She or He?

In my news­letter to NMK readers today, I referred to the Internet as a ‘she’. Reading that back once it arrived in my inbox, I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about that. I think I’m happy about refer­ring to websites as ‘she’ — they are akin to vessels like ships and cars, and also dom­i­ciles — those things are very often referred to as feminine. But the Internet as a whole?

I’m won­dering about this from a web 2.0 per­spective. Web 2.0, with its insist­ence on ‘social everything’ — seems to fit well with what people normally classify as feminine char­ac­ter­istics — con­necting, embra­cing, col­lect­ivism, joining together.

The proposed next gen­er­a­tion of web applic­a­tions, on the other hand, the sort that will join up micro­formats and form the semantic web, seem to be deliv­ering the Internet back into the hands of the engin­eers, and into the tra­di­tion­ally mas­cu­line traits of straight facts, logic and formulae. The thing that interests me is whether this is being driven by gender agendas in some way, at least in the way it is nar­rativ­ised, if not in terms of the science.

Are any readers aware of any gender politics research being done in this domain? Or have I finally found my PhD thesis? [sidenote: also inter­ested in anyone attempting to ‘queer’ the ‘net and what that entails.]

PS: there is a broken link in the second para­graph of the news­letter. You could patch it together yourself, but to make things easier, the link is to this — a great analysis of the new rules of repu­ta­tion in the era of Google, and why the Internet is really rather frightening.

Share this post:

Possibly related:

• The Late Final
• Online Brits Still 1.0
• Goodness in the Future