Wired women

Posted on | February 4, 2008 | 7 Comments

Another book I picked up last month in Yungaburra was Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth Reba Weise’s Wired Women collection from 1996. Subtitled “Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace”, it gives an insight into the imaginaries and experiences of women heading online when Usenet and IRC were at a peak. Having come to the internet — and internet studies — much later than this (I was starting university in 1996), this almost counts as an historical document for me. From a genealogical point of view, it reflects a time before the knowledges we now take for granted, post-Google, post-blog, post web 2.0, post Yahoo!(?).

In our book, Catherine and I are writing a genealogy — rather than a history — of online culture in order to account for the specific forms of intimacy and community different platforms have enabled. But because of this, combined with our preference for ethnographic methods, our examples will be necessarily limited. For instance, Usenet has never been part of my experience of what the internet offers, and I don’t know anyone who uses newsgroups, or even Google groups, really. [Is this true? Please tell me if you do! I'd love to hear... or about why/why not.]

Yet from what I can tell, for people just a few years older than me, especially people working in cultural studies in different parts of the world, Usenet was one of the most formative and intense online experiences they’ve had, with particular groups migrating or splintering into subsequent alliances that continue today (this can be seen quite clearly in the way that Henry Jenkins’ fan/gender studies debate took place in a blog forum and on LJ; as well as in the ways that discussion took place outside of these “formal” channels).

Like e-bay, newsgroups are a major aspect of online life that exist but that I don’t “do” — as opposed to email lists, which I’ve “done”, even though I think the debate about whether they’re actually dead remains to be had. I can’t help but think that the people that dominated many previously active email lists and now diagnose them as “over” fail to acknowledge the accumulation of cultural and symbolic capital that ensued as a result of their previous activity, and which now affects their personal decision to participate (or not).

With LiveJournal, I’ve always felt like I’ve turned up to the party too late, and the fact that most of the people I know who did have one moved firstly to MySpace and then to Facebook tends to suggest this moment is gone, too. For whatever reason, something fundamental was missed or has changed; there’s been a “conjunctural shift”, perhaps (as Graeme Turner suggested in our conference panel back in December, cultural studies methods like conjunctural analysis have a lot to offer a field as apparently fluid and ephemeral as internet studies).

I’ll have more to say about this in the book of course. For the moment I wanted to share some quotes from Cherny and Weise’s collection. Is it the newness of the platforms at the time that allows some of the writers to capture so simply and beautifully the wonder and the warmth of online community? Or is it the fact that this sense of intimacy is now so obvious that we don’t bother to express it — unless it’s with some sort of further nifty application in mind? Here is Laurel Sutton:

Communication through computers can bring people together, regardless of their distance or location. For once in your life, you can be sure that people are paying attention to what you’re saying, and not the way you look or how nicely you dress. You contribute to a newsgroup from your quiet little room (or big, fluorescent-lighted work space) and within hours, or in minutes, you have responses from people you’ve never met but who are interested in what you have said. You sent out a message in a bottle, and you got an answer. Your voice was heard! (171)

A passage like this does much to explain the attractions of online life for women (particularly the notion of being listened to), just as this description from Weise paints a familiar — and curiously domestic — picture:

I slept days, worked nights, became so pale as to look sickly and barely saw another soul, but each night at the bureau, surrounded by empty desks and the velvet darkness outside, I logged in to WOW to read the stories of these women’s daily lives. Their words, written perhaps in the middle of the day, were waiting for me like a letter on the kitchen table.
[...]
In a way, the WELL, and WOW in particular, was like being given the gift of an extended family, something I had never experienced. Suddenly every night I had family dinner, I could sit back and nibble at my food while aunts and uncles and cousins argued and told stories about people I had never met, but whose experiences enriched me… Alone in a new city, I felt surrounded by a thousand aunts—a thousand aunts with modems (xii)

Other chapters, particularly those that tackle the male-dominance of hacker culture or software engineering, offer insider accounts of how or why women do or don’t survive. The following quote sheds light on so many things I’ve been thinking about, including those I’ve tried to articulate to Mark Deuze about gender in the gaming industry. Read today, Ellen Ullman’s chapter reinforces how much there is still to be written about the interplay between gender identity, communication and professional performance in online working environments (which are only increasing):

For an engineer, gaining comfort and skill in using these various aliases—and creating the right online persona for each—is a prerequisite for surviving in the profession. Everything happens there: design, technical argument, news, professional visibility; in short, one’s working life. Someone who can’t survive by email has to find another way to earn a living. If an engineer begins to insist on too many meetings or too many phone calls (womanish, interrupting sort of interactions), he or she will soon be seen as a nuisance and a “bad programmer.” Early in an engineer’s life, one learns to send mail (8).

But towards the end of the collection, Sutton’s take on the politics of online interaction left me feeling a bit flat. Quite rightly refusing the adolescent mentality of flaming, her advice for women marginalised by it is to “continue to carry on conversations with like-minded folks and have fun. I’m not going to let some stupid jerk spoil my cocktail party, especially when I can make him go away with one push of a button: The all-powerful Delete key”. (185)

This solution avoids some of the more complicated issues of harassment and uninvited intimacy that the rest of the collection clearly demonstrates affect women more than men. The retreat to conversations “with like-minded folks” also hints at the difficulties that internet studies, and its attendant politics, has faced from the outset.

For perhaps the wider issue here (as I would say) is one of class rather than etiquette, although Sutton does highlight the overlap between the two. What remains striking about the group of essays chosen for the collection is how much they reflect the white, Anglophone and educational bias that persists in publishing about frontier online communities, in spite of gender (and there is a recurring allusion to cyberspace as ‘the wild west’ in several of the chapters). It’s also the modesty of the pleasures and politics described that linger after reading the book. These are highly literate, highly educated and well networked women — the book itself is the result of existing connections in publishing — for whom being able to press “delete” to avoid a problem is as much a demonstration of agency as joining a Facebook group to promote a cause might be for women today.

In this sense, acknowledging their real historical value, I’m still hoping to find stories beyond the radius of these middle class on- and off-line communities to contextualize “the new realities” of cyberspace and gender — including judgments about what really is new, and what should be accepted as intractable in a world that need not manifest itself in quite the same ways on screen, or over time.

Category: Gender, Reading, Research, Web(log) Stuff

Comments

7 Responses to “Wired women”

  1. melgregg
    February 5th, 2008 @ 11:28 am

    Barry passed on this great piece by Julian Dibbell in Wired that tackles some of the issues mentioned above.

    And yet the story covers similar experiences to those recounted by Netta “grayarea” Gilboa in her piece, “Elites, Lamers, Narcs and Whores: Exploring the Computer Underground”. She vividly describes the anarchism of these subcultures, where ‘power shifts from day to day and hour to hour. You become instantly “elite” depending on who your friends are, what item you possess that everyone wants a copy of, or whom you just humiliated…’:

    Hackers gain credibility either by hanging around long enough to achieve seniority, by breaking the law in front of key people or by acting tough and picking on people so that no one will notice they have no skills. (103)

    Sounds a bit like any underground subculture, doesn’t it? Anyway, Gilboa goes on to say that ‘ethics don’t exist in this community because hackers never know what they will stumble across next and once something is perceived as possible there will always be those with the urge to accomplish it’ (110).

    Good luck with the Scientologists, and all that.

    Note in the Wired article how so many appeals are made to seriousness now that money and business interests are at stake. To expect that capital could offer a more convincing code of ethics or morality for these actors surely misses any lesson hackers have taught us over the past few decades.

  2. glen
    February 5th, 2008 @ 12:05 pm

    in terms of a genealogy, the way car enthusiasts have used the internet and different technologies of online communication has changed. For example, in the late-1990s and early 2000s the yahoo groups were all the rage. These then turned into online forums (round about 2002-2003), which have remained the dominant form of online communication.

  3. Jean
    February 5th, 2008 @ 8:56 pm

    I don’t know if you really want our individual reminiscences or not, but here’s about 1 and a half cents of mine.

    I used to use newsgroups heaps and heaps when i was first on the internet a lot at home (mid-1990s), but not really for social networking – mainly for advice, info and peer learning purposes around web design, computer music, composition, and other stuff I was into. There were always trolls and long, long argument threads and flame wars though, wherever you went. In fact by the time it was all dying in the arse there was nothing much but flame wars left. There was a move to Yahoo groups for a while, too.

    I think Google bought the entire usenet archive, which had previously been bought be Deja. Isn’t that where Google Groups started?

    BTW at the time I’m describing I was at uni for the second time and was reading heaps of stuff for my communications subjects about CMC, the WELL, fan communities and so on, but remember thinking that those more personal social networking uses were quite alien to my own experience – maybe because I really didn’t know anyone else using the internet that much, except for geeky tech-nerd blokes in the US somewhere! Plus: I was and remain a bit of a nerd.

    Anyway, like Glen is saying with the car enthusiasts, I guess those kinds of knowledge-sharing activities have become distributed across a range of forums, blogs and practice-specific sites, where it’s now a lot easier to showcase work, engage in practice, reflect, critique, and discuss in a more connected way.

  4. melgregg
    February 6th, 2008 @ 10:20 am

    Meanwhile, a lot of people without various ‘enthusiasms’ to lead them online earlier are only now discovering social networking sites and realising the potential for knowledge-sharing activities of all kinds… while early adopters, or as I understand Jean to mean, those with a different ‘ethic’ for exchange (based on the generosity/gift economy of shared interests but also an intrinsic ‘use value’ in that exchange) cannot bear the terms of access that come with mass uptake.

    Is this some new kind of digital divide?

  5. Jean
    February 6th, 2008 @ 4:09 pm

    Mel, as you know I absolutely understand that the accessibility and widespread uptake of personal social networking is leading large numbers of people to participate online, effecting some turbulence and unsettling of some routinized hierarchies in online (sub)cultures.

    The more vitriolic reactions against the mass popularisation of online participation from (mostly male) early adopters and the technorati frequently take a modernist tone – usually involving the trope of such participation being ‘meaningless’, ‘trivial’ etc; and all too frequently matching up neatly with dismissals of everyday popular culture. How often have we heard negative assessments of Facebook (and earlier, YouTube, and before that personal blogging) lumping the handy metonym “Britney Spears” in with some rant about narcissism and the pointlessness of sharing details of everyday life. In fact I noticed that round about the time I started blogging. See sweetly naive thoughts about that here. It’s OK to talk about these new sites once they’re Big Business, though. You only have to be a casual reader of Techcrunch (one of the main culprits) to realise that.That was exactly what I was arguing with Axel about a few months back.

    So I certainly would be disappointed if it appeared that I was trying to valorise the ‘use value’ of knowledge sharing and technological mastery above modes of online communication based around friendship and intimacy, but I also don’t want to lose sight of the potential for personal social networking and everyday creative expression to articulate to more democratic modes of cultural participation precisely *not* predicated on capital-k Knowledge, and capital-p Politics.

    What I do want to very critically think about is the terms of participation in particular commercial and non-commercial contexts; where participation is *always* bound up with particular business models, technological constraints and affordances, IP arrangements, and forms of surveillance and control. What enables and constrains participation and what enables and constrains agency and creativity aren’t the same thing. And there are always trade-offs between various competing dynamics in each scenario. I just can’t swallow the FB formula anymore. It’s not the terms of access that come with mass participation I can’t take, it’s the terms of access that come with Facebook.

    Gosh, that got long. Sorry. But it’s a core problem in my work as in my own little online life!

  6. jean
    February 6th, 2008 @ 4:12 pm

    oops, broken link to Axel’s blog. It should be: http://snurb.info/node/705

  7. M-H
    February 10th, 2008 @ 3:07 pm

    There is a site for knitters, crocheters and general yarnheads called Ravelry. It’s been operating less than nine months and it’s still in beta. There is a small ad at the bottom of each forum page and another small ad on the right-hand side of the personal pages – these cost retailers $5US a month for a large number of reproductions throughout the site. It’s designed (in Ruby I think) by a young man whose wife is a knitter. They have both now been able to give up their day jobs to work on this site. It is so far ahead of facebook as to be in a different universe. There are databases of patterns (commercial and free), yarns, designers, and retail suppliers. You can enter a project (pics linked from flickr) and link it to all its parameters; you can enter yarns you have stored, you can make lists of favourite yarns and patterns. You can look at the ways other people have used the yarn you have, or what a pattern you are interested in might look like when it’s made. And it has 75,000 members, growing by around 2000 every day. There are thousands of forums, based on region, religion, occupation, gender, TV preference, sexual preference – any kind of grouping you can imagine is there. I would say that email and yahoo groups for knitting and crochet would now be pretty much over.

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