Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/Rosie Cross/Women and IT 1

Text File | 1994-09-18 | 42KB | 753 lines

As promised..


PARADIGM SHIFT
==============


Transcript of Paradigm Shift
A Radio National Feature.
Part 1 of Women and Information Technologies.
Produced and written by Fiona Martin and Rosie Cross
for __The Coming Out Show__ on behalf of the
Australian Womens Broadcasting Co-Operative
Copyright 94.
e-mail [e-mail]
============================================

Joell Abbott
I really see computers as, you know, that's where the world is going.
They are the future and I think that unless we want to be associated
with computers the way we are with electronic typewriters, I think we
have to do a little more than just a little word processing and the
occasional spreadsheet.

Futur Sex
I'm becoming a technology addict. I definitely wasn't when I started here.
I knew nothing about any of the technology. I didn't know what a CDROM was,
I didn't know what a BBS was, I didn't know what it meant to get on-line.
But being here has definitely turned me on to it. It's very addictive.

Script/Fiona Martin
If you're confused by the jargon, don't panic. These women are swimming
in pools of electronic data. They're part of the information technology
revolution. A revolution which turns over billions of dollars per year
for the companies who sell us new ways to get our message around the globe.
New info techs are touted as something that will radically reshape our
society, but will they really connect us to the utopian global village?
Over the next two weeks we'll be navigating our way around a worldwide
network of women who work with these technologies. They question many of
the assumptions being made about our wired future, and they're changing
the way women interact with technology. A paradigm shift.
Moira Corby is a new media technology artist at CITRI, that's the
Collaborative Information Technology Research Institute in Melbourne.

Moira Corby
My own experience of working with computers in general and technology
in general has been that as a woman i approach my medium in a different
way to some men.I don't like to generalise on the basis of gender but
the kind of men I've been dealing with since I've been working with
computers are mainly technicians and maybe some computer engineers and
their approach is quite mathematical and gung ho and let's take it to
the max and then go onto the next new thing. Whereas I feel very
comfortable working with one package to try to get my concepts out as
much as I can. And I still continue to push the particular software to
its capacity and I'm forever having to ask the technicians to bail me
out of problems or to extend their enquiries into the nature of the
program or the equipment.

Zoe Sofoulis
A lot of technology we think of with a capital T, and we automatically
label it as male, or masculine and so one of the problems would be a
woman working with the technical equipment feels she's working in a male
domain, or is somehow having to be a man or something like that, and so
that can produce all kinds of conscious and unconscious obstacles.

Script/Fiona Martin
Zoe Sofoulis works at Murdoch University in Western Australia, and
she's developing a feminist critique of high tech psychology.

Zoe Sofoulis
A second problem I think, and one of the biggest ones I'm identifying
is that there is a certain presumption about what the best way of relating
to technology is. Assumptions about how you're supposed to relate to
technology have been very much male defined and have got even more so
in the recent developments in electronic technologies. And so women who
don't have that same fetishistic unambivalent love of technologies, or
even men, somehow feel that they're not competent in the equipment or
that they don't have the cutting edge type of approach to it. So styles
of relating to technology are quite important. Another area of course
would be not so much what's often thought of as women's technophobia,
but rather what my co-researcher Virginia Barratt and I have described
as tech-headophobia - women's reluctance to and loathing of the kinds
of communicational styles and attitudes that they encounter amongst the
men who are surrounding the high tech machines that they want to have
access to.

Sue Harris (Artsnet)
I suppose for me, when I first started to look at the technology that
was in existence and I looked at the people who were using that , and a
lot of these people were men, so I moved around and worked my way around
into a situation where I could get my hands on the technology and I was
encouraged by these men to do that. But it was very much an issue of
learning the language, learning the dominant paradigm, how you speak
about the technology. And I found that just by listening to the people
talking I could pick up some of that language and it's just like car
culture, you know, if you can talk about your double overhead cans and
things like that, then you get into the situation where you can use some
of those languages and drop some of those words into the conversation,
suddenly the whole knowledge scene opens up to you and they're much
more willing to talk about and share their understandings of technology
with you.

Script/Fiona Martin
I'm in the lab at JNA Telecommunications, which is an Australian outfit
which researches and designs equipment for companies around the world.
Some of their Australian clients include Telecom and they also work for
the Westpac computing network. Now, JNA has women at all levels of the
company, on management through to software engineering and production
and today I'm talking with Catherine Camillari who is a software engineer
and Judith Hopper who is the manager of the Continuing Improvement Dept.
Catherine, what fascinates you about new technologies ?

Catherine Camillari
What is so fascinating about it is the fact that there is so much of it.
It's almost impossible for any one person to keep up with the whole
breadth and width of it, it's just so vast. In general I find it
intellectually challenging. That's really the thing I suppose, that's
what it was about maths that I liked so much, and physics.

Script/Fiona Martin
And Judith Hopper, what about you? You have a technical background and
you're obviously fascinated by new technologies. Would you describe
yourself as a tech-head ?

Judith Hopper
Not an engineer. This is a stance I've maintained all my life. I'm a
computer programmer, that's my background. I actually came from the
Research and Development Dept in this company into my current role,
and no I don't think I'd describe myself as a tech-head, but then I
don't think I'd describe anyone I liked as a tech-head. My background
is technical, however.

Script/Fiona Martin
So you're obviously fascinated by technology in some way, shape or form.
Why ?

Judith Hopper
I originally come from a microbiology field, as a matter of fact, and
I fell in love with programming because it's such a neat means of
creating patterns. It's the same in microbiology, you look for patterns
in bugs, while I look for patterns in code, hopefully without bugs and
I just found it rather fascinating what you could do with those patterns
and the outcome you would get. Technology itself I regard more as a tool,
a means to an end than any inherent fascination with it, except for the
programming which I like.

Script/Fiona Martin
There have been a lot of assumptions made about the way that people are
fascinated by technology. They think that fast is better and more memory
is more powerful and it's been suggested that these are fairly male
concepts. Would you agree with that ?

Catherine Camillari
The meglomania bit? I wouldn't necessarily say is exclusively male
because I think some traditional male traits are in males and females.
For example we have several women here who like driving V8s and turbos.
I don't really think of it that much until people actually ask, although
people insist that that is the way you always think. I quite often just
disregard that and quite often think, well, this is the way people think.

Judith Hopper
It's not an area where we pay a great deal of attention to gender
differences. You're a good engineer or you're not a good engineer, or
you're an engineer or you're not, or you're a programmer, which is a
form of life higher than an engineer usually, but as far as whether
you're female or not, it's not something that rarely comes into the
equation very often.

Amara Graps
Well, I'm Amara Graps I work as a contractor as NASA Ames Research Centre.
The company I work for is called Sterling Software. They are a bunch of
programmers who assist in, oh any kind of computing that NASA Ames needs.
So what I help the scientists do is see their data. They're good at the
theory and collecting their data, and they want to interpret it, and I can
help in the interpretation as well as teach them how to use a computer to
really see what their data means. I think there is a paradigm here. I
don't work in as female a manner as many other women that I know that
aren't in the sciences. In the sciences we're very logical, we're not
very emotional. And in order to succeed in the sciences you kind of have
to be this way.

Script/Rosie X
What sort of gender ratios do you work with ?

Amara Graps
Oh, it's pretty poor. In my building there are atmospheric as well as
astrophysics and planetary scientists. We have about 250 people there.
And out of that I'm guessing 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 is female. Now that
includes the secretaries and the other technicians, so people like me
who are more the scientist, the ratio is a lot less.

Maria Fernandez
I was reading mainly about work that has been done in first world
countries about how women are integrated in production and in the use
of these technologies and it has been found that women participate more
in the electronic industries and in computing related activities than
in any other aspect of technology. However, there was a catch. What
was discovered is that these women who have graduated from really
prestigious college programs...still occupy lower positions than men,
that they are paid less and that a lot of them are actually not in
positions of making decisions about the technology, that they are mainly
in the maintenance or data input and so forth, which still leaves the
industry in the hands of men. This is why I think it is really important
for women to become involved in the production of scientific discourse
about the technology and not only the use.

Script/Fiona Martin
Maria Fernandez is from Nicaragua. She lives and works in the U.S. and
studies the cultural impact of info techs on developing countries. Info
tech industries thrive on cheap labour. Many of our commercial data
bases are keyed in by armies of women in the Phillippines and Korea.
Many components for computing hardware are assembled by migrant women
in California's Silicon Vally sweatshops, and since the late '80's Maria
has seen this trend move south of the border to Latin America, hurried
along by the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Maria Fernandez
At least in Mexico I think 75% of all factories were devoted to the
assembly of electronic components and electronic objects I guess. And
now I think with the Free Trade Agreement there is what another woman
who has been doing research on Mexico particularly has labelled the
Mexican Silicon Valley. The labour force is usually under 25 and it's
mainly women because they have smaller hands to deal with small components,
and they also accept lower wages and they're presumably more obedient,
so that, you know, there is a great deal of exploitation. This is of
course nothing new. It happened in textile factories, it happened in any
sort of industrialisation. I think that women, particularly women of
developing countries, have been taken advantage of and I think there is
no doubt that if you find cheaper, less responsibility to your workforce
in other countries that factories are going to move and that is one of
the objectives of the north American Free Trade Agreement. And so there
is a dual thing happening. On the one hand there is the argument that
in so called post industrialised countries labour is no longer a
neccessity and it's no longer the primary means of production in the
society because everything is information. That's really not true. What
is really happening is that the labour, the factories are just simply
moved out of sight.

Script/Fiona Martin
So we're building, really , the Western countries are building a myth of
this clean industry, this clean wonderful revolutionary industry that
doesn't include a large part of the world.

Maria Fernandez
That's right. I think it's a lot easier to be enthusiastic, I don't
mean that people should be pessimistic, but at least try to think about
the effects that these technologies are having elsewhere. And I think
that just as, for example, when during the fifties perhaps it was
unthinkable to think about environmental consciousness because progress
was what everybody was really enthusiastic about - that led to really
disastrous results. So I would like ideally for people to think about
both aspects - the really wonderful and liberating aspects of the
technology, and what can be done to make it less exploitative.

Script/Fiona Martin
While women in developing countries are exploited by infotech industries,
women in the first world are demanding more and more of the goods they
produce. If you have access to information technologies, you're
constantly paying out to update your computers and even then the latest
hardware or software mightn't be enough to satisfy your machine dreams.

St. Jude
Machines disappoint me.(Laugh) But I leave any of these warez, hard or
soft, and I've been thinking about this and it came across as a song -
I got the intermediate oh so inadequate present technology blues. It
just doesn't work now, it just doesn't work. I'm nostalgic for the future.
I want the stuff we can dream of but we can't be it yet. We need band
width, we need high res, we need ultra high res. We want to be able to
see the ultra violet flowers the humming birds can see and smell them
the way the humming birds smell them, right ?

Zoe Sofoulis
I think what is happening now is a realisation on the part of several
women who initially worked with the idea, and this was popular in the
mid 70's I suppose, that technology was masculine and that there was
rejection of technologies as equivalent to death and masculinity and
so on. But instead I think what's emerging now is the realisation that
that kind of view is very disempowering for women because it just means
that we chop ourselves off from access to those means in media wherein
which we might exercise and gain power in our culutre, and power to
shape the future. So what the paradigm is shifting to now I think, at
least amongst theorists and artists and people directly concerned in
this, is a shift towards more conscious use of technology and a
critical appreciation of it, and often when we talk about technologies
we think of high tech and information technologies and so on and I
suppose that's where a paradigm shift is happening - that women are
seeing that resources that these are resources that should and can be
available for creative use and expression and communication in women's
hands.

St. Jude
The ordinary discourse of women in technology bores me because it
doesn't seem to me that people are the same possibilities. I'm worried
about the future and therefore I have to consider what happens to the
14 year old lonesome girl who I identify with because I remember exactly
how I was at 14, and if I had had the kind of basic training that I
could have had by being on-line, I would have managed my life completely
differently. I would have lived as a free woman.

Sadie Plant
The word cyberfeminism I started using quite independently of any other
use I've come across. I'd never seen the word used before and I'd really
started to notice some sort of alliance really developing between women
and the machinery, the new technology that they're using and it seemed
to me that women really loved working with new technology but often
feeling quite guilty about it, because it was seen to be toys for the
boys and somehow that they shouldn't really like it. And it seemed to me
that this is a really tragic situation and that women should be encouraged
to go with their desire, basically, and to get more and more involved
in the machinery that they're obviously getting to like.

Script/Fiona Martin
Cyberfeminist Sadie Plant lectures at the University of Birmingham in
England. She is writing a new book, 'Cybernetic Hookers: Women, Drugs
and Intelligent Machines'.

Sadie Plant
When I then started thinking about the history of feminism and the
history of technology, it occured to me that there really is a long
standing relation between the stage of development of information
technology and also the state of women's liberation. And it's almost
as though you can map them on to each other historically, so just as
the machines get more intelligent and more advanced so really women
get more liberated.

Josepha Haverman
I haven't needed these movements and I think that if all these people
whether they're minorities, or women, or old people, young people, would
just take responsibility for themselves, I think we'd start shaping up.

Script/Rosie X
You don't feel there's a feminist technology movement at the moment ?

Josepha Haverman
I don't even understand how they can have that view. You started a
question about not many women doing computers.I think it more true of
not many people over 50 starting with that technology, although it's
not so unreasonable in my case. When I used to go to user's group
meetings I was suprised at the democratic set, the type of people who
would come to these meetings and how there were a lot of women and
they weren't always wives. Very often wives would be coming not only
with their husbands but they would participate, they were doing this
together and each were doing some sort of different thing within the
same technologies, using the same computer probably, but there were a
lot of women involved from the beginning. One of the major programmers
was a woman Admiral for the Navy. There's nothing in using technology
that is keeping women out except women.

Script/Fiona Martin
Josepha Haverman a CDROM consultant who got passionate about computers
later in life....Exceptional women have changed the direction of computing,
like the late Admiral Grace Hopper. She developed COBALT which is a
major programming language and she also gave us the word 'bug'. According
to author Dale Spender though, there are many more women who find
information technologies out of their reach.

Dale Spender
I think  there's a generational difference. I think women of my age quite
frequently are frightened of change and I can understand that too because
women of my age, which is 50, feel that we are in charge of print. We
know how to use it, we're mistresses of it in many ways. Girls have been
good at reading and writing, we're at ease with that. And just as we get
into positions of authority and influence and decision making, what happens?
its taken away. And it isn't that you've got technophobia among women
like that, you've got fear of being deskilled, you've got fear of the
unknown and I've dealt with some of my friends who've made claims like,
I'm never going to become computer literate, I'm never going to touch one
of those things, and I've actually said, if you're going to make statements
like that you should be ashamed of yourself. What would have happened
if women had said in the sixteenth century, I'm not going to touch one
of those alien things called a book, I'm not going to have anything to
do with it. It's a stupid statement... keep it to yourself if you have
to even think like that, but let's deal with information anxiety, let's
deal with change, let's deal with the fear of being deskilled, let's
look at the way we can extend our skills in a way that's co-operative,
that enhances our life rather than this rigidity about not wanting to
change. Now that's very different from 20 year olds who have grown up
with computers and who do understand the role that they're playing in
the future.

Moira Corby
I certainly feel that computers, because they're so new to everybody,
offer some kind of gender equality advantage. I know that the younger
generation are onto them and understand them. I actually know a five
year old who can a work a computer really well and she's great.

Joell Abbott
I just really hope that these kinds of programs encourage more women to
participate. If you hit the wrong key on a keyboard the world isn't going
to end, you know, relax, enjoy it,it's fun. The whole personal computer
movement started out with a group of guys at MIT who liked to play with
trains. It's a strange connection but true. They were the train club,
the amateur train club, and they got into playing around with the big
computers and the next thing we know, god, we have computers sittting
on our desks at home and work. It's great, I love it. It's a wonderful
time to be alive and it's a wonderful time to have access to the Net.

Spider Redgold
I'm Spider Redgold, and I'm talking today because I'm a freelance
computer boffin woman who works implementing data bases and training
people to use the Internet and use our Net and electronic mail, so I am
very interested in making electronic communication accessible because
it is the way that we will talk to the world...To empower women they
need access and they need to deal with technophobia. They need to deal
with technophobia in a general scene, they need to be encouraged to
deal with technophobia that says, oh I'm just a woman so I need a Mac
not an IBM. You know it's a big thing that women believe they can only
use Macs, and it's simply not true. And it's been in the interests of
Macintosh to continue that myth. It's changing now, but four years ago,
you know, women were paying much much more for sub standard computing
because they believed that were too stupid too deal with IBM compatibles.
We use sewing machines, we use ovens, we look after children, we drive
cars, we are completely capable. There's absolutely no reason that we
can't use computers except that women are convinced that if they didn't
do maths at university they must not understand computers, and even
now education authorities are realising that mathematical skills have
nothing to do with computing excellence.

Brenda Laurel
The idea that girls are technophobic is a cultural myth that is based on,
I believe, some cognitive differences that have been wildly exaggerated
by cultural stereotypes and also based on the fact that the applications
that we see on computers, but also the computers themselves from the
keyboards to their operating systems have been designed by men for
certain kinds of outcomes with certain perceptual and cognitive and
cultural standards in mind. We have a technology that is deeply gendered
male as it currently exists and it seems to me that what happens is that
the cultural myth blames that on the females, as it does in so many
other parts of our lives. As women it is suddenly our fault that we
don't particularly love the stuff and take to it like ducks to water,
well that's not suprising. If you recall there was a similar myth about
girls and sports 20 or 30 years ago, that girls didn't like sports,
they didn't like physical activity, that they weren't competitive.
There was a whole host of cultural mythology around sport, and in
the United States it took a lot of really dedicated liberals working
very hard for a long time to effect change at the highest level of
government to get sports for girls in public schools funded at the
same level as sports for boys. Now, 20 years later, it's hip, feminine,
attractive and appropriate for girls to be athletic and to participate
in team sports. It's a radical change in the ethos of femininity in this
country. Now we can't go out and force someone to pass legislation
that says, you will make computing environments and operating systems
that girls like and you will stop using male primate dominance heirarchy
as your model for  how a file system works, but what we can do is
build examples that demonstrate alternatives and which are in fact
attractive to this wildly neglected group of people.

Script/Fiona Martin
Brenda Laurel, a designer of virtual reality environments at the famous
Interval Research in California...Gender and computer design is the
subject of a big debate. Katie Hafner is the co-author of  'Cyberpunk,
Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier'

Katie Hafner
In fact I've written about this quite a bit, this, what they call gender
gap, and how women view computers versus how men view them. Women use
them and men love them, and men carry on an almost obsessive love
relationship with a computer the way they do with their cars or with
stereos, and that's something that could change in fact, if video games
were geared more toward girls, because it's the boys you see playing
video games and you could get women as involved with computers as men
if you start at an early age.

Script/Fiona Martin
Do you find video games interesting ?

JNA..Programmer
NO. My friends at uni, every break they were always playing the computer
games. It bores me to tears playing computer games. I don't mind writing
the programs for them, now that's fun. Actually having to play the game ?
No. They're too slow, I find, and repetitive and once you've worked
them out why would you want to play them again.

Dale Spender
One of the things I've seen being constructed in just about every school
I've been in is computer anxiety among girls. Now this is a very difficult
thing for me to say, and I'm sure people will give me the benefit of the
doubt for a minute, but it is the case in schools these days that girls
are getting too much praise. And what's happening is, you see, that the
boys do things on the computers and the teachers don't even pay any
attention to it because boys are expected to be able to do these things
on computers, and the girls will do something and the teachers will say,
Oh isn;t that good, aren't you wonderful and the girls look around and
think, aren't I expected to be able to do this, why is she suprised that
I can do this. And I can see that being constructed as a sort of future
technophobia for girls and of course it's reinforced by the boys attitude
towards computers, that it's an extension of their right arm anyway. And
there's just about every school in Australia has to have a computer
policy so that girls get access to it.

Script/Fiona Martin
And also a function of the games too. The way the games are constructed
because a lot of your computer skills are learnt from playing games.

Dale Spender
When teachers say to me, the girls aren't interested, and they show me
the software, I mean for goodness sake, the girls are showing absolute
rational judgement. It's the boys who are idiots if they are interested
as far as I'm concerned, and that's another point I'd come back to about
the need for the database and for the information, but at the moment
what's being taught in schools, in educational institutions, the games
that are available, assume the world is filled wih teenage boys. I mean
there are lots of pockets of things that women are doing but there is
no way that they are competing with the sorts of games that are currently
there. You see it's not even consistent with some of the girls values,
because where boys are very keen on there being a winner, that has to
be the outcome, a winner and a loser, much of girls socialisation and
much of girls values in the past have been, everyone having a turn,
things turning out alright in the end. One of the reasons girls loved
novels or stories is because it's a resolution, it's an ending, things
are okay, things are fixed up in the end. Now most of the games are
winners or losers, someone's ended, somenone's dead. It's very savage
in contrast.

Script/Fiona Martin
There are worse things in the world than technophobia or having your
starship blown into another galaxy. There's the speed factor, the pace
at which things are developing. New design developments are being made
every microsecond, and there's heavy international competition across
the I.T. industry. The hidden cost is health. Amara Graps has Carpeltunnel
Syndrome, an overuse injury.

Amara Graps
In my case, I have bad work habits of being very, very intense. I would
stare at the computer screen for two hours without stopping and I wouldn't
even notice that my shoulders were kind of aching, my wrists were getting
sore, and so I developed these methods of working because I had such
a drive to suceed in my field, and this is a result, so you have to
take care of yourself. It's funny, with this Carpeltunnel syndrome that
I have, I've been looking at all these ergonomic designs for keyboards
and input devices and chairs and stuff, and there are a lot of men in
this field, and there are men with this problem, but it seems like people
that are talking the most about it, like there's this Sore Hand News Group
that I've been reading the last month, there's an awful lot of women and
it's the women that are pushing for the ergonomic design and the new ways
of workng at a work station, and I think that's really fun.

Spider Redgold
Silicon Valley in California has a huge rate of birth defects from the
cleaning fluids they use to control static on the mother boards and chip
technology. There are alternatives that are chosen not to be be used,
always with these concerns there's who makes the decisions and that
their decisions are made for the profitability of the corporation rather
than the safety of the earth. I refused to have anything to do with
computers for many years because I used to think that by not having
anything to do with them I could perhaps in some way halt it, but that's
no longer possible. We are not going to stop.

Dale Spender
At the moment it's very clear that we're creating haves and have nots
on a grand scale. And there certainly were haves and have nots when it
came to print, which is one of the reasons we got State Libraries,
because it was recognised not everybody could purchase books and the
States had an obligation to provide people with that sort of information.
And maybe that's the role that State Libraries have to take on in the
electronic era, that they have to provide 500 computer terminals for
people to sit at. We certainly have to look at the ways that some people
haven't got access to information other people have, and I think that
we have to see it as a form of insider trading, that people who know
things are able to use it to gain wealth and people who don't are going
to be completely locked out of the discourse of our society, and I think
the issue of access and equity is something that just has to be raised
on a national level.

Maria Fernandez
I recently had a conversation with someone in which I was bringing up
some of these issues and she said, well, there is no question that in a
few years time there will not be this problem becasue the technology
will be spread all over, and you know things are improving in third
world countries, and I felt like saying, would you like a ticket to
Biafra, you know.

Fiona Martin
Or to Nicaragua?

Maria Fernandez
Yes, exactly, to Nicaragua. Yeah, I think it's difficult to think globally
on these issues. I think of course there are arguments about technologies
become cheaper and cheaper and therefore they will be accessible to
everyone. I doubt that. I think particularly with computer technologies
you depend on an infrastructure that is no tthere, so regardless of how
cheap the technology is, it's not possible to use it. You know, you can,
in some of these places, you don't even count on whether you have
electricity today, so how are you going to use your computer, even if you
got it for 3cents at the market. One thing that I think of is telephones.
Mexico has had telephones since the end of the nineteenth century, yet if
you leave Mexico City you will find yourself in considerable trouble to
find a telephone, and the Mexican government has this program of
offereing people who have stores, I don't know if it's a tax deduction
or certain incentives, so they let the public use their phones because
it's a real problem to actually get access to a phone in some areas. So
that's a technology that is 100 years old.

Sadie Plant
Even though there is still obviously a huge access problem, it seems to
me implicit (really) in all the economic and technical processes there is
again almost an automatic and inevitable process of unintentional access
so that there's almost a split between intentions and effects, I think.
People are still intending, if you take the military or big corporations
or any existing vested interest, still intend the technology to be used
for them. However, the effect is quite different. It seems that the more
that people try to keep it for themselves, the more paradoxically, they
end up spreading it around. And so many times on the access issue I think
that, now technology is almost becoming like Coca Cola, That it's not
really a problem of getting access, you know, the real problem will be
avoiding it if you wanted to.


Minh McCloy
The government's got no policy on this acceessing of the Australian
population to this extraordinary resource and it's starting to show,
and it's going to be devastating in all those terms we're supposed to be
improving on in the 90's - the Asian contact, and the global communications
and the value added - our failure to access the information that's on
the Net and the people and the communications is going to slow us right
down unless we just come to terms with it. Rupert Murdoch said, I heard
him say when he was living in Australia sometime in the last 12 months,
that the government should take sales tax off all the hardware and just
let the kids sit down and start hacking and playing and we would have a
software industry really quickly that would be second to none in the world.
And I really agree with him, I mean I don't often agree with Rupert Murdoch
but this one I really agree with him, and I've waited for a debate or a
response, you know, like in the Australian, for the paper to pick that
up and explore the notion of dropping tax on this late twentieth century
tool, the computer. Nothing, absolutely nothing. It does make a lot of
sense. Women would have more access to the hardware so it would be cheaper
which in turn will give them access to the Net.

Script/Fiona Martin
MinMcCloy, who is a Net cruising computer educator. The Net she's talking
about is the Internet, the world's biggest computer network, and of
course Rupert Murdoch wasn't being benevolent with his suggestion. He
now owns Delphi, a commercial gateway to the Internet. And the other big
players are getting bigger. Time-Warner is now allied with the video
games giant Sega. So maybe we'll soon see artistic statements like the
'In Bed with Madonna ' game.

Zoe Sofoulis
I think it's possible to say that the men whose works get paid attention
to, who's ideas and quotations are taken up and repeated in art, media and
on television documentaries and things about the field, the ones who are
paid attention to certainly are the ones who go for the high tech futuristic
models and have tended, at least to date, to fetishise the propertise of
the equipment rather than to maintain their interest in how that equipment
might be critically deployed in ways for self expression and critical
reflection upon society, and that kind of thing in the way that one expects
artists to normally do. And so one heard complaints about the TISEA that
was held in Sydney in 92, that's the Third International Symposium on
Electronic Art, complaints that there there was a lot of fetishism of
the equipment itself and of things like the algorithm, the magic formula
that people use to produce pretty computer patterns and electronic
wallpaper and not enough attention to the ways that equipment and these
technological processes within it might be used in critical engagement
and relection upon the high tech society.

Maria Fernandez
The technology itself is the aesthetic. There are some works that are
included in shows, some that are highly valued because they use high
technology. Now what that means in terms of third world countries is
that they will be, they will resume the position that they had , let's
say, during modernism, in which they will be completely left out. They
will be judged as producing things that are not aesthetically competent.

Script/Fiona Martin
You mean like they'll be looked at as culutral artefacts like, oh what
a lovely folk painting or whatever ?

Maria Fernandez
Exactly, some of that, but also I think in my view, an unreasonable
assumption on the part of critics and practitioners in first world
countries, that everyone would like to use the technology. But that's
not the case, you know, some people just choose not to work with this
technology. They don't like it.

Zoe Sofoulis
There are ways to have fun with the technology. Here in Australia,
women artists are using it to explore new ideas about women's image.
I think a number of women artists, certainly that I've spoken to or
who's work I've seen so far, are rejecting of what you could call a
certain western idealist and male centred dynamic of pursuing the
transcendence of the body and the disappearance of the body. Instead
of doing that, I think a lot of women artists are using new technologies
in order to explore interiorities of body in order to go against the
machine's own bias and to do what Linda Dement describes as, puts some
guts into the machine. In other words, they find themselves confronting
a technology like a computer or virtual reality systems that seems so
much to promise disembodiment along these conventional masculine minds
and rather than do that, they will want to use the technology in order
to celebrate organic forms in thoroughly embodied states. For example,
the art group VNS Matrix uses extremely vivid physical metaphors to
describe computer space and cyberspace and say things like, the
clitoris is a direct line to the matrix.

VNS MATRIX
There are four women in VNS Matrix and we work on a very collaborative
level, and we sort of really maintian that. We're very determined to
maintain our identity as feminists, in particular cyberfeminists.

Fiona Martin
What is cyberfeminism ?

VNS MATRIX
It's a type of feminism which looks at the future of technology and the
implications of new technologies for women and also how women can be
involved in cyberspace and virtual reality and what we're really wanting
to do is talk about the body, the female body, how the female body
interacts with technology, how the female body can have a presence
within cyberspace and what the future body is. I think the area of
cyberculture and cyberfeminism is very conceptual, and it's quite ethereal.
It's the whole area about imagining and one of the reasons why we formed
as a group was that we were really sick of seeing very fetishised and
stereotypical images of women created by new technologies and we just
felt it  was really important to balance these images with really
positive and affirmaive images of women and to actually create a model
of woman in the future, an alternative model than some sort of fembot
or technobimbo.

Fiona Martin
The hourglass figure in a kind of spacesuit ?

VNS MATRIX
Yeah the sort of cyber sexpot. ...All New Gen is our interactive computer
game and there are a whole bevy of characters. I suppose my favourite
would probably be Gen, All New Gen herself, because she's an indeterminite
character who manifests in various ways, sometimes as an intelligent mist
or as a hostile mucus, and so she's a great character to play with because
she has no fixed identity and I think as we develop she will take on
different characters.

Sadie Plant
Well, I think actually we'll see big changes in the whole notion of
basically what it is to be a human. I think women are just beginning to
realise that they've really obviously had to have been invested in the
definition of what it is to be human, which has very much been a male
definition. Even the very term homosapien, it really does mean 'the man',
and as there are increasingly other sorts of intelligent commodities or
intelligent machines or active machines, I think the whole notion of
agency gets challenged and I think women will start questioning the
whole notion of what it is to be human. And I think you can see this
already with men sort of sliding out of the very strict definitions of
identity and quite without realising it there's a move for them to
become more feminised as it were. In the same sort of big question mark
is what will then happen to women, because if men are becoming more
feminine I don't think that women are just going to stay where they are.
Women too are going to move on one stage further and this will be the
first time really. I mean women's liberation is really not about liberating
some existing notion of women, but actually explaining what it might be
to be a free woman. It's a totally unknown quantity.

end