Chapter 1 & 2

So, today's blog is prompted by chapters 1 and 2 from the textbook An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures from my Capstone class in Communication. A major theme of both chapters focuses around discovering how much of ourselves we take into the cyber world with us.

Earlier theories presented in chapter 1 "such as that by Howard Rheingold (1994) celebrate virtual worlds for enabling the user to transcend geography and the body." However, chapter 2 develops a very different stance based upon more recent--and perhaps more realistic and less ideological--theories:

The artifact is the environment through which the audience moves, and the artifact-environment is shaped by this movement of the audience. "Interactivity" is this mutual linkage: the rootedness of the artifact in the audience and the audience-experience being shaped by the artifact. Art forms that depend on cybercultures once again highlight the fact that cyberculture cannot be studied independently of the real and the material.

 Because the cyber world cannot be completely disconnected from our corporeal selves, then, there is a place to discuss the disparate experiences that different genders go through. The hybrid state between human and computer is known as a cyborg, a key staple in cyberpunk fiction. Ironically, though, in the early eras that claimed that virtual reality allowed one to escape the confines of the body, cyberpunk literature reflected the predominantly white male participants of the technological world through the "macho-cyborg" protagonists. Any transcendence for women and minorities, then, would have come from the fact that cyber culture "rarely identifies the 'console cowboy' as 'white male' because it is assumed that white male bodies are the norm." One of my favorite cyberpunk novels Ender's Game from this time in the late eighties to the early nineties even holds true with this assumption of the white male as the active agent in the cyber world.

From this was born a cyberpunk feminist response that: 

...demands a new genre that emphasizes women's experience of high tech. Feminist cyberpunk begins with the assumption that cyberpunk reinforces existing gender inequalities. The genre foregrounds technology in the material conditions of the real world, where control over technology is concentrated in male, capitalist hands and serves the purpose of racialized and gendered exploitation. The woman cyberpunk, when not a part of the underclass, becomes a code for the alien Other. 

However, it seems just as we move away from the assumption that the body can be transcended is actually when we begin to see this happening. The real world and the cyber world impact upon each other simultaneously in that the more women are introduced to cyber culture, the more the technology is opened up to them and the more they participate. For instance, in the early days of the computer even into the 2000's, computers and their career fields were associated predominantly with men. Now, though, my womanly self is tech savvier than 80% of the guys I know--which is saying something as I tend to hang out with some awesomely geeky individuals. Also, a majority of the individuals I tutor in Web Design are women, and I work with technologically empowered women such as the awesome Graphic Artist Elisabeth Shabi.

Furthermore, rather than the contrived cyberpunk feminist movement, female protagonists now appear naturally in cyberpunk literature such as my favorite recent cyberpunk series Uglies by Scott Westerfeld.

If you read the reviews, I haven't seen a person yet that even comments on how the protagonist is female. It's because it just doesn't matter. Women in technology spheres have become so commonplace that the event is just not remarkable--which is exactly as it should be. Rather than shouting out our special snowflakeness by setting up a separate genre for female cyberpunk, a more effective method is just running a silent invasion into the technology that had been dominated by males. Before long, we're there, and they don't know how long ago it was that they just accepted that fact. We didn't announce our plans to take over their cyber world; we just did it and didn't demand special recognition for it.

That's what the cyber culture I live in is about. Yeah, we are inextricably attached to our female bodies, but it's really quite incidental to our participation in cyber communities. It might even be a benefit in terms of hardware as guys burn their junk on the hot underside of laptops all the time...though I suppose boobs can occasionally get in the way of viewing the screen when you're laying down...

Aaaaaaaaand that's where I end this blog for today. Feel free to contemplate how your own bits influence your online life (answer: probably not much).