Gillian Youngs, "Making the Virtual Real:
Feminist Challenges in the Twenty-First Century" (Page 2 of 5)
Where are we now, virtually?
The first straightforward answer to this question is, "We don't quite
know," and it is a more complex statement than it might at first appear.
The arrival of the Internet and burgeoning of its multifarious uses,
expected and unexpected, is demonstrating in dramatic ways something
that has always been true but now seems much more obvious and "in our
faces." While we can observe, research, and analyse facets of what is
actually going on in the world, we can never capture the whole in either
perceptual or evidential terms.
Investigations for academic, policy, or other purposes provide us
with what might be best regarded as fragments of what is really
happening; and of course, they often tell us very little about the
diverse motivations and the intended and unintended consequences that
are in play at any one time. As I say, this has always been the case,
but the Internet provides us with a new and powerful illustration of
just how deeply true it is.
Why? The technological characteristics of the Internet are a
fundamental part of the answer. In its design and operation, and in the
creative political, economic, and cultural ways it is used, it provides
evidence of the dynamic and ever-changing nature of human interaction
increasingly accessible to growing numbers of people. Much that was
evident only to specific groups or audiences involved in particular
realms or activities is often now available to much larger, constantly
changing and expanding online publics.
Virtual networks, as well as the search engines and hyperlinks that
help drive them, are taking us into new experiential worlds that cross
not only the boundaries of nations and cultures, and of the public and
private spheres, mentioned above, but also the traditional divisions
within these, such as state and market, civil and commercial society,
profit and non-profit, institutional and personal.
In the complexities of this boundary crossing, the Internet has
changed the world in many ways. For the first time, those who have
Internet access can roam rapidly and easily across different sites of
social activity, information, and service provision, and generate a
range of identifications, whether as individuals or members of
organizations. There are limitations, e.g., government controls against
activities defined as criminal or thought to represent security threats,
and political censorship in countries such as China. These limitations
indicate different strands of Internet governance, some of which may be
considered generally in line with democratic processes, and others, such
as extensive political censorship, anti-democratic. These strands affirm
that state sovereignty and the varied virtual assertions of it are an
integral part of the Internet age. They remind us that the
transformative potential of the Internet is subject to contrasting forms
of control.
The networking principle is key to such transformation and
hyperlinks on the Web—connecting different websites and documents to
one another—are a core technological expression of this. At the click
of a mouse we move between one virtual space and another, experiencing
networks of organizations, for example, or following knowledge tracks
that piece together connecting bits of information. Such online activity
emphasizes interactivity and connectivity. It takes the age-old human
activity of networking onto new technological levels, crossing time and
space, as well as boundaries of activity, such as politics and the
market.
Hyperlinks are at the infrastructural heart of transition to what is
familiarly called "the information age," where societies are operating
increasingly on the basis of online forms of connection and exchange.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, sums up the shift:
The fundamental principle behind the Web was that once
someone somewhere made available a document, database, graphic, sound,
video or screen at some stage in an interactive dialogue, it should be
accessible (subject to authorisation, of course) by anyone, with any
type of computer, in any country. And it should be possible to make a
reference—a link—to that thing, so that others could find it. This was a
philosophical change from the approach of previous computer systems.
People were used to going to find information, but they rarely made
references to other computers, and when they did they typically had to
quote a long and complex series of instructions to get
it.[5]
Berners-Lee's combination of philosophy with the practical and
technical nature of this shift to information society is a useful
reminder about the links between theory and practice, reflection and
action, identification and engagement. Interactivity has become a pretty
banal term in its everyday usage, but it does signal a new mode, or
perhaps more accurately an expanded one, that binds together the
workings of people, the information they produce, consume, and
disseminate, and the computers and networks through which connections
are made.
So the online world, and much of its political economy and culture,
revolve around these aspects of connectivity and the different forms of
power and inequality that shape them. The growing use of the Internet
means that we increasingly live in and through "sociospatial" (virtual,
technologically mediated) contexts, as well as in the more familiar and
traditional "geospatial" (physical and bounded) ones, e.g., states and
towns.[6]
The intimate, dynamic relationships between identity on the one hand
and experiential and associative processes on the other has made it even
more difficult in some ways to know exactly what is happening in
intertwined sociospatial and geospatial contexts. It has also made it
difficult to know exactly who we are or are becoming, in terms both of
our network and of our more conventional identities of nationality, for
instance. Let me unpack this a little further.
The Internet links in fluid and complicated ways to the real material
world: in other words, online and offline motivations and activities
relate to and interact with one another. It is difficult enough to study
effectively the full complexity of online developments, certainly in
terms of their deepest interpersonal and social implications; it is even
more challenging to do so once the vast breadth and diverse significance
of online/offline confluences has been recognized.
With no intention of being simplistic, I would state that this is
partly a matter of speed on many levels. New interactive technologies
work at previously unimaginable speeds, and online lives are adapting to
these and increasingly being expressed in and through them. Action and
meaning, doing and reflection, are more condensed than ever in these
circumstances, and can generate causes and effects building on one
another at such rapid speeds that tracing the process leads us to whole
new ways of thinking about social analysis. While
cybermapping[7]
is beginning to tell us about communications flows and social
networks, we are, in many ways, at the beginning of new research
cultures to explore the full and interactive dynamics and consequences
of sociospatial and geospatial realities.
It is important to take on board the above problematics when we think
about what is actually happening contemporaneously, even just online,
and when we consider the implications for future feminist thought and
action. Both philosophy and empirical research methodologies and
strategies, I would argue, are essential to thinking about new social
contexts, and feminism has contributions to make to them. But there are
reasons for being concerned that such contributions may be even more
overlooked than in the past. In a high-tech era, masculinist traditions
of science and technology, with their gendered structures of power and
influence, threaten to become even more deeply embedded. Fresh social
circumstances should bring fresh opportunities for reflection and
analysis. But the relationship between power and knowledge processes
indicate that this will not necessarily be the case, and may become an
insurmountable challenge in the face of dominant social forces.
Access to the potential of the new online/offline settings is a
complicated and multi-dimensional issue, with various inclusionary and
exclusionary influences in play, some of which are more immediately
evident than others.
These influences include: stark inequalities in basic communications
infrastructures across the most and least developed parts of the world;
affordability and distribution of computing and communications
equipment, including mobile varieties, across both work and home
contexts; access and basic know-how to use information and
communications technologies (ICTs) across generations and genders;
motivations to use ICTs for self-empowerment and improvement on
political, economic, or cultural grounds, or to contribute to the wider
economy and its growth and prosperity; policy processes at all levels
(local, national, global) impacting on priorities for digital
developments and regulation; innovations in software and hardware and
developments of new business models; education of all kinds related to
the digital economy, including the fundamental competence of
literacy—another area in which stark contrasts exist between the
richest and poorest nations of the world.
While I do not have space to roam exhaustively across all these
areas, I want to focus on what appear to be major priorities for
feminist reflection at the current time. I draw distinctions between
areas where women and feminist influence seem to be most included in
virtual transformations, and others where they seem to be most excluded.
This is not by any means a complete picture of what is happening, but it
gives us a starting point for considering how gender differences and
inequalities are both being challenged and disrupted, but also further
entrenched in the combined realities of geospatial and sociospatial
circumstances.
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