Doing Technology, Undoing Myth: Women Creating And Using Technology In The Netherlands

Doing Technology, Undoing Myth: Women Creating and Using Technology in the Netherlands Introduction Because myths around the gendered use of technology remain so powerful, women's participation in the development of new media and its surrounding discourse has remained largely invisible (Sveningsson Elm and Sunden). In an effort to gain a more accurate view of how women engage with technology I am conducting interviews to study women's roles in the institutionalization of new media in the Netherlands. In particular I look at how women get started with technology, how they use it, and how they have entered and participated in the development of new media and the surrounding discourse. One aim of the project is looking at the way an emerging culture of knowledge is gendered. This paper is a report on research in progress and does not aim to confirm a definitive alternate story of technology and gender. A recent book, Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights, claims that earlier research on gender and technology has been US and UK-centric, taking the experiences of people in those countries as universal and ignoring differences in the construction of gender and in the actual living conditions of men and women in other countries. Further, some earlier research is argued to have been biased by existing stereotyped beliefs about how men and women use technology (Sveningsson Elm & Sundén 2007). Discourse around gender and technology tends to make some users and practices visible and others invisible, and the way it constructs some users and practices as normal or positive, while others are placed firmly in a deviant or negative category. Because both gender and technology are socially constructed, understanding these discursive practices is essential to understanding the ways men and women perceive and use technology. In this study, women from their early 30s to mid 60s are being interviewed about their participation as artists, scholars, and activists in the Dutch new media field. Women who were highly active were chosen in order to first make their use of technology visible, and second to learn something about the life-paths of. women who do use and create technology. The study aims to understand how the rhetorical frame of the discourse occurs shapes participants' perceptions of their own experience. Following Judith Butler's conclusion that subjects are always to some degree opaque to each other, rather than providing a single vision of how women use and speak about technology, these interviews instead am to provide a space in which multiple perspective can be recognized. Ultimately they reveal that the way we speak about how men and women use technology, the way we frame 1

research questions, and the way users describe their own activities, shape our perceptions of how women use technology and of the technology itself. The Netherlands is a logical starting point as it is where some of the first university programs in new media began, and thanks to early and extensive government funding, a wide array of other cultural institutions have developed simultaneously. The Dutch context was originally characterized by heterogonous networks of people, things and symbols that were ad hoc and informal, but now all of these disparate elements contribute to the establishment of formal knowledge, specialization, and the construction of a canon. These activities are a clear sign of institutionalization, which also inevitably involves the development of gate-keeping processes. However, while institutionalization is taking place, the Dutch cooperative polder model still shapes socio-economic relations and allows for the continued emergence of new voices and new groups. Thus the whole spectrum of development is available for study. Almost twenty years ago in Amsterdam, the Digital City was founded. Since that time, the Netherlands has remained in the forefront of new media innovation, and the Dutch educational system serves to fuel this system. In particular, universities in the Netherlands, which are free, offer a range of programs for graduate study that is both broad and highly specialized. Further, funding has been made available on city and national levels, and from private bodies such as the Mondriaan Stichting, to support the work of many individuals and groups, so that women need not follow traditional paths through the educational system in order to participate in work around culture and technology. Below are preliminary results from interviews with women involved with new media. Some are American; the relative abundance of opportunities and the free educational system makes the Netherlands attractive to women from outside the country as well. While there has yet been no comprehensive history of new media in the Netherlands published, I have been surprised to find that neither the women I've interviewed nor any of the women's technology groups have received much attention in more focused accounts either. For example, Geert Lovink, a prominent chronicler of internet culture, especially in the Netherlands, fails to mention the Genderchangers, the Eclectech festival, or even the more international Old Boys Network when discussing the increased attention paid to gender. Instead he mentions Kittler and reiterates his view of the personal computer as "the bachelor's machine" (Lovink 2008, 215). Thus this paper first and foremost aims to lift the blinders from our vision of women and technology. Sher Doruff 2

Sher Doruff has been active in Dutch new media institutions for more than twenty years and in particular has been highly influential as head of the Research Program at De Waag Society for Old and New Media. She has also worked on projects to develop both hardware and software, specializing in image processing, digital audio/video, interactive web applications and real time performance technology for theater and the Internet. She feels she started with new media pretty early, and was attracted mainly because of the freedom she believed it would offer. Both because the technologies were so new, no one had any pre-conceived idea of technical limitations, they just tried anything and everything. Further, in those early days, there were no stereotypes about computers being only for men, or that men were more inclined or more skilled at them--no one really felt very skilled. This was something of a revelation because the other women interviewed so far are younger--between 25-45--so they entered the new media field much later. Most them mention the lack of perceived limits when it comes to what the tech can do, or at least the feeling that it offered more freedom to them in some way, but most did not have such an experience of thinking they would be able to completely shed gender stereotypes related to careers or activities. Erna Kotkamp Erna Kotkamp is at Utrecht University (UU) and has been doing work on gender studies, and on technology. Erna described her use of technology in a way that, so far, more closely resembles the "classic geek mode" than any of the other people with whom I spoke. She said she was most comfortable with a screw-driver in hand, tinkering with a computer's guts. At the same time, even she was not completely comfortable saying she just found it fun, admitting any frivolous reasons for her use of tech. And she noted herself as we spoke, it was interesting to find such an old gender stereotype still affecting her so much. Though Erna is not focusing explicitly on gender in her current research, which is on open-source software and e-learning, it was more explicitly part of this interview than in many, maybe because she notices that aspect in her work as a matter of course. She put her experience in context, describing how 10 years ago, it was still common for people in humanities disciplines to feel comfortable ignoring tech or even announcing their ignorance of computers. At that time she was the "techie one" in Women's Studies at UU and was often called on to help others do things with computers, even to make PowerPoint slides. Now people are not so comfortable admitting techno-illiteracy, but Erna still feels some that she knows need to be more savvy, and more importantly to recognize that knowing how to use tech and how to think critically about it are both essential basic skills now. 3

Though Erna is the most inclined toward hardware hacking and, of the women I've spoken with so far, one of the most proficient at coding, she seemed to get started rather incidentally. Her family always was much more focused on arts and humanities kind of stuff, so neither she nor her brother were encouraged to do much with math, science, or tech. So though Erna feels her strengths lie in these later areas, she never really had much chance to develop them (or maybe even recognize them?) until by chance she took computer classes during her BA studies. Erna had quite a few insights into her own use of technology, the opensource scene, and the impact of gender. For one thing, she finds that she has to prove her technological expertise more often than male teachers, and when she observes the teachers she trains she sees the same thing. In a class on computer use, women teachers are still more likely to be asked "test" questions than men, which suggests that though men and women may use computers for daily tasks in the same ways, and may be aware that they use them in the same ways, when people talk or think about being "experienced with computers," they tend to use a narrow definition that depends on actual programming or other creation, rather than just use, and that men are still perceived as being more competent. This was in line with what some recent research has shown; when gender is explicitly part of the discussion, using technology may be narrowly defined as programming. Also, Erna made an astute observation in saying that she defined her own level of experience differently in different settings. Among her colleagues in Gender Studies, who are not so focused on tech, Erna describes herself as very experienced, but among people who program a lot, she describes herself as less so. We need to look more closely at what standard people use when asked to either describe their own practice or to evaluate others. Because if women habitually compare themselves or are compared to to most hardcore programmers and other use of or creation with technology is not recognized, without any discussion of what counts as "use" and why an activity counts or not, then we may blindly reinforce the stereotypes. She further commented about relationships and careers; she had mentioned herself still feeling like she had to have serious reasons to use tech, not just enjoying the playful aspect and that this was part of an old, embedded gender stereotype. She later added that it was easier for lesbians to escape that dynamic because between two women (and I assume this would hold for gay men as well) choosing to work or not did not instantly force you into some stance in relation to traditional gender roles. This may be a real issue, but is hard to get at since if self-reporting about tech use seems so unreliable. 4

Marianne van den Boomen Marianne van den Boomen is also working on a PhD at Utrecht University, in new media. Marianne has already been writing about technology for some time, so she has a very well-informed perspective. Most of our discussion was carried out through email, and so I will quote some of her statements directly. My first involvement with new media was in 1984. I was working as an editor of a magazine called Marge, a monthly magazine about social work, community work and social movements (feminist, gay, squatting etc). That year the research institute where we had our office had bought a word processing system (not even MS DOS, it was a dedicated Dutch word processing system, with huge 8 inch floppies, on which you could store I think 30 pages). The system was meant for just the secretaries, to type reports, but we, the three magazine editors, went with the secretaries on a course to learn it. We had the idea that with this we could publish the magazine without the expensive, bureaucratic and tiresome steps in between the editing and final printing (manual copy editing on typescripts, sending it by snail mail to the typesetter, getting strips back by snail mail, proofreading, sending it back again, doing the layout with the returned corrected strips, sending it back again, and then final proofreading - and always fights with the publisher about delivering to much typesetting work). So we started to do the typesetting by ourselves in-house - that indeed did save us money we had to pay to the publisher, and it was big fun, but of course it increased tremendously our working hours... First mistake :-) Nevertheless, I was completely in love with those word processing machines - magical typewriters, which enabled bypassing intermediary institutions by doing-it-yourself, hands-on (I still consider PCs that way). Marianne took time to reflect on what she thought when she first encountered computers, and notably for her as well there is an idea that they can confer some kind of freedom; freedom from layers of control, freedom from the constraints of some other medium. Also, like Sher and Erna, Marianne had the experience of being the most knowledgeable in a community or workplace, and so sort of fell into the role of tech expert, and in her case actually gaining a title of system manager. When she first encountered the Internet, gender issues were visible, but seemed perhaps to not really be experienced as constraints by women as a whole.

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The Internet came into view in 1993, when I attended the famous Hacking at the End of the Universe camp (the HEU, as it is called) in a Dutch nowhere land polder, organized by the hacker-technoanarchists of Hacktic (later called Xs4all, still my Internet provider, and I am proud that my e-mail adresses at Hacktic and xs4all are still working. I was there with my tent and laptop to write an article for De Groene about the hacker movement. Man, what fun did I have there! Hundreds of tents on a site, lectures, workshops and demonstrations in bigger tents, 300 public computers connected to the Internet, 1000 boys and 10 women/girls camping, talking, internetting, listening, laughing. The amazing thing was that the atmosphere was really like what I knew of women's festivals - I came right out of the women's movement, and here there were boys and men all over the place, sharing their stuff and experiences, discussing how to get human right violations reports out of Gaza over weak telephone lines, how to get rid of the fascists on their bulletin board systems without betraying their principle of freedom of speech, talking about Gopher (the text menu based navigating system, no web yet) and newsgroups and mailinglists and FTP. From here we talked further about gendered experiences with technology and Marianne had some interesting observations. While we can see the image of the "nerd" is already present in her conceptual framework, I'm not sure many men who did not know how computers worked would have felt any different than what Marianne describes below. Mm, my prior experiences with computers did not really impress me. At school 'computers' were something unseen, a hobby of a few boys with the wrong clothes, who went studying math and physics. Classical nerds, and at that time 'nerd' was not associated with anything sexy or fun at all. When I studied psychology I had my first hands on experience with computers: mainframes behind glass...(the typewriters connected to the computer did not even have screens). I did not have a clue what I was doing and it did not interest me at all. ... no, not my cup of tea. For that matter, just a classic women stance towards computers. The first time I had an idea about computers was again at the research institute were I worked, actually before they bought the word processors. In the hall there was a piece of furniture I did not understand. It was a huge table, in which a kind of typewriter was built in. No one used it, it was just standing there. I asked other people what it was, no one knew, but one day the publisher visited 6

the institute, he saw the thing and he told me that it was a word processor, on which you could save and edit text. And that is was a shame that the institute did not know how to handle it. At that moment I got a glimpse, I had a idea what could be done with such a device, I have been involved in several feminist magazines as a volunteer, and some of these we had to typeset ourselves at the printing house. ... Though there were ways to correct a letter or a word, you usually ruined the rhythm of the words and the sentence cause the font types were proportional, there was not enough space or too much space after deleting and then inserting a new letter. I realized that this problem would be solved with a word processor. So in that sense my computing education is 'classical feminine': I did not see anything in computers as long as it was about calculation, but when it turned out to be about writing, language and typesetting I got it. Of course, this is a tricky stereoptype male=calculation, language=female, but it worked for me. I have to admit that I used this stereotypical argument in my book 'Internet ABC voor vrouwen' (Internet ABC for women, 1995) to convince women they had to get their hands on this stuff, because otherwise the Internet would remain a toy for boys. My message was basically: don't be afraid, the Internet it is more about language and communication than it is about computing and technology. I am still a bit ashamed for that argument... But it worked. This passage reveals what I believe is both an important stereotype and a constraint on women's use of technology, that of women's motivation being pragmatism versus men's being play. Marianne and others have said they cared about tech once they saw it could help them do something they wanted to do, and they seem to think this is more how women think, while men use tech more often for playful reasons. But this distinction rests on what we define at "just for fun" or "for a serious purpose" and no one seems to question those categories. Later Marianne went on to discuss an encounter with a musical device created by STEIM called a "crackle box." Her first reaction was that she wanted play one too, and then she tried to build one. To me, this sounds like just the kind of playful appreciation usually attributed to men. But Marianne described it this way: I think for me the point was, both with the word processor and the crackle box: if I have an idea of what I want to accomplish, and if I have the idea that this can be done with a technology on which I 7

can lay my hands on, which I can appropriate, adjust, tweak, then I am into technology. I am not a hacker, of course, but I always liked the old hacker's slogan: hands-on! Because it is both literal and figural a matter of hands-on, both with the crackle box and the computer (which' most important interface is the keyboard, and not the screen.) Strange enough such a basically pragmatic drive is not usual in women. I at least had no women friends who have the same fun in appropriating technology. So Marianne seems to have really gotten into a kind of hardware hacking, or even circuit bending, which again is usually assumed to only be interesting to men; even describes this as atypical among women, however as Sher Doruff, her actual activities seem identical to those carried out by men. Renee Turner Renee is a member of De Geuzen, a group of 3 women conducting what they term "multi-visual" research, most of which involves computers and digital media in some way. Renee describes herself as a perpetual student and this is pretty clear looking at her educational history: BA University of Dallas, [1984-1989]; MFA University of Arizona, [1990-1992] and MAs from Rijksakademie, Department of Photographic Media, Amsterdam, The Netherlands [1993-1994], and the Jan van Eyck , Laureate: Theory, [1995-1996]. Now she's finishing an MFA in writing from a UK school and is considering going on for PhD in New Media or something similar. But this seems in a certain way another point in common among the women I've interviewed, they are always pushing into new areas, learning new things. That's not to say this is reserved for women, or new media scholars/artists, but almost all of the women have explicitly mentioned that as a motive. Maybe it's no surprise that people studying new media are more interested in continually having to learn something new. Anyway, Renee started really with photography, but soon got in to digital images. She said that for her, new media seemed to allow more freedom from disciplinary constraints, but also that it allows her to much more easily combine and remix media (the advantage of digitality, of course). She summed up her overall view as this: "I want to be rigorous, but I'm not into being disciplined at all." So, Renee is now working on an MA in fiction, and interestingly, she seems to share some of the same interests as Sher in thinking about writing or text as part of artistic practice. Right now she's finishing her MA project which involves both fiction and non-fiction intertwined and she's thinking about 8

going on to a PhD in which she can explore narratives in electronic literary forms. Work she's already done in De Geuzen reflect some of these interests, like the virtual seance with Guy Debord or some aspects of the Female Icons series. Along with discussing these aesthetic and theoretical aspects, we talked a lot about how she used technology and what really affects women's use. A couple of really interesting things emerged from this part of the interview. Because Renee has been a tutor at Piet Zwart this year, we were talking about that experience, in particular about women learning to program. Anyone who knows Florian Cramer (the director of the Media design MA program at Piet Zwart) knows of his preference for the command-line and has probably heard his reasoning on why graphical user interfaces are limiting to users. Since I know Renee is not a really avid coder, I asked her what her view on this was and how the students reacted. (Since coding is almost always part of gender stereotypes around tech, this is a useful way to create an opportunity for gender to arise in the discussion without forcing it into the story artificially.) Anyway, a couple of things came up. First, all of the students seemed to manage the coding without too much trouble (and the class is about 50/50 women and men). Second, at the same time, the students most likely to get into "tech as toy" thinking were men, but in such a small group, that doesn't really show anything. Third, and most interesting, she thought the real reason women appeared to have a harder time learning to write code or use the command line has to do with the way their time is structured, especially if they are taking care of kids or other family. Renee felt, and I can certainly confirm this from my own experience, that learning a programming language or to use the command line takes a kind of sustained attention over time that often women don't have if they have families. She realized this after reading Martha Rosler's work on how women read magazines (among other topics). Apparently women read magazines like Vogue because they can put them down and pick them up easily, and being interrupted is not too much of a problem. So her idea is that graphical user interfaces enable a similar ability to put down and pick up computer work. Her own experience has been that if she is trying to (or succeeds at) learning how to code something or do something via the command line, if she then has an interruption of several days (or of course longer) she loses her place and has to start over figuring out how she did it. I don't think this indicates a difference between how men and women think, rather, anyone would probably have trouble if they were frequently 9

interrupted and I think women are more prone to being interrupted or perhaps allowing themselves to be. Certainly anyone with children experiences this problem, and women are still more likely to be primary caregivers, especially when kids are very young (a time when one is lucky if one can squeeze out an hour of uninterrupted time from caretaking). But further, I suspect that women are less likely to insist on uninterrupted time because it may seem self-centered. --The persistence of this particular aspect of gendered socialization is still surprisingly strong and it showed up in most women's reluctance to feel using tech for fun. So when I ask how or why they use tech, most women only talk about reasons they feel are serious, worthwhile, important, etc. Though some may actually play with it in the same way men do, or use tech in the same way for the same reasons, they seem to perceive or at least describe their use very differently. This raises interesting challenges in how to best conduct and interpret the interviews if I want to make any general comment about women and tech/new media in the Netherlands. Finding a way to get away from these gender roles and stereotypes is crucial to understanding men's and women's use of technology. Failing to do so may leave us reinforcing the stereotypes and keeping women's practice invisible and their contributions to institutions, discourse, and knowledge production as well. Then as the discourse and the institutions evolve, they do so based on a misperception of women not creating and using technology. Instead of allowing this delusion to continue, we must look more closely at what women are doing, and making sure that our discourse about those practices is rooted in their real practices and not outdated and inaccurate stereotypes.

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Primary Sources: Doruff, Sher, interviewed, July 3, 2008. Kotkamp, Erna, interviewed, July 6, 2008. Turner, Renee, interviewed July 5, 2008 van den Boomen, Marianne, interviewed via email and in person July 6, 2008. Secondary Sources: Appadurai, Arjun, Joke Brouwer (2005). Feelings are Always Local, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers/V2_Organization. Boyd, Frank, Cathy Brickwood, Andreas Broeckmann, Lisa Haskel, Eric Kluitenberg and Marleen Stikker eds. (1999). New Media Culture in Europe. Amsterdam: De Balie and The Virtual Platform Butler, Judith (2005). Giving an Account of Oneself. Fordham University Press. Caborn, Joannah (). “On the Methodology of Dispositive Analysis” Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines. Foucault, Michel (1969). The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Routledge. Gill, Rosalind (2007). Technobohemians or the new Cybertariat? New media work in Amsterdam a decade after the web, Network Notebooks 01, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Hansen, Mark B. N. (2004). New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Kluitenberg, Eric (2007). Delusive Spaces: Essays on Culture, Media and Technology, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam and the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam Lievrouw, L. A., & Livingstone, S. M. (2006). Handbook of new media: social shaping and social consequences of ICTs. London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE. Lister, M. (2002). New media: a critical introduction. London; New York: Routledge. Manovich, Lev, (2002). The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Rossiter, Ned (2006). Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, Amsterdam: the Institute of Network Cultures. Sunden, Jenny, Sveningsson Elm, Malin (2007). Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights: Digital Media and Gender in a Nordic Context. UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Tarkka, Minna and Mirjam Martevo (2003). Nordic Media Culture: Actors and Practices, Helsinki: M-Cult. Zielinski, Siegfried (1997). “Media Archaeology,” Digital Delirium. New World Perspectives: Montreal 1997. Arthur & Marilouise Kroker (eds.). Montreal: Ctheory, online at Ctheory: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=42

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Here is your Confirmation. Paper Submission Confirmation. Dear Kimberly, Thank you for submitting your 2009 ICA Annual Conference Paper. The title of your paper is: Doing Technology, Undoing Myth: Women Creating and Using Technology in the Netherlands The file you uploaded has been assigned the file name: ica09_proceeding_300803.pdf Thank you for your submission. Sincerely, International Communication Association

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