Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/Rosie Cross/Women and IT 2

Text File | 1994-09-18 | 44KB | 751 lines

THE ELECTRONIC SALON
====================

Transcript of the Electronic Salon
A Radio National Feature.
Part 2 of Women and Information Technologies.
Produced and written by Rosie Cross and Fiona Martin
for ___The Coming Out Show___ on behalf of the
Australian Womens Broadcasting Co-Operative
Copyright 94
e-mail [e-mail]
=================================================

Sandra Davey from Ilanet
There are an estimated 1.5 million machines on the Net at the moment,
and most of those will allow public access in some form. So once you are
connected to the internet you can pretty much connect yourself to any
other machine - whether the machine is in Alaska, or Greenland or in
America or in the United Kingdom.

Minh McCloy
It's the Internet, it's got everything. Everything seems to be appearing
in there in digital form. There's a bookshop on line you can go to, and
you can pick the title, cross reference it to reviews, go find some
people who have posted their own personal reviews - so not just critics -
and then you can order the book and pay for it with a credit card. I mean,
these are services that are available on line which I think is in California,
but it doesn't matter wherever it is, it's actually irrelevant where it is
because you do it all on_line and you know the book arrives in your mail
some time later.

Script/RosieX
The Internet is the biggest, baddest, wildest computer networking system
in the world. Academics, researchers and those addicted to information
are immersing themselves daily in the flotsam and jetsam of digital data.
Information networks have become electronic oceans teeming with different
cultures and ideas. Tonight the Coming Out Show casts it net to catch the
voices of women in cyberspace - to hear the fun they have and the fears
they express about information technologies. Libby Reid is from the
cultural studies program at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

Libby Reid from RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)
The Internet was initially a project of the US Dept of defence. I believe
it was originally designed in order to facilitate communication and
admistrative control in the event of a nuclear war. So initially of course
it was a rather secret project with a great emphasis on secrecy rather
than communication. I'm interested in tracking how it has developed from
that into a this wonderful communicative network that it is now. Up until
about 4 or 5 years ago I had never actually used a computer and in fact
I was rather scared of them, your typical technophobia. But one day a
friend showed me a computer bulletin board and this changed my whole
understanding of computers worked. I had felt they were rather cold
logic driven objects which were incapable of reflrecting any of the
more humanist concerns I'd been educated in, but after looking at this
BBS, I discovered that they could be a medium for human communication
and could enable reflection upon development of the social issues I was
concerned about. So by the time I got on the Internet I was convinced
that the cultural impact of computers was going to be a rewarding and
fascinating experience, and I felt, worth studying.

Script/RosieX
A computer and a modem can give you access to an endless wave of digital
information. You can send electronic mail, post or read notices on
bulletin boards and subscribe to over 7000 special interest groups.
You can even have a real time interactive chat or group discussion where
it's not unusual to find a virtual party going on. But it's not all fun
on the Internet. Women who get hooked often find it isn't the free and
easy space they imagined.

Cheris Kramare from WITS (Women and Information Technology Scholarship)
There's a lot of discussion about the Internet as being this wonderful,
free, that there's anarchy that people talk about in glowing terms, anything
goes on the Internet. Now of course that's not true. We know that right
now there's a lot of people who don't have access to the Internet through
a company and education system, who would either have to pay their own
fees or not use it, and beyond that we know that it isn't all free out
there.There have been lots of norms established and a lot of rules
established. So many of the rules, the norms for exactly how conversation
takes place is there as well as what's considered interesting material.
That has been determined with not a lot of interaction from women.

Script/RosieX
Cheris Kramare, Director of Women's Studies at the University of Illinois
and co-organiser of the Women and Information Technology Scholarship.
There are more women using the Net every day, but some still have problems
getting their ideas across this vast network. Professor Susan C Herring
writes about gender difference and computer mediated communications. She's
done a lot of study on the way you have to communicate on the Net.

Susan C. Herring
In particular I've noticed that a lot of Net discourse is very adversarial.
We have the notion of flaming on the Net, of sending a message with strong
negative or hostile message content, and I think what I would do is expand on
the definition of flaming a little more broadly than that to adversariality.
I've seen a lot of adversariality on the Net and it seems that women respond
to this differently than men. So I sent out some surveys and I asked people,
'how did you, what was your reaction to this particular so and so discussion
on this list and what did you think of the tone of this debate', and people
would write back and they'd say, 'oh, I thought it was terrible , people
were going at each others throats', and both men and women would say that.
But the men and women would react to it differently, so that men were more
likely to say, well that's just the way it is and really this list is not
so bad, whereas the women were more likely to say things like, it made me
feel disgusted with the profession and made me not want to have any part of
it. So I interpret this as being a more covert type of silencing on the Net.
Women respond differently to this adversariality and in effect it constitutes
a type of censorship.

Joell Abbott
I don't think that you have to use four letter words to communicate your
ideas, and I have a mouth that would embarass a sailor at times. But when
I'm communicating with a computer I don't have to use four letter words to
communicate an idea and I think that's where it all starts from, you know,
especially with, I hate to say it, but the younger male. And they just, you
know, they think it's cool and so they start doing it and they do it with
each other and then they start responding to the women and there's the whole
factor of anonymity. I think that's where a lot of it comes from. It's like,
I can harass you and get away with this and not really face any consequence
from it.

Libby Reid
I think that the belief that the Net isn't real life, I mean of course you
know the people tend to refer to it as virt net and real life and making
that sharp distinction. I think that's possibly an effect of the Net being
currently a textual medium. You simply don't get the effect of other people's
presence, and therefore tend not to consider their feelings so much. I know
that I personally will be far more concerned to return a telephone call than
a piece of e-mail, as of the sense of personal immediacy and therefore
obligation to social expectations tends to be less so on the Net. Which of
course tends to cause things like on the one hand people tending to be more
friendly and intimate but other people tending to be more aggressive and
unfriendly and less careful of other people's feelings.

Susan C. Herring
I think people are very much aware of others out there. I don't buy the
idea that people flame because they're sending their messages out into an
anonymous cyberspace and they don't feel that they will have any
consequences. I think a lot of what we're seeing is sexism from the larger
society just carried over wholesale onto the Net.

Script/RosieX
Dale Spender is a Net cruising Australian author who has written a lot
about gender difference and language. She thinks men on the Net dominate
the space the same way they do in real life.

Dale Spender
Almost everything I learned has transferred to the Internet. Almost
everything I know about the way topics are set up, how agendas are
determined, who gets to speak, who's experience is discounted, who gets
harassed in conversation applies in exactly the same way on the Net. Which
is why in the States women have developed what they call the Electronic
Salon. And this is where groups of women with particular interests agree
that usually for about a 2 week period they agree to a certain amount of
time on the Net when everybody puts in their discussion paper, their ideas
etc and for 2 weeks there's a couple of hours each day, so that every
night you can come home and not only have you got your e-mail and
conference and your bulletin boards, you've got your electronic salon
where you can see what the discussion has been with people putting in
their contributions. Now in that context, yes, women are in charge of
that, except you still get harassment sometimes and you get even more
harassment when people know that it's a women's salon and it's closed
entry. Privacy is very difficult and it's still a vexed issue about who
is going to get it and how we're going to set it up. But at the moment
there are numbers of young women who are very distressed about the way
that they are treated, the way they are sexually approached on the Net,
in the same way they are sexually harassed on the streets. There's the
same sort of dynamics there that we need to start thinking about, which
are areas for discussion and research but also, I think, for some sort
of, well I've heard the word 'Netiquette' used again and again and I think
there are basic courtesies that have to be developed just as we develop
manners in conversation, we need to start to develop some things like
that and saying to people, you're infringing on the rules.

Amy Bruckman from MIT, Boston.
Well, I mean there's complex social conventions that monitor what is
acceptable and what is not acceptable and it's complicated because these
are new medium and not everyone has the same expectations of what's ok
and what's not ok and which communities need to develop a sense of what's
appropriate.

Helen Rose from Kapor Inc and founder of WNTBMW
The group, 'Women Not to be Messed With', that's a group I set up about
2 or 3 years ago at EFF because one of the other women working at EFF,
her name was Rita, she had been called in a post on USENET ;'You are truly
a women not to be messed with', so we thought we'd have to set up a
mailling list and call it that. It doesn't get a whole lot of traffic
but it sure is effective in scaring people. Since the Net is so male
oriented it's almost like a sports bar where most women feel very
uncomfortable in voicing something because the numbers are so stacked
against them. I mean, I know many women who use Net_News who just will
not post because they're so afraid they'll get flamed by all these men
who are taking over all the groups. I think I've found one user Net group
that's even more than half women. That's a group about weddings. I guess
that isn't a men topic.Harrassment can range from anything to imagined
things, that is, you get a snub from a guy and you feel like you're being
harassed although you may not be, it's just the way you took it, up to
anything including sexually explicit e-mail saying, I'm going to do this
to you in a dark alley and stuff. It's very difficult to combat because
the problems with e-mail are it's not guaranteed that the sender of the
message in the from line is actually the person who sent it since e-mail
is so easy to forge so it's very hard to prove that someone is harassing
you over the Net.

Script/RosieX
From Tokyo to Australia to the USA and to Europe, most women can recall
stories of harassment on the Net. From the famous Media Lab at MIT in
Boston, Amy Bruckman works designing MUD, Multi-User Dimension. MUD is
a text based virtual world, like electronic dungeons and dragons where
you can adopt characters or different personas.

Amy Bruckman
I remember when I was first starting to do a bit of ethnography of MUD,
I tried out some of the adventure game MUDs and logged on to one LP MUD.
And this guy started following me around and I went from place to place
and he kept following me and finally he said, 'wait, wait, I've been
trying to talk to you', and I said,'yes, can I help you?', and he
proceeded to spontaneously hand me a small black cocktail dress. It
turns out it was quite a valuable gift because it functioned as a high
class of armour. I think that that experience was really quite thought
provoking for me. Certainly the kind of harassment that one occassionally
encounters on the Net is much more blatant than the kind of things that
happen in real life. Noone has ever walked up to me in real life and
handed me sexy lingerie to get my attention. I think tough, it can very
much help you to learn more about the way these things happen in real
life by experiencing them in this exaggerated form on the Net.

Anna Couey from Artswire USA
Not too long ago there was a situation that hit a lot of the mainstream
press. What happened was a male user on the Well had been simultaneously
involved in relationships with a number of different women who were all
Well users, and the Well has a private area for women only. And it just
so happened that in that private area the women discovered that they were
in love with and having problems with the same person. In this case he had
not just been involved on line but had flown across the country and gotten
together with the women and so forth, so there was a physical component
to the relationships, And the women decided that they wanted to expose
his behaviour and they posted a statement in the public areas on the Well
where he spent time. And it turned into a huge community tirade largely
against this male user. It just so happened that he was off line at the
time, so he didn't have much of a chance to defend himself, but apparently
after the fact said, well, you know, I thought this was cyberspace and
it was an experimental territory and he didn't mean any harm. That wasn't
the experience the women had.

Script/RosieX
Abuse of women in cyberspace has receieved a lot of mainstream media
attention. Some reporters have described these attacks as virtual rape,
although not everyone agrees with this description.

Libby Reid
Sexual harassment certainly exists in cyberspace but I must say I hesitate
to refer to it as rape. Even if harassment does take the form of a textual
simulation of rape, I think it belittles actual cases of physical rape to
refer to the on-line equivalent as that. With rape there's no way of
really getting away from it. In cyberspace you can always turn off your
modem, or just log out. You're not forced to look at it. I mean, I would
imagine if you were forced to look at the text as it was being typed that
would be a different situation.

Script/RosieX
What do you think about the Electronic Salon, the spaces for women only
on the electronic medium. Do you think they're a necessary thing..

Libby Reid
I'm not participating in any but I think they are very necessary because
there are a lot of women who are not as outgoing as I am, that is who are
not as likely to just go out and post and say what they want.

Script/RosieX
Right, so you don't think there's a danger of ghettoising women in a
particular area and marginalising them once again..

Libby Reid
It's a personal choice, it's not one that I would force or not force on
any woman, however if someone was afraid of getting on-line because they
would get flamed by men then I might suggest one of these women only
forums.I think one of the huge problems with dealing with sexual harassment
on the Net and one which I think came out of the Melbourne University study
on this last year was that a lot of women who are sexually harassed don't
report it, largely because the people to whom they could report it - systems
administrators and so-on are male. I think one of the major things that
needs to be done to combat this is to make sure that there are people in
positions of authority on the Net to whom people can talk. Simply having
a female systems administrator or having a female sexual harassment officer
who has an internet email address would make it far easier for people to
talk about these kinds of problems and would probably make it less likely
for people who might go around harassing other people to consider doing
so if they know that their potential victims would have means of redress.
I'm not sure what you can do in the immediate instance except walk away
which is not much of a solution. I think that some of the facilities on
the Internet which are designed specifically for women can help to empower
them and enable them to become familiar with the Internet and thus feel
as though they have more of a right to it. I think part of the problem
when you're faced with that kind of response is that you feel as though
you're not a part of the Internet and therefore can't carry on with it.
One particularly interesting example of this kind of resource is WIRE,
the Women's Information Resource and Exchange, which is Internet's service
provider which aims to provide access to information relevant to women,
and while it's not a women only service, the aim is to foster a sense of
community among women and empower female users of the Net by addressing
their particular concerns.

Amy Bruckman
Last week I logged on to Lambda Moo and I received a rather obscene page
from a person I'd never met and I was sitting around feeling somewhat
depressed about this, wondering what in the world can be done about it
and feeling frustrated, when I got a message from a friend of mine on-line
who said did you get that page and I said yes. And she said, well it seems
to have gone to all the women logged on and we've started a mediation
process against this person. So within an hour after this incident
happened there had been a formal process of mediation against the offending
person started and about a dozen people sent in their personal account
of what happened and the person apologised. The mediation was finally
resolved. The person who sent the obscene page to all the women logged on,
despite the fact that he apologised publicly and promised never to do it
again, had his right to program on Lambda Moo suspended for 3 months as
a result of the mediation process.

Minh McCloy
One of the places I go visit when I go out on the Internet and tunnel
my way through various connections is to a place called MICROMUSE, and
the MUSE part of that stands for Multi User Simulator Environment. It's a
text based environment so in MICROMUSE I've got an apartment, so when you
walk into my apartment you get a text based description of the apartment,
but I constructed it. I wrote a little program that had it look the way it
is. Out on my verandah you look out into an Australian sub-tropical
rainforest, which is something I'm familiar with, and some of the other
users of MICROMUSE are very sophisticated at doing that sort of stuff,
and they create entire little universes almost in theirspaces within
MICROMUSE. But MICROMUSE is basically populated by young people. The
youngest people I met there were a group of Grade 1 kids from the High
Sierras who'd come in and their teacher was actually on the keyboard, and
they were asking me questions and I took them on a tour of some of my
favourite parts of MICROMUSE. I took them to a friend's beach and I
took them to my apartment and they asked all kinds of questions. This
is a good teacher. I regard this as a very quality teacher to do this,
but most of the people I've met are in that 16-18 to 25. These are the
last years of highschool and first years of college/university.

Script/Rosiex
Min McCloy is a Net cruising educator. She hangs with people on the Net
who like to learn and pass on information. She often goes fishing for
data in unusual locations and discovers that girls are learning their
own ways to tackle harassment.

Minh McCloy
In MICROMUSE we're looking at adolescents there, so we're looking at
adolescent boys and they have a go at the girls in various ways. So the
women themselves, the young women have got together with the administrators
of MICROMUSE and created a Women's Resource Centre, and the Women's
resource Centre is in the general Community Resource Centre and when you
go in there, there is a sign that says, 'Your mind is your strongest weapon',
and it's true. And what they give them are little programming techniques
so if someone is harassing them, and it can be a female harassing a female,
I mean that happens too, and there are various techniques but the only one
I can recall at the moment is the one to gag someone. So you just write a
little instruction and what happens is that person who is annoying you
or harassing you, you gag them so they can no longer communicate with you
in that environment. You don't stop them communicating with anyone else,
it's purely a decision you make to turn that person off if you like. And
until you ungag them they can't get to you.

Amy Bruckman
I mean there are a lot of annoying people on the Net. Needing to sometimes
gag people is not a gender issue. The one thing I will say is that you can
solve social problems in a technological way or in a social way. You can
gag someone, which is a technological solution using the programming
language to no longer be able to hear anything someone says, or you can
have a sympathetic systems administrator to have a discussion with someone
who's being troublesome, or have feedback from peers to someone who's
being troublesome. I believe that social solutions are always preferable
to technological solutions.

St. Jude
Any sort of attack on line has to be met with martial arts. You have to
martial all your arts. You have to learn how to mount an argument. You have
to learn how to mouth off and win. This is what I mean about basic training
in cyberspace. To me this is the ideal place to learn how to fight. It's
better than an acre of warm tapioca. You have nothing to lose. You're
bodyless, you cannot be injured except insofar as you back down or feel
that you are injured. And I personally am never going to be undressed by
a rapist on-line, or deconstructed by a politically correct person without
a fight. I think the keyboard is a great equaliser. It's better than the
hand gun, you know. In a physical fight you might be 10 down as a woman,
but on line, by god, you can win.

Minh McCloy
It's a really good opportunity to explore different personas, to adopt
different personalities, to take on roles, and in MICROMUSE we've got
many adolescents, that's something that they do. They change clothes and
faces and styles and here you can really do it. You can become someone
else and gender is just one of those things they can switch. Some women
adopt male roles, there's one person on MICROMUSE who constantly switches
and we didn't know for quite a whilw whether she was male or female.

Brenda Laurel from Interval Research
I believe that we are always spinning ourselves right in various contexts,
various situations, constructing different versions of ourselves. And I see
nothing wrong with that. We are given, children especially are given, an
incredibly impoverished palate of choices about who they can be and what
they are in terms of gender and sexuality, but also in terms of how they
use their imagination, what they're allowed to think about. And they
construct a notion of what reality is and what authority is. I think that
the tremendous freedom, relatively speaking, that we have in electronic
virtual worlds for exploring those issues is a healthy thing, especially
for young people. We need to try very very hard to provide strategies for
people to protect themselves against potential abuse without throwing the baby
out with the bathwater. For instance, I think it would be a complete
disaster to ban anonymity and pseudonimity because that would make it
impossible to do certain kinds of explorations of the self.

Margaret Minsky
My name is Margaret Minsky and I'm currently at Interval Research
Corporation, and I'm also a doctoral candidate at the MIT Media Lab.
Of course right now you have to write good. There may or may not be a
less sex linked issue, but the degree to which you can write beautifully,
not traditionally beautifully, but you can write appropriately for the
medium, whether it's humourous or succintly or in an unusual way
matters a lot. And that is an aspect of creation of one's persona,
though that seems to be more under intellectual control than evident
in a traditional problem. And I think that if you look at what people
do with their self representations in appearance on the Internet in
the places where they do have self representations like pictures, you
see a lot of self representations which consist of people just pasting
photographs, obviously selected photographs of themselves, and you do
wonder whether you have to look good in a traditional way and how much
work you have to go to do to manipulate your image, and whether there's
a stigma or a positive value associated with manipulating that image.
Should you lie, should you change that image? Will that image in some
sense reflect what's 'real' about your appearance? We don't know what
will be considered socially acceptable or not and whether or not those
issues will revolve around the same problems that women have with
representation to appearance and the fact that everyone else has to
representation with appearance as well.

St. Jude
It's the ultimate pranksters medium of course. You're bouded only by your
ingenuity. You can prank anybody with whatever outrageousness you can
concoct, but it seems to me that sort of the ultimate outrageousness
though, is refusing to be honest. You have also the freedom to be
ultimately outrageous which is to tell the truth, to say personal things
you wouldn't dare tell anybody face to face, and you can say them from
behind your pseudonym. There seems to me the possibility of understanding
what human beings are about, quite beyond men understanding what women
are about and women understanding what men are about. I think it's very
touching that men pretend to be women in order to get some kind of insight
into the alien species.

Dale Spender
In fact if I see these days blatant women's names on the Net I assume it's
a man who's trying to attract attention from other women to then be able
to turn around and insult them because most women are using gender neutral
icons on the Nets to be able to participate without drawing attention to
the fact that they're female, because you get so much flak if you do. It's
like being in a public space and women who are in a public space know that
they are at risk, and a lot of women don't want to venture to go there.

Future Sex Magazine
There's a group of women on the board now called Cyberchix and they're kind
of like the Riot Grrrls are in rock n' roll. They go around on the different
boards and post erotic thoughts and messages and I think it's a part of the
guerilla mentality that a lot of women are getting now, and the technology
is part of it. It's very empowering and it has nothing to do with physical
strength. It's all about what's between your ears.

Script/RosieX
On the Net noone can see what you look like or where you come from. The only
clues are a name and an identity and yet just like the good old days of
letter writing, some people even manage to fall in love or become best
friends on-line. Anna Couey explains how you develop Net intimacy.

Anna Couey
I'm not a letter writer so if I have friends that live in different parts
of the country I rarley communicate with them, but e-mail is real easy to
send and there's this kind of immediacy to it. You tend to get something
and feel like you have to respond right away and it's not as formal as a
letter is.

RosieX
And how do you compensate for those lack of social clues..

Anna Couey
Especially if you're talking in a public area on a bulletin board system
or in a conferencing system, stuff like irony is real difficult to
communicate. So what people often do in paretheses after they've said
something is type GRIN or SMILE. There's also a little kind of iconography,
:-) which if you turned it sideways is a happy face and that kind of
thing can help people. But misunderstandings do happen, definitely and
in terms of the intimacy of it, I think in a way because you're getting
text and you focus on the words because that's all you have to go on,
you're much more focussed on what communication tools or cues that you
do have.

Minh McCloy
I'm really interested in the idea that language for specific use on the
Internet will arrive, and they're already appearing in terms of what they
call the EMOTICONS which are combinations of symbols which come off the
edges of the keyboard, the things that are on the same keys as the numbers
and the slashes down the right hand side, those sorts of things. And
combinations of those have been created which have a common meaning
to Internet users wherever they're from, even if they don't speak English,
which is what's really exciting, so the language barriers will go down.
And these symbols are often quite potent with meaning and they're being
used at the moment as a substitute for that which is missing when you're
communicating on the Internet, which is face, body language, tone of voice,
and that's why they're called 'emoticons' because they actually give you
the opportunity to be wry or sardonic or simply humourous or totally
sarcastic, emoticons help put that across. But they're becoming more
elaborate, I mean they started off just simply as a smiley or a frowny,
and now sometimes there'll be a new one and you'll say what's that mean,
and someone will say, oh such and such, and you'll go, wow, that's really
interesting, that's a complex set of emotions to be transmitted.

Dale Spender
I think the Americans quite definitely dominate the Internet. In fact
the assumption is often, if you don't make this kind of thing overt, that
you are a white male Californian. I think this is becoming less so as
more nations come to be part of the Internet.

Script/RosieX
It's no secret that the Internet is dominated by the West. This new form
of cultural supremacy is an issue of growing concern in less developed
countries. Women in Nicaragua, the former Yugoslavia and China have started
to organise thier own conferences in on-line networks. Maria Fernandez
studies culture and information technology.

Maria Fernandez
I think that communication with somebody in other countries through the
Network or even through other means of electronic technologies doesn't
mean that we understand the culture, particularly if we use English as
the language. I mean, culture is so separable from from language it's
just like talking on the telephone to somebody you don't know. I mean,
how much of the culture do you understand. But I think this is the dream.

Script/Fiona Martin
Could you imagine a time when people would develop a new language to use
on the Network through this kind od information technology?

Maria Fernandez
It's difficult to know, because actually whatever language is developed
it will, at least if the development of the technology takes the same
route that it has taken, that language will be developed in first world
countries, so again we have the question of imposition of a certain language.
I think that unless there is participation on the scientific end by people
from third world countries, it will be difficult. And then you have issues
of class to deal with. There is certainly increasing commmunication, but
one of the things people don't realise is that that is class based in
many of these countries. Although we may be talking on the Network to
somebody in Bolivia, this is not the people of Bolivia, this is a privileged
woman from Bolivia. So I think that it is very difficult to think of
something that will work universally. I think that things have to be
developed in the context of each group or each culture to serve them.

Libby Reid
One of the things that I have noticed in the Internet is that racism tends
to be rather invisible. I think that's simply because most of the people
who are on the Internet are white and there is an assumption that very
few people that are not caucasion will have access to it. Things like
homophobia certainly exist and I think that as greater numbers of people
do get access to the Internet and as it becomes more commercialised and
anyone can go and buy an Internet account, I think we will tend to see
more conflict between these kinds of groups. I think that what it tends
to come down to is the conflict between people who tend to be more
friendly and more likely to be intimate with people once they're given
the chance, and people who tend to be more aggressive. On the macro level
I think that's the difference between increased knowledge of different
people leading to greater tolerance and goodwill, and on the other hand
a problem not unlike that of Douglas Adams'  'Babelfish', with increased
communication between differing people leading to more and bloodier wars
than ever before.

Brenda Laurel
I think what's happening now is that what we're calling information
technologies is being co-opted by individuals to put to their own uses,
which has much less to do with exchange of information as we know it as
some authoritative thing, and much more to do with the exchange of social
behaviour, of communities of social behaviour, of self representational
behaviour. These are things that we are placing value in and that we're
sharing with each other increasingly on computer networks. So information
technology I see as this wonderful appropriation of something that
started out as a very establishment kind of thing, if you'll excuse the
60's terms, by people who are so hungry for community and self
expression and for a world where there are different points of view again.
Generations of people who had the imagination beaten out of them by
television are taking it back, we're just taking it back in a very
centralised way, and I believe that people who think they are going to
be content providers or information providers in the future aren't
anywhere near the scale of broadcasting today, are the walking dead.
There's not a place in the future of this technology for these information
providers anymore. The people who are going to provide services and
products that will be useful to us are people who are making tools.
These are the people who have something to offer to those of us who will
actually use these networks as part of our daily lives.

Script/RosieX
The Internet is one of the ways people with disabilities can connect
with the world.

Elise Matheesen
I'm hearing impaired and it's something that's been happening to me as an
adult and it seems to be getting worse, and I'll wear hearing aids but
when I'm on the Internet everything is in print and I can hear print just
fine, it's not a problem. I've always been a big reader and I really like
having all the words on the screen. I don't miss anything in the
conversations. I can talk to anybody in a conversation or one on one at
no disadvantage, which is a little different than it is in my daily life.

Sue Harris from Artsnet South Australia
I think there are some really good technologies out there. One of the
people we're dealing with, a fellow in Adelaide, we didn't know he was
blind at the time, and when we met him, he's a musician, and when we
met him in the flesh we realised he was blind. My goodness, he talks,
you see his text is on the screen, how does he do this? He's got a box
which is this, just a computer and a keyboard with no monitor, and he
can just type. He's got a Braille printer so he can read things that
come off the network through his Braille printer and then type them in
so I think those sorts of technologies some people are fortunate enough,
or perhaps they happen to be thinking down the tracks and they've got the
technology there in front of them. And in fact that's something that
really interests me, the domestication of the technology, because I think
that's where women have a lot of opportunity to come into that process.
And I'm very interested in how low end technologies versus high end
technologies. I really like working with the low end because I feel
like any changes you can make in the low end technological environment
makes it more freely and readily accessible anyway.

Script/RosieX
Having control and access to the medium is the name of the game. But
there's not a lot of women running their own computing systems. Dey
Alexander is in her mid 30's and she's a SYSOP, a systems operator.
She runs her own bulletin board, Euphoria in Melbourne.

Dey Alexander
You soon acquire the technical skills, I mean basically you learn as
you go and the thing about the bulletin board industry is that people
are really helpful when it comes to helping people get set up and giving
all sorts of technical advice about different things that you need to
know about initialising modems and all that kind of thing. I don't think
that people who are running their own bulletin boards have to put up
with attitudes that distress them or antagonise them, just because they're
running something that happens to be attatched to a phone line and other
people are allowed to call in, so I personally don't have a problem with
people who want to set up women only spaces because I can understand
the reason for doing that given the amount of antagonism that there is
towards feminist issues and lesbians and issues like that. I don't really
see it as being censorship, although some people who don't like the way
I operate that area have decided to run around screaming saying I'm
restricting their freedom of speech, which doesn't really seem to be a
good description of the issue to me.

Spider Redgold
We decided that we wanted to make an electronic bulletin board to mark
the centenary of women's suffrage. It is intended to be a forum for women's
discussion focussed in South Australia, but moving nationally wherever
women want to be involved in it, and 'The Feminine Byte' seemed to be
just the best thing we could call it.

RosieX
Spider Redgold is one of the designers of a bulletin board system for
women users in South Australia.

Spider Redgold
We've got it divided up into various sections like, Safety, Justice,
Violence, Dreams and Visions, Economics, Finance, Health, Welfare,
Social Theory, Direct Politics where we're lodging things like electronic
copies of legislation that's coming up for review, the discussions of
judicial inappropriatness in sentences for rape, those kinds of things
would be into that Politics and Parliamentary Law area, and then we have
a notice board which is upcoming events and things like that, each
relating to one of these topics, and we have document and file areas
relating to those topics and then we have general messages which can
be public messages to everyone or we're having private messages which
we've reprogrammed so it appears as a pigeon-hole, notice boards and
filing cabinets because we're committed to making it in language that
does not mean you have to have any computer literacy if you're prepared
to follow the beginners help kit that we're making available, and the
on screen messages.

Donna Zelzer from Midwifery Today
Midwifery Today is a magazine and it's been publishing for about 7 years.
Over the past couple of months we've got an email address and we're just
starting posting on-line. So this is new to us to find out how we can
reach women, both midwives and non midwives, to tell people more about
midwifery and the midwifery model of birth care. And we believe that
if women are given information they can make wise choices. As far as
midwifery specifically goes, there probably is not that much information
around, so that sometimes people will find out about our magazine and
they're just thrilled because people are just hungry for this information.
But really, it's difficult to look through all the information when you go
on the Internet and you just see this vast amount of things that, I
personally have so many interests I could just spend hours on there just
looking, so we need some way to help people in there interests and so on..
to help people find where to go and what to do. That possibly is a role
we could play in the future or help to be guides for women, because
sometimes it's very threatening for people who go on line, women
specifically, but anyone who is not really technologically orientated to
go on-line and just get bombarded with all this information and not
knowing what to do with it or where to go.

Script/RosieX
Navigating your way around the Internet is a priority for those riding
the digital wave, but never assume it's clear sailing. If the American
govenment has its way, we may have to be more careful of where we go and
what we say.

Donna Zelzer
A woman goes on-line and needs to access sensitive information, whatever
to her is sensitive. You can be anonymous. You can go on-line and nobody
is there looking over your shoulder. However, right now in the United
States we're having all this big fuss about wire tapping and the govenment
being able to look at where you're going. Like, if you were in a State
where midwifery was illegal and you wanted to find out information about
it, they could see that you have accessed this bulletin board here about
midwifery, so in that sense it's kind of frightening to me. If you're
going out there to be anonymous, you don't want somebody following you
around and seeing everyplace you went to to get information. So that's a
little scary.

Script/Rosie
We're just about finished. But, if information is the wealth generator
of the future then who will control it and who will own it..

Minh McCloy
Well, that's the debate and if people don't know how to use the technology
then they're not going to be able to control it. They're not going to have
any say . It will be the people who use it. Undoubtably there's going to
be attempts by various groups on a commercial basis, or a government power
basis or a military basis ar whatever, who'll attempt to control it, or
control part of it, or control access, but you can say one thing for sure,
people who don't have access are not going to have any control at all. And
we've got kids in primary school now, we've got kids in secondary school
and they're not having any experience of what's going on, they're not
having any experience in information management, any experience of
information development. Their information, the information that they
come up woth is uniquely important, and when they put it out other people
are interested in it. And every day that goes by that we're not doing
anything seriously about it, we are disadvantaging our population really
badly. I met a 22yr old. She'd just done a media and communications degree -
a media and communications degree- and she had never used the email, she
had never visited the database. So she uses her media and communications
degree to become a journalist - she's got no idea how to find a story via
the Network, she's got no idea how to go and access the Reuters database.
She has none of those skills. If it were me I would be suing that university
for a total failure to meet its obligations under the trade Practices Act,
or whatever it might fit under. It's appalling.

end