Making the Virtual Real:
Feminist Challenges in the Twenty-First Century

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.¹

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.²

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 cybermapping³ 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.

1. Tim Berners-Lee (with Mark Fischetti), Weaving the Web: The Past, Present and Future of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor (London: Orion, 1999), 40. [↩]
2. Gillian Youngs, Global Political Economy in the Information Age: Power and Inequality (London: Routledge, 2007). [↩]
3. Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchen, Atlas of Cyberspace (London: Addison Wesley, 2001). [↩]