In Nattering on the Net, Dale Spender described her conversion from scepticism to passionate advocacy of electronic media. Abandoning her beloved fountain pen for a word processor, the Australian scholar and feminist issued a clarion call for women to get wired. Hari Kunzru talked to her about women, power and the world beyond the book.
WIRED: Do men and women relate differently to technology?
DS: Certainly. If you put boys and girls in a room with new technology, almost without exception the boys will go and use it to find out how it works, and almost without exception the girls will want to be told how it works before they'll go and use it. You see a huge difference in socialisation and approach. The girls are involved in a process of risk assessment, because that's what girls lives are. Do I need it? Can I break it? Does it cost much? Will it hurt me?
Contrary to the belief that women are technophobic, they have historically had a very intimate relationship with technology.
Yes. In the industrial revolution women operated the power looms; women worked telephone switchboards. It's just that whenever women are associated with a machine, the element of "technology" gets mysteriously taken out of it. You know that originally they said women would be no good on the telephone? Women, said the pundits, were only good at face-to-face communication. Whether it's a sewing machine or a vacuum cleaner - if women do it, it doesn't count as technology. Technology has, by definition, been something done by men.
What about the dangers women perceive on the Net, things like pornography and sexual harassment?
Here's a real-world example. There were two fourteen-year-old girls using the Net in a classroom. One day the boys in their class posted messages everywhere saying they were slags and sluts and god knows what else. They were really upset and swore they would never touch the computer again. This was a real problem for the school, which has a duty of care, and for me as someone who was trying to get them interested in computing. So I brought in a friend from the Australian National Supercomputing Centre. She spent an afternoon with the girls, and taught them to program a virtual "dog," a little cartoon character which would bark at messages they didn't want on their screens and send them away. By the end of the afternoon they didn't want to go home - two girls who earlier were too afraid to touch a terminal were waiting for another message to come through so they could send their dog after it. They felt confident because they had a form of online self-defence.
So women thinking about getting online should ...
Do it immediately! I think we've been taken off-guard about the importance of the change from print-based to electronic media. I tell people I'm the product of a million novels. Text made me, but I really don't think today's four- and five-year olds will say that. If they do read, then text will be one information medium among many. They were reared in print but are required to function electronically.
What changes have non-print media brought for the new generation?
If you look at young children, you find that even their eye movements are different. By the time I was six or seven, my eye movements had been strictly disciplined - left to right, like reading a page. Kids of the same age today, their eyes are darting around. They're used to processing images, not print. They can still work with print, but studies show they process it not as a narrative but as an image. They see it as wholes, go in and out hypertextually, not from beginning to end. Give them a standard reading test and they don't do very well. But then that's a test designed to fit the old idea of knowledge. If they were setting the test, my generation wouldn't do so well.
They don't sit still in silence. Their eyes are all over the place. Their bodies are all over the place! Scholarship used to mean the ability to sit still and do one thing.
Concentration isn't an empirical state - it's a political label. It's about getting people to do things the way I do.
That's a change in the way people take in information. What about changes in how they value it?
Take television. Older people would automatically say that the news, which presents itself as objective and truthful, is more trustworthy than advertising, which is attempting to manipulate you. Children in classrooms are consistently claiming to be more comfortable with advertising, which is up-front about its agenda. Anything which claims to have authority, or claims to be truth, like news, is suspicious.
So the whole ideology of objectivity is collapsing?
Isn't it great? After all, objectivity is only a male description of male subjectivity. Objectivity is associated with text, and as books become less important, all the baggage that goes with them will diminish in importance. People get funny about the end of books. But after all, is it Shakespeare that's important, or Shakespeare in print?
Particular ways of thinking and being are promoted by books, and some of them are useful. Wouldn't we lose something valuable if books went altogether?
If these things are useful, we'll keep them. They'll survive. This is the Shakespeare argument again. Is it the text that's important, or the meaning? I think Shakespeare would have been really pleased by the death of text. This whole thing about books and authority and so on was only invented after his death. He was a performer! I reckon Socrates would have been overjoyed. He wouldn't put anything in writing because to do so would open it to the indeterminacy of interpretation. And it's this Socratic position that I think the 21st century is going to adopt. They'll look back and say, How could anyone have thought with such an unwieldy medium as print? It was so dead.
Hari Kunzru (hari@wired.co.uk) is a section editor at Wired.