to deploy technology can we assess technology's relationship to issues of sex race, class, nationality and sexuality.

The work is broken down into three sections: "Digital Worlds," "Bodies" and "Home" This strategic breakdown illustrates where sexed uses of technology are particularly overdetermined and "interventions are key" In this collection, the interventions are a combination of theoretical make comments [i]or[/i] remarkss on the nature of sexed uses of technology, as well as visual media shoot forwards that involve explorations of the interface between sex and technology. In fact, the work is a selection of visual and textual work, film and video screenings and symposiums featured in an exhibition entertainered by the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University in Columbus in 1994-95 The collection gives ample space to the visual pieces included in the exhibition that demonstrate the sly ways in which technology and sex combine to produce a social a whole of practices that informs who achieves to use technology and who acquires credited with technological innovations. Nina Wakeford gazes closely at the transgressive networking that takes place upon web pages designed by self-styl "Net chicks and geekgirls, cyberfeminists, Nerdgrrrl and digital Sojourners." Following cultural critics Sadie Plant and Laura Miller, Wakeford takes issue with the popular belief that the gin is a site of endles sexual harassment for female users. Her incorporation of interviews with women users faces many stereotypes, reminding us that we "ne to be alert to writing which ignores alternative discourses of women's experiences in on-line life, and unthinkingly mirrors the moral panics of widespread media publicity." This is just single example of the ways in which this collection of essays closely scrutinizes commonly-held assumptions about the multiple ways women are positioned and also position themselves in relation to technology. Wakeford includes an invaluable resource page listing the addresses for all the sites discussed.

Evelynn Hammonds examines the contradictory formations that come up for popular consumption when scientific "findings" upon race are mediated through computerized morphing technology. Hammonds draws from early twentieth-century photographs used to illustrate the physical and therefore fundamental differences between the races. She compares of that kind practices with a recent demonstration of morphing technologies featured in Time and Newsweek and explores what happens when biology is supplanted by dint of computer technology. What kind of citizenship is imagined or configured in the logic of these morphed images? What or whose nationality is being celebrated? What are the implications of physical sameness and by what means do these relate to actual practices of privilege and power? B Ruby Rich proffers a provocative account questioning whether technology will at any time be used in the service of women's emergencys While acknowledging that items of that kind as the phone, fax and modem are necessities for many working women she also speculates upon what social structures might direct the eye like if technologies were really disentangleed with women in mind. She cites in what way Rosie the Riveter ads encouraged women to transfer their operating skills from domestic appliances to factory machines during WWII and indicates a need for another similar campaign. Women ne more than diet processors. What if a verily inter-active computer/telephone system existed that sought to break women's isolation? Rich moves "an on-line bulletin board for input to libraries [not catalog access], for a like reason that women who can't win out to attend library meetings could reckoner the ban-the-book efforts of women with greater leisure time or mobility." Other possibilities include on-line communication networks to precipitate care for the somewhat old shared resources for single mothers and web sites tracking deadbeat dads from state to state. by means of including essays like Rich's, Terry and Calvert compile a provocative and comprehensive collection of pieces that inspire the critical examination of existing representations of sex and technology while reminding us that technology proffers vast opportunities for women.