sexing the machine
Three digital women debate
gender, technology and the Net
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BY LAURA MILLER | this three-way e-mail conversation about
technology, the changes it's working on our lives and how
those changes affect women in particular was held at the
request of a national magazine. Later, the magazine decided
the discussion would "go over the heads" of its readers.
Perhaps its editors were also confused when so little of the
conversation amounted to what we dubbed "whining at the
gates" -- that is, the familiar complaint that women have
been excluded from the world of high technology. To us, the
debate about the role of computers in our lives has moved on
from those early days.
Instead, we felt at home enough to question the more
fundamental ways high technology is reshaping our world. If
more and more women are practicing "multi-tasking" as a
way of life, is that liberating or maddening? Do computers
concentrate or decentralize authority? Does the World Wide
Web give users more power or less? Can machines ever be
considered "intelligent"? Our conversation might indeed go
over the heads of the shrinking ranks of the resolutely
unwired -- but for everyone else, we think it goes right to the
heart of the matter.
Participants:
Laura Miller, a senior editor at the Internet magazine Salon
Sadie Plant, a lecturer in cultural studies at the University of
Birmingham and author of "Zeroes and Ones: The Matrix of
Women and Machines" (Doubleday, 224 pages, $23.95)
Ellen Ullman, a software engineer and consultant since 1978
and the author of "Close to the Machine: Technophilia and
Its Discontents" (City Lights Books, 189 pages, $21.95 -October 1997)
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Laura Miller: We've been asked why so few women seem
to be among the movers, shakers and philosophers of hightech industry and culture. I'll make the usual, obvious
observations about how girls are socially and culturally
steered away from mathematics at a fairly early age, and this
leads to fewer women in computer science and engineering
schools, and therefore fewer women in the community of
people that high-tech industries draw their leaders and
pioneers from. It's intellectually fashionable to see girls' lack
of interest in math as innate, but the same thing was once
said about athletics, and the new surge in women's and girls'
sports shows how much that can change with a little
encouragement and reforms like Title IX. We may see more
women in these industries within the next 10 years.
I see another problem, though. The work culture of high tech
is obsessive and single-minded, on both the creative and the
business sides. When you're on a project, you work every
waking hour, sometimes losing track of the time of day or
the day of the week. Everything else falls away. It's a work
style that's carried over from the computer science programs
in universities. If we assume that women are generally more
invested in having balanced lives, and are often responsible
for taking care of kids, then they may be unwilling to drop
everything else for work and as a result don't find high-tech
careers tenable.
The culture of the Net is a slightly different matter, since
participating in it doesn't make that kind of demand. But
from its early years, the Net was populated with people -mostly men, but some women -- from tech companies and
the tech-related programs in universities, and it reflected
their social inexperience. There was a lot of talk about Net
culture being hostile to women early on, but that seems to
have died out. There are a lot more women online now, and
it's now clear that loutish behavior -- and the reaction of
being hurt or offended by it -- are not the exclusive property
of either gender.
MULTI-TASKING -- BENEFIT OR CURSE?
ILLUSTRATION BY BART NAGEL
http://archive.salon.com/sept97/21st/tech2970911.html
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2. Doing many things at once
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Sadie Plant: We shouldn't assume, even now, that women
turn their backs on high-tech careers because of the obstacles
in their way, and we certainly shouldn't assume that
programming a computer or even managing a corporation is
the most desirable or socially significant thing to do.
As for getting wrapped up in work, I would have thought that
this trait far predates computer science programs, and
historically has been as closely associated with women as
with men -- all those hours of knitting, for example. And
while computing can demand this kind of engagement from
individuals at particular times, the broader cultural effect of
new technologies is to allow people to do several things at
once.
It's also important not to start with the downside. Given the
prejudice about women's ability with math and machines, the
number -- and certainly the quality -- of women working in
both the creative and business sides of new technologies
might be said to be pretty high.
Ellen Ullman: Rather than asking why women are not more
involved in computing, we might just as well ask why
anybody enjoys watching a Net browser tell you how many
bytes remain to be downloaded. I have been a programmer
and software engineer for nearly 20 years, and the
deformations of character that go into the making of a
technical person are not necessarily salutary.
Programming (and using computers in general) involves a
narrow-well horizon -- the world in a small frame -- and a
tight, nervous, cycling energy. This strange energy can be
alternately exhilarating or unpleasant, but the long-term
effect is an abiding impatience. Once you get used to the
machine cycling back at you, responding to you and only
you, you come to hate it when it's slow. And the diffuse,
ambling ways of normal humans can become unbearable.
Even after hours and days of programming (or using the
system all day at work), returning to the terminal after dinner
is seductive. Here is where something, if not someone, can
keep up with the strange, nervous energy you've gotten used
to. If you are a reasonably sane woman with several friends
and acquaintances -- someone who enjoys the ambling ways
of normal humans -- it's not hard to understand why the PC
in the study is not so alluring.
But I have to question Sadie's looking fondly on the Sherry
Turkle-ish idea that "the broader cultural effect of new
technologies is to allow people to do several things at once."
I don't believe computers let us do "several things at once"
quite in the way that, say, a mother can bounce a baby, talk
on the phone, write a note and watch someone come up the
walk. These motherly several things are done at various
gradations of attention -- a human way to multi-task. But life
around computers reproduces the operating-system version
of multi-tasking: a time-slice model. One task is the
foreground, and all others are rolled out. That the operating
system seems to be doing several things at once is only an
illusion, an adjustment of time-slices, a round-robin look at
all the possible things to do, with each thing getting a
nanosecond or two, and the rest swapped into the
background. (Humans have six senses. A computer has one:
the current instruction.)
Think about talking on the phone with someone who is
sitting by a computer. One moment he or she is there, talking
to you, present in a regular way. The next you sense a
vagueness. Gone. The tack-tack of the keyboard is the dead
giveaway: You have been swapped out.
My point is that the "culture" that has grown up around
computers has tended to re-create the deeper technical
solutions embedded in the systems we use. That this culture
may be less than pleasing to women (and men) is no
surprise. The technical solutions eventually used were not
really planned by anybody. Engineering proceeds by
tweaking and tinkering: One version follows another;
features and errors accumulate; the next version fixes
mistakes, adds new features, introduces new errors. It's really
no use analyzing all this as a male cultural plot or a bane to
females. In the end, from the standpoint of the engineer, a
computer program has one and only one meaning: It works,
more or less.
Laura Miller: To go back to Sadie's point about knitting:
That's a highly interruptable activity, which programming
(or, for that matter, writing) isn't. One of the things we're
talking about here is concentration, and I tend to agree with
Ellen that the celebration of multitasking (switching back
and forth among functions or activities -- among applications
really) among some academics strikes me as misguided. It
has to do with deciding that it's wonderful for people to
"realize" that their identities are not unified or singular,
which is considered a Good Thing in the realm of theory. But
in my experience, as a computer user and simply as a worker
in a technically sophisticated environment, constantly
switching back and forth between activities is exhausting and
stressful. Everyone complains about it.
For me, the most satisfying work requires undivided
concentration, in which case interruptions are an
aggravation. I suspect that no woman caring for small
children ever spent 12 hours in uninterrupted knitting, but it
remains an activity that can be done half-unconsciously -- as
Ellen says, with gradations of attention; you can talk to
someone at the same time. And as Ellen's phone example
points out, reading and talking (or at least really being
present in a conversation) are mutually exclusive.
Sadie's right that we shouldn't assume that programming a
computer or managing a corporation are the most desirable
or socially significant things to do, but they are the sorts of
work that lead to positions of power in the high-tech world.
Sadie Plant: I do take Ellen's point about multi-tasking (and
I really don't take any kind of Turkle-ish position on this -- I
think that kind of work is naive). It certainly is true that
computers are currently serial systems which do one thing at
a time, effectively reproducing the most bland, orthodox
ways of working. But even at their worst, serial computers
can do several very different things -- spreadsheets,
communicate, make pictures, music, play games, etc. -- even
if they currently have to do them one by one.
It's where things are going which really interests me. We've
learned from the Net that issues which seemed so important
only a few years -- or even months -- ago can quickly lose
their pertinence. The near future of computing lies in parallel
processing, or its equivalent in simultaneous processes, and
this does begin to map onto more varied modes of activity. It
may well be that a particular person will be absorbed in a
particular process for a particular length of time quite
regardless, but I do think that the differences computers
make to the wider culture (by which I don't just mean
computer workers, users or even people with an interest in
computing, but the subtle, pervasive influences which
developments like the Net have right across the board) are
such that the possibility of doing more than one thing -- at
least in a lifetime, if not in the moment -- is becoming
increasingly viable and, indeed, necessary. True, anyone can
spend their lives watching a browser count, just as they can
spend them having babies or whatever. But the point is that
there was a time when it was difficult to do anything but one
thing. And, for women, that one thing was pretty much
prescribed. Watching the counter may be addictive, but it's
not compulsory.
It's also the case that the kind of concentration demanded by,
say, computer programming, or even getting to grips with
using particular software, is a little like learning to read, in
that one's not learning to read a specific book, but gaining a
skill which is extremely transferable and can open up a vast
range of other possibilities.
Computing obviously does reproduce the old paradigms of
work -- we know that all too well. What's crucial is to look
out for the ways in which it changes the ways things are
done.
I very much agree with the point about engineering going its
own way -- indeed, this is precisely why getting into
supposed positions of power isn't necessarily where it's at for
either women or men. The whole notion that technology is
intentionally developed as a human tool for human use -- i.e.
that we know what it's for, that we're in control of it, and can
predict the outcomes and effects it has -- all this is no longer
obvious at all. And yes, the Net is an example of the extent
to which the people who think they have all the cultural
power can be taken by surprise. Machines, men, women -we're all components of that vast engineering process known
as reality.
THE AUTHORITARIAN NET
DETAIL OF ILLUSTRATION BY BART NAGEL
[Women and technology,
illustration by Bart Nagel]
3. The authoritarian net
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Ellen Ullman: Sadie, you say that computing does reproduce
the old paradigms of work but also changes the way things
are done. I'd like to look a little further at that point,
especially as it concerns the Internet.
I'm constantly amazed that the popular imagination has
seized upon the Net as some harbinger of a brave, new
freedom, or at least a metaphor for it. On the surface, the Net
does seem democratic and multivalent -- the whole notion of
"each user a publisher," and so forth. But I must say that -internally, in the technical configuration -- the Net represents
a return to the most restrictive, authoritarian model of early
computing: the control of the central server.
When I watch users try the Web, it slowly becomes clear to
me that this part of the Net represents the ultimate dumbingdown of the computer. Think about it. In your six-pound
laptop resides more computing power than once fit on whole
floors of buildings. But when it's connected to the Net, what
is it doing? Waiting for each screen to come down the line.
I once told a consultant friend that I thought the Net was a
plot by corporate central MIS to regain control of the
desktop. He scoffed at first, but after working on the Net for
a year or so, he called me and said, "You know, I think
you're right. They just want to control what everybody has
running."
Strangely (or not so strangely), the structure of the Net -everything of interest on the server, the user waiting for a
chance to talk -- reproduces the sort of computing system
women have been working on for years as clerks. I'm
exaggerating to make a point, but I can't resist saying it: The
Net is a pink-collar terminal with prettier pictures and better
sound.
Laura Miller: There's some truth to the idea that the Web
limits the degree to which the user -- the surfer -- can shape
or use the data at hand. It's also been championed as a
medium that makes the Net accessible to all sorts of people - many of whom are women -- who found telnet and FTP
daunting and overly technical. It's a lot like the difference
between the old command-line DOS OS and the Macintosh
graphical user interface.
The Web has helped many new users leap over their
impression that accessing the Net requires membership in a
mandarin group of people with years of technical training
and orientation. That's a democratic effect, but its price
seems to have been that users' involvement with their
computers is more passive. More people have access, but
their experience is more limited and controlled. (Unless
they're publishing on the Web, which is another matter
entirely.)
Sadie Plant: I don't disagree at all with these comments
about how the Net is actually developing -- like any
emergent phenomenon, it's the ambivalent result of
tendencies pulling in very different directions, some trying to
maintain the old routines, others making new modes of
connection and communication possible. The guy who said,
"They just want to control what everybody has running" is
absolutely right. But the question is, obviously, what can be
done to counter this, or rather what tendencies are already in
motion which do counter this?
It has to be remembered that insofar as there were deliberate
intentions behind the development of computing in general
and the Net in particular, they were solely concerned with
command, surveillance and control. If this had worked, we'd
be living in an absolutely authoritarian global state by now,
and we're not. Again, yes, there are plenty of interests in this
direction, but there are also potential and actual disruptions
of such controlling tendencies. The Net is only interesting to
the extent that it's part of these disruptions. If or when it
becomes a corporate mall, then it won't be interesting at all.
I also agree with the point that there are many current
attempts to confine users to preprogrammed packages. But
this is a little like the supposed backlash against feminism -not a sign of paralyzing defeat, but on the contrary, evidence
that there is something there which needs to be contained,
recuperated, confined, packaged and sold yet again. Power
always wants to reproduce itself and its strategies -- the trick
is to get in its way.
The notion that the Net is a brave free adventure is absolute
bunk, and I've tried to ridicule this in my book. Any more
thoughtful engagement with these issues makes it clear that
the Net doesn't provide new freedoms for individuals at all;
the whole notion of individuality is brought into question
instead. Nor does it encourage democracy as we've known it
in the modern West -- after all, our notions of democracy are
crashing round our ears, partly because of the (again
possible, potential, as well as actual) tendency of electronic
communications to override national boundaries with huge
implications for fiscal policy, trade, etc., but also because the
ways in which technological changes creep up on us make it
clear that we're not, and never have been, freely choosing the
directions in which our cultures develop.
Ellen Ullman: Well, if I were nit-picking, I'd have to say
that it's true that early computers were first used to calculate
shell trajectories (still an engineering 101 assignment), but
the Internet we are all trying to salvage was actually created
in a fortuitous, serendipitous cooperation of government
infrastructure project and individual free-for-all. The
Department of Defense built it, then let scientists across the
country talk to each other, more or less openly. Maybe this is
why we are all having such a battle over what the Internet
means and where it should go. For a brief moment, its very
structure seemed to contain a delicate balance between
collective and individual authority.
My biggest concern is the way computing culture is
spreading outward. What began as a back-room operation
created by a weird breed of human called the programmer is
now a nearly intimate part of life in the developed world.
Like it or not, programmers are re-creating the world. With
every new version of an operating system, browser or
application program goes an assumption about how human
beings understand their existence and how they wish to
organize it. These assumptions are not easily recognized or
understood, yet they operate anyway, and powerfully. The
explicit logic and structures of a computer system can't help
but become implicit ways of being.
The only course, I think, is for us to understand the
embedded logic and the demimonde from which it came.
And then to ask ourselves, is this what we wish to be?
Laura Miller: We've taken a pretty wide detour from our
initial topic. Is there something that really needs to be said
about women and computers, something that doesn't apply
equally to many men?
Sadie Plant: Here are some points I'd really like to see
raised: There's nothing peculiarly masculine about new
technologies, which, if anything, offer a great deal to women
and everyone for whom access to information and means of
communication were severely restricted in the past. This is
not only the case in terms of the immediate functions of
computers, but also because of the extent to which, for
example, new conceptions of the human and its place in the
world have emerged amidst these technological changes. The
traditionally masculine notions of man as the author, creator,
originator of "his" machines are eroded by the emergence of
machine intelligence; as is the old insistence on definite
boundaries between different genres, disciplines, modes of
expression and art forms. There has also been a crucial shift
away from the old notion of large-scale, top-down,
centralized organization to the molecular, the microscopic
and other microprocesses, and small-scale, piecemeal
engineering. This too coincides with and encourages the
undermining of -- or at least unprecedented pressure on -- all
notions of centralized authority and, with them, the old
patriarchal cultural structures which once made women the
"second sex."
To confine discussions of women and technology to the
obvious issues of who's making what and working where is
to miss all this. It would also be good to reference the rich
history of women's involvement in the emergence of the new
technologies, not least because any women feeling they are
coming to it late can see the extent to which they've always
been involved. And also because it does any remaining boys
who believe it's all in their hands good to know that a young
woman (Ada Lovelace) was the first programmer.
A COMPUTER IS NOT A METAPHOR
DETAIL OF ILLUSTRATION BY BART NAGEL
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4. A computer is not a metaphor
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Ellen Ullman: Some of your points, Sadie, are very
interesting metaphorically. But as the resident engineer, I
feel I have to point out the obvious: that computers are actual
objects doing quantifiable tasks, and a social, analytical,
metaphorical understanding of them is not the same thing as
their functioning existence.
First, "machine intelligence," which is somehow supposed to
erode old notions. Put nakedly, there is no such thing as
"machine intelligence." A computer and its program are
realizations of the two things that make us most human: toolmaking and language. Maybe that is why computers so
fascinate us -- they are us to the nth degree. The
"intelligence" of a computer is our attempt to understand and
codify our own intelligence.
To give a concrete example: The game of chess between the
grandmaster Kasparov and the IBM program Deep Blue was
widely discussed in the press as a "man vs. machine" contest.
But that was inaccurate. The more accurate view is that one
man, Kasparov, was playing against an entire team of
engineers and programmers, most of whom had studied
Kasparov's past play and incorporated that knowledge into
Deep Blue's program. (Kasparov was, in part, playing against
himself.)
The contest was not between human and machine; it was not
a contest at all. The game asked, What is the relationship
between "natural" intelligence in biological practice -- its
knowledge-ways not well understood, the question of how
one knows left unaddressed -- and intelligence that is selfaware, codified, structured, where the issue of how one
knows is at least as important (to computer scientists, more
important) as the actions prompted by that knowledge. In
other words, Kasparov knows how to play chess. Deep Blue
poses the question: How does Kasparov know how to play
chess?
I am going on about this point because I think it's crucial in
overcoming a kind of idealism about computers which I fear
quite acutely. "Machine intelligence" is not some sort of fast
track to a better future. If anything, as an attempt to codify in
structured ways what we only half understand about
ourselves and our world, computing can just as well lead to
the worst sort of reactionary thinking. Notions of "his" and
"her" can change and develop; or they can be frozen into the
yet more stereotyped personas assumed by people in chat
rooms. We have to decide which way events will unfold.
Machines won't save us from ourselves.
[Pause. Off the soapbox. Back on.]
Next, "piecemeal engineering." This is a perfect example of
how a computing reality can seem to mean one thing and yet,
in practice, mean something else altogether. Object-oriented
programming has been touted as a sort of holy grail: It would
make programming faster, it would let us reuse code, it
would let us put bits of stuff all around networks. And now
it's supposed to break down central authorities and, I
presume, somehow bring down the patriarchy.
Sigh. Without even going into the technical problems (no
one can really figure out how to test little pieces of code
running everywhere at any time, for instance), I have to say
that object-oriented programming eventually passes all
processes through even a narrower funnel of central control:
what is called the "object request broker," or similar
registration and control authority. In other words, it won't do
to see all this as only metaphor. Multiple processors need to
be synchronized. Bits of code need to get in touch.
When we talk about computers, we are talking about the
most authoritarian object you can imagine. Somewhere in
any system there is a locus of control. I cannot see how such
a thing will free anybody from anything.
Laura Miller: I tend to agree with Sadie that tech culture
isn't inherently "masculine," but Ellen points out that the
tools we use to create it do have certain mind-sets imbedded
in their design that profoundly influence what we can do in
that culture. I just don't see the potential problems as having
a whole lot to do with gender, necessarily. Women can be
just as invested in centralized control as men are.
What's frustrating for all of us about this discussion, I think,
is that we're trying to deal with what I see as a diversionary
issue. It's not about male culture vs. female culture -- it's
about alive, imaginative, original culture vs. formulaic,
predictable, dull culture. Uninteresting, conventional people
are always the ones who most conform to "masculine" and
"feminine" gender stereotypes. In the social world of the
early Net, there was a predominant voice that was full of
puffed-up bravado and excessively rationalistic -- all the
stereotypes of what "men" are supposed to be like. And now
that there are more women online, we find the
hypersensitivity, passive-aggression and emotional navelgazing that are the worst side of conventional femininity.
But the really interesting people -- male and female -- have
always been around and have always operated outside those
stereotypes; they're just fresh, engaging minds and
personalities. That's what matters to me, when I'm looking
for a culture to inhabit, virtually and actually.
Sept. 11, 1997
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WOMEN AND TECHNOLOGY: Come to Table Talk's
Digital Culture area and continue the discussion.
DETAIL OF ILLUSTRATION BY BART NAGEL