Women@Internet: creating new cultures in cyberspace

This is the first major analysis of the emerging cultural characteristics of women’s activities on the internet across the globe. It brings together anthropologists, communications experts, development workers and media analysts and women’s movement activists to ask: are women caught in the net or weaving it themselves?

The book maps both the social, economic and political biases in which the culture of cyberspace is embedded as well its revolutionary potential explores women’s knowledge of and access to the Internet across the world and puts forward concrete proposals for increasing women’s engagement with the new communication technologies shows how the Internet can create new spaces for women working within radically different cultural environments to access knowledge - and transform it rethinks the very idea of culture by looking at the links and discontinuities between the local and the global that cyberculture has highlighted.

This is the first major analysis of the emerging cultural characteristics of women’s activities on the internet across the globe. It brings together anthropologists, communications experts, development workers and media analysts and women’s movement activists to ask: are women caught in the net or weaving it themselves?

The book maps both the social, economic and political biases in which the culture of cyberspace is embedded as well its revolutionary potential explores women’s knowledge of and access to the Internet across the world and puts forward concrete proposals for increasing women’s engagement with the new communication technologies shows how the Internet can create new spaces for women working within radically different cultural environments to access knowledge - and transform it rethinks the very idea of culture by looking at the links and discontinuities between the local and the global that cyberculture has highlighted.

Publishers Weekly

A provocative exploration of the emerging trends in women's activities on the Internet, primarily in the Third and Fourth Worlds, this anthology brings together the voices of anthropologists, communications experts, media analysts and women's rights activists who are uninhibited about using techno-speak and the occasionally impenetrable language of social science. An outgrowth of the Women on the Net (WoN) project, originally organized by the Society of International Development where Harcourt is a program director, the collection begins with a particularly analytical section on the different cybercultures women are creating on the Net and their inherent dangers and advantages. Gillian Youngs considers whether we are entering a new phase of feminist politics "characterized by the possibilities of geographical, social and cultural transcendence," while Sohail Inayatullah and Ivana Milojevic remind us that "far more is required for cultural pluralism than a fast modem" and caution that "by promoting, enhancing and cementing current ways of communicating the Internet silences billions of people." The second section provides examples of how women's groups have used information and communication technologies (ICTs) for global networking, for advocacy and for lobbying policymakers. In the final section, WoN's members consider more specific applications: Laura Agustin considers how ICTs could empower migrant sex workers, while others explore the possibilities they offer for indigenous cultures, isolated rural women and the silent women of the Arab world, among others. (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Wendy Harcourt is Director of Gender and Development at the Society for International Development (SID).