Libby Brooks:FIRST PERSON
You’ve got Mail, a romantic comedy, stars Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan as bookshop owners who hate each other in real life but fall in love in cyberspace. Plausibility of plot and sex appeal aside, the film delivers one interesting contemporary comment: it is now as likely for a woman to rush home to check her e-mail as for a man.
Indeed, a recent study found that as many women as men, and nearly half of all regular users, considered themselves addicted to the Internet. Dr Helen Petri, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, who surveyed 445 Internet users from around the world as part of her research, was initially surprised at her findings. “You don’t expect women to be obsessed with the Net because it appears to be such a solitary activity. But they use it for chat activities, communication – the sorts of things that 20 years ago they’d have done around a kitchen table.”
Internet use among women has risen steadily since the early Nineties. In the United Kingdom, women make up more than a quarter of all Internet users and 52% of members of leading service provider AOL are women, with those in their forties accounting for its fastest-growing market.
As more and more businesses go online, women have gained crucial access to new technology, while its use in education has also increased. But the forthcoming Durlacher Quarterly Internet Report reveals that 30% of UK residential users are women and AOL research identifies communication, convenience, online shopping and parenting support as key areas that attract women.
Melanie Howard, of think-tank Future Foundation, argues that the generalisation that women cannot get on with technology is framed by a male- dominated perspective on information technology. “Women work on deliverables and practical benefits. They will not be dictated to or driven by the design of technologies and services provided on technological platforms, but will bend and subvert it to their own uses. In this respect, women have no problem using technology as long as it serves their purpose and their own lives.”
Commentator and author Melanie McGrath accepts that women are traditionally slower than men to adopt technology. “They are not creatures who enjoy tinkering under the hood.”
An increasing growth of informal networks has been an important factor in encouraging women online. “Women are recommending technology and packages to one another. It gives women the opportunity not to be isolated. If you have small kids or are elderly, it provides that casual contact you don’t get when you are unable to do routine things.”
At its inception, the Internet was invested with a hatful of expectations, particularly by women. Many believed the Web would provide a fresh new arena for political organisation and personal interaction.
Sadie Plant, who founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick University, wrote her acclaimed book, Zeros And Ones, about women and the Net. She developed her theories on the symbiotic evolution of women and machines through frustration at the Western, white male clich of the computer age. By arguing that, as machines become self-organising, so do women, Plant concluded that the technology to which they are intuitively linked can undermine patriarchy and traditional gender definition.
Plant traces women’s intimacy with machines from their involvement with looms and weaving to their experience with the QWERTY keyboard, and questions the traditional feminist reading of technology as hostile to women. “There has been an accidental conspiracy between the classic misogyny that says masculinity equals technical skills and residual eco-feminist theory,” she insists.
It was Sigmund Freud who famously said that women had invented nothing, except perhaps weaving. In Zeros And Ones, Plant finds a direct connection: Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, worked on the very first computer with Charles Babbage, basing its design on the Jacquard loom. And it was Beatrix Potter whose analysis of lichens gave rise to the term “Internet”. And Grace Hopper who developed the key computer language Cobol in the 1940s and invented the word “bug” for a computer glitch.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a 16-year-old girl from County Cork recently flummoxed scientists when she designed a new e-mail code that is 10 times faster than the one currently used to convert confidential information.
McGrath, however, remains sceptical about cyberfeminism and the concept of the Web as a women-positive space. “All the Net can do is reflect the outside world. It is just a medium and the ways in which women use it are similar to the ways in which they conduct themselves in real life. Power relations are the same. For example, the ways men present knowledge in chat rooms are authoritative, while women’s are tentative.”
Organised feminism has generally been at such a low ebb, notes Howard, that new forms of access and information are unlikely to make a difference. “Technology will serve political movements rather than create them. If and when feminism is revived, then doubtless women will use technology to network effectively within the umbrella provided.”
The Internet cannot provide a new way of playing out gender roles, McGrath argues, and women do suffer harassment on the Net.
Avedon Carol is a regular Net user and a member of Feminists against Censorship. “What I see most is women using the Net as an easy means of networking at a non-commercial level. Many women are building websites that are mostly biographical and plenty are doing it to promote causes as well. Surprisingly, women appear in equal numbers to men on Internet relay chat,” she adds, “where quite a few seem to be there principally for sex. Many don’t even want to meet their partners. They just want to do cybersex on a casual basis.”
For Camille Paglia, Internet intellectual and contributor to online Salon magazine, the Internet is nothing short of revolutionary. “Wherever it goes, it brings democracy. Women have an innate facility of talk and the Net becomes an extension of women’s historical connection to the telephone. The Net allows outsiders of any kind to have a voice.”