This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 33, Summer 1996.
Dale Spender is a convert to computer technology. In her new book Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace, she predicts that the new world order will be unrecognisable and that those whose lives and work are based on print technology will be left behind. But what do these changes mean for women? Dianne Butterworth reviews her book and takes issue with some of her conclusions.
Throughout Nattering on the Net, Dale Spender compares the electronic media revolution with the changes that occurred when another media shift took place: when knowledge based on manuscripts became knowledge based on printed books.
The development of the printing press created a revolution. According to Dale Spender, until then, the Church had a monopoly on information in Europe and therefore controlled people’s minds. It trained the monks, priests and scholars who read and copied manuscripts, and any deviation from the set text and set interpretation was forbidden. Faced with the prospect of mass distribution of books, she says, the Church reacted with panic, desperate to preserve its power base. It did not take kindly to the possible diffusion of unauthorised ideas. Those who had a stake in keeping their position also reacted against books, fearing that their skills would no longer be necessary. They claimed that true scholarship would be destroyed because no-one could possibly know and understand so many books. Family conversation would be destroyed and society would be corrupted.
Democratising and standardising
Dale Spender argues that print meant that knowledge was democratised, the Church lost its grip on ideology and new information was more easily circulated. However, she says, the print era brought problems of its own. She reproduces the common, but rather misguided idea that it was due to the development of the printing press that language became standardised. Spelling, grammar, dictionaries and so on were developed, all based on a white, professional, male standard. For example, grammatical rules against ending a sentence with an infinitive were based on the fact that in Latin it was impossible to do so, and therefore scholars, educated in Latin and Greek, encoded this rule into English. Generations of grammarians have insisted that since ‘everyone’ was singular, it should accord with ‘he’, as in ‘Everyone is entitled to his opinion’, because ‘man’ includes ‘woman’ and ‘he’ includes ‘she’, in the male-centric view of the world. And dictionaries included what men thought important and encoded male definitions, for example woman= weak in the Macquarie Dictionary and Thesaurus.
As the ‘public domain’ texts such as the Bible and collections of fairy tales were exhausted by the publishers, a demand was created for new texts. Issues of ownership of texts became problematic, Dale Spender argues; originally the author would sell their work for a one-off fee and the publisher became the owner. Eventually the system of ‘intellectual property’ and copyright evolved, with royalties paid to the author for each copy sold. New concepts such as plagiarism had to be invented; it is now considered a horrendous intellectual crime to plagiarise someone else’s work.
The wide availability of books and the valorisation of the creative ‘talent’ of an author also led to literature being taken seriously. Dale Spender claims that, despite resistance to the idea, the study of literature became acceptable within universities by mimicking other types of more ‘scientific’ study, which meant that universities had to be able to test students. This is the reason, in her view, why subjects such as Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon were included on the syllabus, and why every student had to be able to judge whether or not a book was ‘good’ or ‘bad’, according to whichever texts were at the time included in the canon. Naturally, the ‘good’ literature is written by white men and nothing else is worth reading. She points out that The Great Books of the Western World, the substance of the canon, only included women in the 1990 edition (Jane Austen, Willa Cather, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, in case you wanted to know), but no Black authors were represented at all. Needless to say, feminists and Blacks have been blamed for the ‘declining standards’ in literature, for having the audacity to question the value judgments of those who decide the canon.
The medium is the mindset?
One of the other effects of the print era, according to Dale Spender, is that the print medium has in itself an effect on the way people think. Those readers familiar with her theories of language will already know that she believes that language determines the way we think: ‘According to Dale Spender, it is through their control over meaning that men are able to impose on everyone their own view of the world; women, without the ability to symbolise their experience in the male language, either internalise male reality (alienation) or find themselves unable to speak at all (silence).’[1]
Similarly, she makes the rather contentious claim that the medium of communication also determines how we think. She argues that, along with the (male-normed) standardisation of language that resulted from the printing process, came the imposition of a standardising ‘mindset’: ‘Partly because print itself doesn’t change, the medium has helped to promote a mindset in which we want other aspects of life — and language — to remain fixed and unalterable’. (p 9) Therefore ‘with its ability to fix the language, and the ideas, over the centuries print has limited and skewed the active process of thinking and talking’. (p10)
End of an era
All of the above developments due to the print era will be overthrown, according to Dale Spender — ‘authors’ will be a thing of the past, because anyone who wants to will be able to publish on the Net; books themselves will no longer exist, but will be replaced by multimedia experiences, including video clips, sound, text and graphics; the role of the ‘author’ will become more closely akin to a film director, perhaps co-ordinating a team effort.
In Dale Spender’s view, without publishers and editors as gatekeepers, standardisation will be abolished. Computer-based tools such as spellcheckers and electronic thesauruses will provide the only editors, which people can employ or disregard. ‘People spelt creatively before print, and no doubt they will again after the values and mindset of standardisation have begun to recede.’ (p 14)
Other inventions of the print era will also be transformed, she argues. Plagiarism, she says, depends on two concepts: first ‘it demands that someone know that particular passages have been plagiarised’. (p 74) With the amount of material that will be published on the Net, how can anyone be conversant with all the material on a given subject? Secondly, ‘it depends on the concept of originality. This concept is being seriously questioned in the new literary theories’. (p75) Concepts such as copyright will therefore have to be re-thought.
In addition, she argues, literary canons, with their hierarchies of the great and the good will also become irrelevant, when anyone with a computer can publish what they like, without being vetted by publishers. ‘Because there is no place for a single, exclusive standard in the new global networks, the canon and much of the justification for literature now have little credibility.’ (p 43)
Education will change beyond all recognition. Dale Spender insists that computers are much more suited than human brains for the storing of information. ‘Teaching students to store information in their heads — and to recall it on demand, on certain days of the year, with pen and paper (which is still the way that education is conducted in many places), and then to label them correct or incorrect, is neither a valid nor a useful activity in the computer era.’ (p 106) Breaking down learning into distinct subjects and set hours will not be appropriate in the new computer era, nor will learning require a physical classroom, when students can access schools and universities on the Net.
The role of academics will also change. Dale Spender contends that academics will have to ‘perform or perish’ rather than ‘publish or perish’, and they will become more facilitators than authoritative sources. ‘The trend towards the democratisation of research and scholarship (which parallels the democratisation of authorship) is already discernible. Research is no longer confined to the university. Market researchers, television researchers, etc. are making a significant contribution to the information industry (and often displacing the university researchers in the process).’ (p 141)
Libraries, too, will no longer focus on books, but will maintain electronic copies of texts. Librarians will have to invent new methods of indexing the vast amount of information on the Net. Dale Spender points out that the keywords used to catalogue Net information will be crucial. Librarians will be the navigators through the seas of the Net.
These are not bad things, she says, but exciting new developments. However, she is not oblivious to the potential hazards of the new technology. The main point she makes throughout the book is that all this information must be available to everyone, which it is not at the moment. ‘The recognition of the increasing gap between the information-rich and the information-poor has led to a growing appreciation that access to information — for all — needs to be enshrined as a human right.’ (p 148)
Woman-friendly Net (not!)
Dale Spender also warns that we cannot assume that women’s needs and perspectives will be incorporated into the evolving Internet. She quotes from a study on Internet users — 56% were between the ages of 21 and 30; 94% were male; 45% professionals; 22% graduate students. In addition, women tend to have less money than men, and less leisure time, which means fewer women have computers or the time to access the Net. She notes that women historically have had less training in science and technology and that girls traditionally are encouraged to relate to people, not machines. She quotes from a UK study of teachers in which 49% of teachers sampled (across all subjects) believed that technology subjects were very important to a boy’s general education compared with 24% saying they were important to a girl’s general education. 60% said that technical subjects were important for a boy’s future, but only 25.7% for a girl’s. (p 179) She also points out that computer science labs tend to be hostile environments for women, with macho posturing and widespread use of computer pornography.
The Internet is far from being an inviting environment for women. Not only is it a mostly male environment, there are a number of users who can react very aggressively towards women. Dale Spender relates what happened when a group of researchers monitored the conversation on Megabyte University for a period of five weeks, where there was, apparently, a small friendly list with a slight feminist influence. Men dominated the postings at 70%. At one point in the period:
a feminist topic was raised, and for two consecutive days, women posted more messages than men. Despite the fact that, on the 33 other days for which records were kept, it was men who took up most of the space, there was an angry response on the part of some men when women took a two-day turn. Accusations came from the men that they were being silenced. Some even threatened to ‘unsubscribe’ from the list. One man wrote the lengthiest message of all — 1098 words — protesting that the women were ‘shutting up’ the men with their vituperation and insults. (p 194)
She quotes from the researchers’ report: ‘In [his message], he accuses women on the list of “posting without thinking their contribution through carefully first”, of levelling charges (rather than questions) at the men and in general of “bashing”, “guilt tripping” and “bullying” men who don’t toe a strict feminist line. A man who overtly sided with the women also comes under attack; he is accused of betraying his brothers out of feminist-induced guilt.’ (p 194)
This tallies with my own experience on CompuServe (not strictly speaking part of the Internet, but a separate commercial bulletin board with various areas of discussion). One of the CompuServe forums is called ‘Issues’ and is subdivided into various sections, such as Women’s Issues, Men’s Issues, Gay and Lesbian Issues, etc. The topics of conversation on the Men’s Issues section are political — and mostly anti-feminist. Here’s part of an exchange from one of the messages on the topic ‘Preventing batterers’ (the topic is determined by the person who first posts a message. Subsequent messages replying to replies to messages can stray far off the original topic):
Jerry: OTOH [on the other hand], I observe that there are plenty of young men who have been ‘gender-whipped’ into *assuming*, without proof, that men *typically* treat women badly, abuse them physically and emotionally, and pretty much deserve whatever shrill abuse comes back at them. Quite sad. [The asterisks are the electronic equivalent of underlining.]
Bob: Those would be the men on our college campuses, who must deal with the most rabid among the gender feminists on a daily basis. But these men are starting to rebel against the constant assaults; they’re starting to organize. It’s the best hope for the men’s movement, especially at a time when the academic hate-mongers are turning off the college-age women (my daughter and her friends referred to their women’s studies class as ‘feminazi class’).
Even the Women’s Issues section is not exempt from aggressive messages from men on a political topic. And, as Dale Spender notes, it is impossible to restrict men’s access to supposedly women-only Internet services.
She also points out that sexual harassment is a risk women run on the Net, if they post messages under an identifiably female name. She cites, amongst others, a case of a woman who received a Valentine’s Day message saying that she would have her throat cut and be gangbanged, ‘fucked to death’. (p 203) She draws parallels with other forms of sexual harassment — behaviour which is designed to stake out territory and exclude women. And yet, many Internet users claim that no action should be taken, because freedom of speech is paramount. The Internet is also being used to transmit huge amounts of computer pornography. (In a recent case in the United States, a male student was prosecuted for posting a ‘fantasy’ on the Internet about raping one of his classmates.)
Dale Spender argues that women’s realities can also be distorted through the method by which information is categorised. For instance, she notes that ‘there is more than one such place that I could name which has no entry for violence against women, and where “rape” is to be found under “life cycle”.’ (p 158)
A sceptical view
I will admit to being a techno-nerd. I will admit to wanting the latest, most powerful computer packed with RAM and a CD-ROM drive (an unlikely prospect, so I will have to make do at the moment with my 4 year old 386sx with 4MB RAM). I will admit to reading computer magazines and to wanting all my friends to understand computers. However, I am less optimistic about the global benefits of the Internet than Dale Spender.
It is because of all the hazards she points out that I believe the vast majority of people will never see the benefits she describes. As she herself says, ‘In countries where children are dying of starvation, where there is little or no health care and no clean water, it borders on the obscene to talk about the pressing need for information infrastructure.’ (p 250) Even if access to electronic information were enshrined as a human right, a human rights declaration signed by a government isn’t worth the paper it’s written on: the British government has signed an international convention on the rights of refugees but still deprives refugees of the right to benefit; it has signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, but still does not fund refuges even to the extent recommended by its own commissions.
In addition, I do not subscribe to her deterministic views about the effect of a medium of communication upon the human mind; many of the things she attributes to the print revolution existed before books did — structured argumentation and resistance to change. Therefore I do not think that a shift in mindset will necessarily result from the electronic revolution.
Widespread use of electronic media will not of itself bring about a more egalitarian, pluralist, non-standardised world view. Dale Spender says that ‘the dismay and distress at the passing of the print era has more to do with bringing to an end a patriarchal presence that has been encoded in communication than it has to do with the loss of print’. (p10) But I have great faith (if that’s the word I’m looking for) in the self-interested survival of patriarchy. As she herself points out in the chapter ‘Women, Power and Cyberspace’, patriarchy seems rather entrenched already in the Internet.
Nor do I agree that mass authorship equates to mass empowerment as she does: ‘“super-personal-computer-TV-fax-modem-sound-recording-desktop-video-publishing-playback-studio”. This would be the ultimate in empowerment; everyone who had such a box could be a fully multimedia author, able to publish their own productions for everyone else in the world who was wired up.’ (p 90) As a materialist feminist, I believe that change comes from collective political action, not from individual postings on the Internet. This is why radical feminists have always insisted that academic feminism be combined with activism.
Information revolution — or is it overload?
The proliferation of data will not necessarily lead to better informed Net users. Data is not the same as information. Despite Dale Spender’s postmodernist enthusiam about mass authorship, gigabytes of undifferentiated information are more overwhelming than informative. If, let’s say, Trouble & Strife were published on the World Wide Web, one of the keywords it could be categorised under would be ‘feminism’, but it would be outnumbered by other materials such as misogynistic rantings by fundamentalists in America, Joe Bloggs’ opinions about affirmative action in France, and reviews of the latest Camille Paglia book.
I also have ‘faith’ in capitalism: where there’s a potential profit, a way will be found of exploiting it. Copyright will probably be a lot more enduring than Dale Spender thinks. Even now, various groups are investigating the possibility of electronically embedding in all digital information a ‘copyright’ stamp. Recently the Sunday Observer (3/3/96) reported that the US government is also trying to pass through Congress the National Information Infrastructure Copyright Protection Bill under which a Net user will pay royalties for accessing an item on the Internet, even if they’re just looking at it to see if they’re interested in downloading it.
The issue of leisure time is also crucial. Most people, when they first get access to the Internet (the World Wide Web, in particular), spend hours and hours looking at and downloading material, enthralled by the amount of data available. Usually they realise that the amount of time they are using is unsustainable. For many people, especially women, this time is just not available.
Oppressive forces: new technology, old misogyny
Nattering on the Net raises a lot of interesting and important questions about the uses and potential of the Internet. However, I would recommend that anyone who is wondering what the shape of the future might be also read some science fiction, for alternative visions of what global information networks and virtual reality will bring. Even in these books, though, the protagonists often are to be computer hackers, with an inside knowledge about the Net, and not the average Net user (which most of us will be).
I agree with Dale Spender that the involvement of more women in the discussions and forums where decisions about the Internet are being made is crucial, but their involvement must be informed by politics, and not from ‘a woman’s perspective’. I also think that the forces which oppress us in the print age will also oppress us in the electronic age.
Note
[1] Deborah Cameron Feminism and Linguistic Theory (MacMillan Press 1988 , p 108)↩
Reference
Dale Spender Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace (Spinifex Press 1995)