So why does the lack of women matter - in addition to the obvious loss of opportunities?
A number of papers in the collection address this issue. Katherine R.B. Greyson looked at how students, given a choice, constructed pedagogic agents, and found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that they were most comfortable with avatars (I learnt the jargon is "Intelligent Agents" or "embodied Communication Agents") that resembled themselves in race, body shape etcetera. Yet existing agents tended to stereotypical gender designs and either white or racially ambiguous. Her study implies that if mono-cultural agents are producers, the result too will be monocultural, and geneder-stereotyped.
Another issue is addressed by Tanja Carstensen and Gabriele Winker, who look at the potential of the internet for the women's movement and activists - unlikely to be fully realised if insufficient numbers of women are at least comfortable with IT. I don't entirely agree with their conclusion that "women's policy networks use the Internet particularly for finding and providing information, but that interactive options such as forums and chats, and thereby potential for discussion and opinion-forming are little used. Political action via the net is almost completely non-existent."
In terms of actively spreading information I think of Women's E-news, in terms of campaigning of the Justice for Linda campaign, in terms of simple grassroots activism of Radical Geek's Bombing for Choice. I might even proclaim my own humble effort of the Carnival of Feminists as a networking effort.
Nonetheless, I think it would be fair to say that women’s groups have been slower to adopt the technology and its possibilities than would be ideal, and women bloggers, in particular, and for understandable reasons have not pushed themselves forward as far as they might have.
Which brings me to blogs - and the one paper on this subject. (Even conferences have a lag-time, and I'd hazard a guess the next will have a lot more.) The paper is by Tess Pierce who takes a heavily theoretical approach in trying to compare "cybergrrls" and "cyberfeminists", and finds "two conflicting narratives. One ... operates on a sophisticated theoretical level of feminism and technoscience, with Donna Haraway's cyborg as central character. The other integrates women's everyday lives with the actual use of communication for political organising."
Article comments
1 - John Daniel
Natalie,
First a question, then a couple of notes.
What do you mean by "The paper is by Tess Pierce who takes a heavily theoretical approach in trying to 'cybergrrls' and 'cyberfeminists'"? I'm guessing that is a typo, but I'm puzzled. What are you trying to say here?
I did not find Ms. Pierce's selection of blogs to be odd at all. The web is awash in blogs right now and you really have to search to find one with any substance. These three blogs are quite unusual and substantial. They were picked specifically to illustrate women using blogs to get around restrictive societies.
You are going to get a lot of of dry, theoretical analyses in papers like these. This was a peer-reviewed conference and if they weren't written the way they were, they wouldn't have been published at all. Eventually these papers will show up in books and articles meant for the general public. Until then, you have to keep an eye on the authors and papers that sound promising.
Unfortunately, you are wrong about the next conference having a lot more papers on blogs. This conference was the last one. A conference about women is always going to be hard to maintain. Combine that with the downturn in IT and you get no more money for conferences like this one. Welcome to Women's Studies.
2 - Natalie Bennett
First, not a typo: "cybergrrl" is part of a whole movement that has been around for decades, see for example here.
I'd agree these are excellent examples of "women using blogs to get around restrictive societies", they just seemed to sit rather poorly with frankly rather undigested discussion of Donna Haraway's cyborgs. (A theory that I find very interesting, as you'll see from my thesis on the realities of the wired world.)
And I have no objection to "dry, theoretical" analyses (indeed you'll find I'm an enthusiast for Pierre Bourdieu, among others), if they have something to say, and I'm afraid this didn't really go anywhere.
Nonetheless, as I think the review makes clear, I think there is a lot of valuable material in this book. And while its primary audience is undoubtedly meant to be academic, there's plenty of academically rigorous but entirely accessible material there.
And I'm very sorry to hear about the demise of the conference - any benefactors with a bit of spare cash around out there?
3 - John Daniel
I was referring to the phrase "in trying to". I do a lot of editing and that stuck out at me. I ignore stuff in quotes. In a related note, you should review your thesis and add unicode tags where appropriate. I promise I'll read it for content next :)
Thanks for the link to Pierre Bourdieu. He sounds interesting.
I guess academic writing is here to stay. It hasn't changed much over the years, except in quantity, and that isn't likely to change. The blog phenomena, however, is still a work in progress. I'm very interested in substantial analysis of blogs - something more than: Cool! I'll start my own.
The blog Notes from an Iranian Girl, referenced by Ms. Pierce, is one of my favorites. She said what she wanted to say and then she stopped. Brilliant.
4 - Natalie Bennett
Apologies John, you are right there is a missing word: it should be "in trying to _link_. I'll go in and fix it now. As for my thesis, you caught me in the middle of a total revamp of the website. The front and some other pages have been done but the thesis hasn't - I'll do it tonight so you can try again tomorrow!
And I think academia does have a problem with what I call the "wired world" - the rate of working in each is totally disproportionate. The answer, really, is to develop an academic world of blogging, or similar technologies, but given the conservatism of academia, that is likely to be, again, a slow process.
5 - Natalie Bennett
Actually, make that missing word "compare", as I have now done.