Plant - Babes in the Net (New Statesman 1995)

Record: 1 Babes in the net. By: Plant, Sadie. New Statesman & Society. 1/27/95, Vol. 8 Issue 337, p28. 1p. 1 Black and White Photograph. Abstract: Comments on the impact of the information technology on the role of women in society. On-line services' coming of age; Information technology's eradication of gender-based limitations. (AN: 9503031839) Database: Business Source Alumni Edition Section: arts in society BABES IN THE NET Sadie Plant explains why women have the last laugh in cyberspace The storm has broken in the past few months. Turn on the TV, and there's virtual reality, multi media, the Net, computers, and video games. Go to the newsagents, and in between the top-shelf fantasies of Digital Dreams and the piles of highbrow papers you find a wealth of magazines devoted to the software and hardware of computing, telecommunications, games, new media arts, techno music, dance culture, and other cyberian interests. Suddenly, cyberspace is everywhere. Though its arrival seems strangely abrupt, this cybernetic future has in fact been here for some time. It is more than a decade since the publication of William Gibson's Neuromancer, the novel that brought cyberspace to the street. The Internet is older still. Even the computer, still referred to as a "new technology", is only a little younger than the old, grey TV. What is new, of course, is the ubiquity of things cyber, hyper, and virtual. And although it is fashionable to dismiss them all as simply matters of consumerist hype, even die-hard Luddites are beginning to realise the extent of the cultural changes they bring. Work, play, art, science, literature, sex, education . . . digitisation leaves nothing untouched. Social relations are being transformed by the development of telecommuting, hypermedia systems, and a new world of on-line information. In particular, everything in the vicinity of sex, gender, and sexuality is being dramatically rewired. Cyberspace brings unprecedented confusion to sexual--and all--identities. You can go on-line and be anyone. You can go on-line and be no one at all. As for where and when you are when you're connected to the global telecoms network, it's always difficult to say. Such deregulated possibilities have star appeal for women--and all those who've struggled within the straitjacket of identity. Recent undoings of history, moreover, discover a dose and longstanding interface between women and nonlinear machines: women were at one time literally called computers, and now even the machines seem to be converging with the women who first programmed them. The centralised, top-down structures of the old serial systems are now subsumed by the smart speeds of parallel distributed processors with their lateral connections and intuitive leaps. The Net itself has no organising core, but pulls itself together from the bottom-up, replicating networks and making connections, just as women have organised themselves. It may be problematic to define these tendencies as positively feminine. But it is also clear that they go against everything dear to the heart of all power structures--and the phallic principles that keep them secure. Even so, if it's now right-on to distrust the hype, it wasn't long ago that the politically correct believed computers to be somehow essentially male. Traditional feminists and misogynists alike have insisted that cyberspace does nothing to disturb the roots of patriarchal power, and there have indeed been some celebrated cases of virtual sexual harassment and other examples of boyish bad news. It certainly seems that male users of the Net still outnumber their female counterparts and, back on the top shelf, heterosex and computer games converge

between the covers of Digital Dreams (and, of course, on its free CD). Teresa May and Vicky Lee meet Wake of the Ravager and Wrath of the Gods. Yet more toys for the same old boys: not much of a sexual politics here. But facts and figures are as hard to ascertain as gender itself in the virtual world. And if women face the same old problems there as in their everyday lives, they are also, and increasingly, discovering new possibilities for work, play, and communication of all kinds in the spaces emergent from the telecoms revolution. As for politics, even those of the sexual variety, questions of the "what is to be done?" variety are no longer the only ones to raise. The digital revolution does a great deal more than rework the rules of social and familiar life. Complex dynamics, self-organising systems, non-linear processes, nanotechnology, machine intelligence: the species that thought it was in control now finds itself in a paradigm shift that undermines its role and destroys its separation from its own machines and from what it called nature. If life itself is being re-engineered by computerised genetics and intelligent machines, modern conceptions of what it is to be human are hardly immune from the runaway effects of what were once believed to be simply the discoveries and inversions of man. And it always has been man, the male, who has circumscribed humanity. Homo sapiens has defined itself against a feminine considered too fluid, flexible and lacking in concentration to merit anything more than associate membership of the species. It is these women, however, who have the last laugh. As intelligence become s more valuable than strength, the strong sense of purpose and identity that once served the masculine so well becomes nothing more than a liability in a world of Net schizophrenia, selforganising systems, and emergent planetary intelligence. Girls are achieving more than boys at school, female skills and working patterns are reshaping the economic world. From Brazil to Bangladesh, women are escaping social control and men are running to catch them up. In the face of such dramatic shifts, arguments about whether the Net or virtual reality allow more or less room for benign social orders lose clout; the telecoms revolution is no good for anyone concerned with such solely humanist affairs. While there are high hopes that new and improved social relations will begin to emerge on the Net, nothing is simply reproduced, least of all communities (you remember them--the social bonds that once kept women and immigrants at home). But it is the case that, by a suitably bottom-up and piecemeal process distributed far beyond the social world, the digital revolution is re-engineering the very conditions of patriarchy. Hooked up to the Net, the computerised economy and his new prostheses and implants, man loses his power and self-control as he becomes entangled with the machines. And this is what is doing the trick, opening new spaces for brand new girls and whatever post-human mutations may come. While everyone gazes in the rear-view mirror, guarding the present as the reproduction of the past and hoping to legislate the future in advance, the sands of time are running into silicon, and Read Only Memory is coming to an end. Digitisation is traumatic for humans. Those with no identity to lose don't even need to adjust their sets. Copyright of New Statesman & Society is the property of New Statesman Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.