The Internet (Net) is the new space of empowerment and it is adding to, and transforming, the diverse contexts for economic, political, cultural and social transactions. In many ways it is the first truly potential global space because access to it is absolutely possible for all, although only a concrete reality for the few right now. Those few are concentrated in the North where the communications infrastructure and technological hardware and software are widely available and accessible. With 19 per cent of the world’s population, the rich Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries had 91 per cent of Internet users as we moved into the new millennium (UNDP 1999). However, the Internet is reaching and being reached by an increasing number of people across the world every day, including those in the South, and the networking and activist work undertaken through it is forging new communities and collective strategies (Escobar 1999). These developments increasingly cross North/South boundaries. The Internet is facilitating an international grassroots communications revolution where more and more individuals and groups, including women and women’s groups, are communicating, campaigning and community building through websites, e-mail networks and discussion groups.
One does not have to be a cyberfanatic or a naïve futurist to recognize that, while such activities do not automatically and immediately overturn the state-and corporate-based power that holds sway at the global level, they are contributing to changes in its operation. We should therefore consider the Internet as a potential means for democratization of the international arena through its facilitation of a growing number of voices and collective strategies. The possibilities for long-term change are well worth recognizing. The impact of cyberactivism and its part in mobilizing real-time protests, and the derailing of the WTO meeting in Seattle toward the end of 1999, was one of the first high-profile events demonstrating the concrete effects of international virtual political activity (see Protest.Net, http://www.protest.net, and ZNet, http://www.lbbs.org/Activism/actst.htm).
This event signalled the degree to which the Net is aiding ‘active’ participation in international processes by a growing number of individuals and groups. The day-by-day and minute-by-minute realities of Internet exchange incorporate the development and operation of ‘interactive networks’ (Escobar 1999: 34) around all kinds of interests and shared concerns. Through such networks, the Net is expanding ‘horizontal’ forms of communication that associate citizens and interest groups to some extent outside of, or alongside and at times interacting with, the traditional ‘vertical’ structures of political and economic (including media) power, involving state and international institutions and corporations. The following discussion examines how attention to the nature of the Internet as a communications medium and the kinds of interactions it facilitates emphasizes an approach to empowerment as ‘process’ (Rowlands 1998: 28).
The chapter pays particular attention to the Internet’s potential for women in this regard and demonstrates how it is being harnessed, including across North/South divides. The Internet increases the visibility of women’s issues at the international level, develops new communities based on common interests, and works explicitly to pursue the possibilities offered to women by cyberspace. I will draw on my experience in the UNESCO-Society for International Development (SID) Women on the Net (WoN) project (see http://www.waw.be/sid/won/won.htm and Harcourt 1999), which was launched in 1997 and brought together a group of technicians, researchers, activists and development practitioners from Africa, the USA, Canada, Europe and Asia.
The project focused directly on women, empowerment and the Internet. As one of its originators Lourdes Arizpe (1999: xiii) explained: ‘The main thing is that women must now be active agents in experimenting and interpreting the new forms of communication that the new technologies offer us.’ The aims of WoN included examining the implications of the social contexts of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the particular challenges women confronted in participating as fully as possible in their development and application, including at the policy level, locally and globally.
ICTs are developed and configured in social realities in which men and women have differential access to power, economic opportunities and resources. How to fulfil the potential of the Internet depends very much on opening up the vertical power structures for women and women creating horizontal power structures through networks which could serve their varied needs within and across regions.
(Harcourt 1997: 4)
The following discussion will begin with an assessment of cyberspace and its implications for thinking about boundaries and agency. This section emphasizes the importance of understanding cyberspace in socially contextualized ways: as a space within, connected to and interacting with other social spaces. I explain how cyberspace problematizes traditional senses of boundaries (physical, social, political, cultural) and actively encourages fresh thinking about different kinds of potential for transcending them. I argue that the Internet highlights the importance of technoagency: technological access and know-how. It expands perspectives on campaigns for global equality, drawing attention to the growing role of technological needs and capacities in definitions of it. The current communications revolution has raised the development stakes, as it were, adding modems and computers to the more familiar basic needs of water, food, shelter and healthcare.
The next section focuses on women and cyberpolitics, and explores the specific meanings of cyberspace for women’s lives and development. I assess the particular impact of Internet access for women who have been too much a missing force in male-dominated international politics, and, importantly, who have had limited means of reaching each other across national boundaries (Enloe 1990; Peterson 1992; Pettman 1996; Youngs 1999a and b). I illustrate the ways in which the Internet offers radical collective opportunities in this context, arguing that the relationship of women to ICTs and thus the gendered implications of the so-called information age are essential considerations.
The third section discusses cyber possibilities and development. It considers how the whole notion of development is being reframed to take account of the influential role of ICTs in transforming societies. The ICT revolution is pervasive, incorporating (actually and potentially) economic, political, social and cultural activities. As Fatma Alloo, founder of the Tanzania Women’s Media Association (TAWMA) has explained: ‘We must recognize that this information technology is here to stay …. What we have to decide is we either play the game … and turn it to our advantage or lose out completely’ (Women in the Digital Age 1998: 14). I believe ‘playing the game’ offers opportunities for women to build new alliances across North/South divides and to actively address the problems of access to ICTs and their use, including their gendered characteristics. With respect to the latter, there are many challenges to share related to the traditionally male-dominated history of science and technology. And, as Sandra Harding has recently argued, these should be addressed with feminist and postcolonial sensitivities that move away from rigid and hegemonically informed North/South technology-transfer paradigms to more open dialogues that validate local contexts, knowledges and cultural capacities.
[T]his postcolonial science theory organizes its concerns and conceptual frameworks from outside the familiar eurocentric ones and, in that sense, its ‘subject’ or ‘author’ is not the familiar enthusiastic European beneficiary of northern sciences and technologies. Such a strategy enables postcolonial theory to detect features of different cultures’ scientific and technological thought and practices that are not visible from within the familiar western accounts of science.
(Harding 1998: 8; see also Pillai 1996)
The communicative power of the Internet is both part of the problem and part of the solution in this context. While it is an expression of the triumph of Western technology it is also a means of engaging critically with the nature of that technology, of opening up lines of interrogation and transformation.
Cyberspace undoubtedly brings a new era of social interaction. Online it is possible to be in touch with audiences across the globe, offering them extensive information on individual concerns or group campaigns, and soliciting responses, even from strangers in distant locations, within minutes. The distinctive technological advance that the Internet symbolizes for the information society is the fusion of information and communication technologies to combine the power to communicate in depth and at speed. There simply is no comparison, for example, between the capacity of the fax machine to transmit information through cumbersome hard copies page after page and the megabytes of data that can be uploaded and downloaded via the Internet in minutes. ICTs mean that it is possible to have cyberneighbours/friends/colleagues with whom one chats/works daily or hourly by e-mail, and in this sense they truly give meaning to the now familiar cliché of the global village (McLuhan et al. 1997).
It is helpful to think of the Internet as a man-made environment because that prompts us to focus on the kind of ‘village’ that it permits: one that facilitates communication and even intimacy without physical presence. This is quite a different sense of village to traditional notions that are highly dependent on a defined and usually small geographical location with close physical proximity of people and buildings. In contemporary times we need to work with different senses of proximity, some of which are totally dependent on communication via ICTs and some of which involve usual notions of social interaction through physical presence (Tomlinson 1999). Closer contact, both professional and personal, may well be generated by one or both means.
So how does cyberspace change the social world we live in? It clearly expands the scope of communication geographically. It also speeds up the potential for communication and makes a greater density or intensity of communication over shorter periods of time possible. It also allows larger amounts of information, faster than ever before, to be posted (as on websites) or transmitted from one address to another. So the ways in which it helps to shrink the world are equally about the amounts and the nature of information as about the actual process of communication of it. One of the key starting points of the WoN project – culture – is interesting in this context because it identifies the social potential of ICTs with informational content that is explicitly about peoples, their ways of life, their histories and practices. It has meaning at the collective and the individual levels, and this is essential since ICTs link both.
Access to information and facilitation of communication provide new and enhanced opportunities for expression and perpetuation of the cultural life of communities and peoples, with the potential to accelerate political, economic, social, educational and cultural advancement beyond the scope of traditional institutions and forms of communication. Regional and global information networks expand the voices of cultures and peoples via electronic fora to raise awareness and focus international attention and support on specific cultural issues and efforts. The ability to transcend present boundaries and create what would be an even finer web of information systems is the key to taking cyberculture to its next level.
(Bray-Crawford 1999: 162)
This and many other exchanges within the project have emphasized the challenges and opportunities offered by cyberspace for expanding what we understand to be the global informational sphere. It is increasing the number of new voices and new knowledges, and, crucially, enhancing the ability to campaign for the interests and concerns of a growing number of people around the world. By focusing on culture, the WoN project has explored the located nature of cyberspace in several complex ways. It has linked the potential of cyberspace to people, their lives, their problems and their aspirations. It has recognized the potential informational power of cyberspace to inform, educate and combat ignorance in such areas. Perhaps even more importantly, it has considered cyberspace as just one of the interacting media through which social communication and action takes place. In this way it highlights the need for critical thinking about the social relevance and potential of cyberspace and the ways in which it can connect people and communities, and begin work toward transcending traditional barriers that have divided and limited people’s knowledge about one another. ‘Cyberspace offers the possibility to move from segmenting knowledge to integrating and sharing it across traditional academic categories, expertise, technical skill, scientific know-how, political weight and cultural hierarchies’ (Harcourt 1997: 4).
Cyberspace has the potential to cross many traditional boundaries. The degree to which it ultimately does so is dependent only on the ways in which societies and individuals use and develop it. Part of its potential is to reach across social and geographical contexts, breaching public and private, national, political and economic divides (Youngs 1999c). It brings the local and the global into much closer relation and thus the most powerful possibilities for transcendence it offers relate to the most influential of boundaries dividing nations and cultures. This presents a conceptual as well as practical challenge because international theories and political practices, and the common sense resulting from them, have to date been dominated by billiard-ball state-centred frameworks, which define collective and individual political identities through the boundaries that separate states and peoples from one another (Walker 1993; Youngs 1999b). This helps to lock ‘political imagination’ as well as political identity into state-bound orientations (Walker 1993: ix–x) and this is highly problematic when thinking about the possibilities for expanded cross-boundary political activity and experience offered by the Net. Imagination beyond traditional political realms, participation and identities is an integral part of such processes and, crucially, the motivation for them. This situation is further complicated by the technical boundaries that ICTs present, which have implications for all those who are down the technological hierarchies for one reason or another. Two great divides lie between the so-called developed and developing worlds, and between men and women. One of the strengths of the WoN project has been its deliberate decision to work across these boundaries.
This picture implies that cyberspace is expanding the scope and nature of political agency. In certain respects it is linking, and is likely to increasingly link, such agency to varying forms of technological agency. Questions of techno-agency are central to the transformations defining the move to information societies. The pursuit of human goals is being increasingly integrated with the capacities of various forms of advanced technologies, including ICTs. The current genetic debate, for example, touches on many aspects of human reproduction, health, food and the environment. It relates to other forms of technological developments based on the most sophisticated of scientific informational techniques. Technological syntaxes are beginning to saturate our social and communicative environments.
The computer is by all odds the most extraordinary of all the technological clothing ever devised by man, since it is the extension of our central nervous system …. The important thing is to realize that electric information systems are live environments in the full organic sense.
(McLuhan et al. 1997: 35–6)
There are processes of recognition, familiarization and adjustment to be taken account of here as well as the influential hierarchical barriers concerning access to technology and technological knowledge, basic education and literacy, and English (American) as the dominant language of the ICT age. The WoN project has stressed that the challenges we share cross all these areas. It has recognized, along with other Net-oriented global projects, the contemporary importance of technoagency, and has focused on the specific issues faced by women across cultural contexts.
ICTs carry the gendered legacy of historically established male domination in the realms of science and technology. Women’s relationship to modern technologies has been largely defined and mediated by men. Donna Haraway’s provocative discussion of the contemporary era of ‘technoscience’ draws us directly into the realms of subjectivity and agency: ‘I want feminists to be enrolled more tightly in the meaning-making processes of technoscientific world-building’ (1997: 127). At issue is women’s fundamental relationship to technology and any politics associated with it. Feminist perspectives draw attention to the need for critical thought about both: the implications of women’s historical alienation or separation from key technological processes by masculinist science, and the subject/object separations common to scientific traditions of thought (see Youngs 2000a). Haraway’s sense of the woman/computer (‘cyborg’) relationship is embodied, or at least one that attempts to interestingly blur the distinction between person, machine, purpose and political imagination (see also Haraway 1991).
Communication and articulation disconnected from yearning toward possible worlds does not make enough sense. And explicit purposes – politics, rationality, ethics, or technics in a reductive sense – do not say much about the furnace that is personal and collective yearning for just barely possible worlds.
(Haraway 1997: 127)
Haraway embraces and articulates the virtual possibilities of cyberspace and the political purport of the tracks we follow and connections we build within it. She prompts us to probe the ‘knot[s] of knowledge-making practices’ (1997: 129). Women’s relationship to and use of ICTs cannot be taken for granted. It has to be worked through with critical regard to the gendered social constructions of technological capacities and tools, and this is not just a practical matter but one that has implications for the alternative world visions that women can weave together. Use of ICTs goes hand in hand with questions about purpose. As Lourdes Arizpe has argued:
Cyberspace will greatly accelerate our capacity to create and build. This will have important effects in encouraging women to participate in designing and implementing models of economic development, constructing stable democracies, ensuring that different cultures can exist side by side without violent conflict and providing the sense of trust, partnership and solidarity that are necessary to any society in which people co-operate for mutual well-being. Such a vision calls for women cyber-citizens who are rooted in their local cultures yet have a stake in national and global civil society.
(Women in the Digital Age 1998: 2)
This sense of women as located yet globally connected through cyberspace reveals the complex spatial politics of technoagency. It also signals the importance of an awareness of cyber-citizens as embodied (Youngs 2000b) and technoagency as something which connects virtual space with the more conventional and overtly concrete spaces of political, economic, social and cultural activities and processes. ICTs are multidimensional tools whose power rests largely in their capacities to link places and people, and we already have strong evidence that women can harness and exploit that power to their own purposes. This has particular importance at the international level where the scope for women’s political activity has been most severely restricted (compared to men) and where, subsequently, political and personal linkages with one another have been limited.
At this point it is useful to remember that the arrival of the ICT age accompanied a growing international focus on women’s issues and women’s movements with the United Nations conferences on women and its decade for women (1976–85) playing key roles. The ICT dimension in women’s activism came to the fore in a major way at the fourth world conference in Beijing in 1995 as well as earlier in the preparations for it (Gittler 1999). Those involved in the process, however, have stressed that ‘networking’ by no means arrived with the Internet. Rather, this new medium expanded the established practices and networking possibilities that had already been contributing to building different strands of international women’s movements (Gittler 1999: 92). The numbers of newsletters had been expanding and fax networks had been ‘instrumental in multiplying messages and mobilizing action in campaigns’ internationally (Gittler 1999: 93). The Beijing process was a profound example of the potential of the Internet to deepen women’s global connectivity and transform their collective sense of political action.
[W]omen accessed draft versions of the Platform for Action, regional action plans and caucus documents. They downloaded them, disseminated them, analyzed them, drafted additions and deletions, reached consensus on issues, circulated statements and mobilized support. NGOs in some countries found themselves better informed than their national delegations. The public electronic spaces for discussion and information sharing also helped demystify the UN proceedings. Discussions previously reserved for a few government delegates and observers at the United Nations were now open to anyone able to access the medium.
Electronic communications promoted a feeling of being part of a larger process …. Women who met on-line found an immediate network in Beijing. Electronic conferences and mailing lists sprang up on issues ranging from violence against women to spirituality, gender, science and technology.
(Gittler 1999: 95)
Relevant to our considerations of technoagency is the interactive influence of collective political work and association in this context and collective learning about ICTs and the problems and potential they present. The pull of the possibilities for political involvement was coupled with the pull to get online, to work together to make ICTs meaningfully accessible and usable for growing numbers of women and women’s organizations in larger numbers of locations. Training and technical assistance was a large part of the empowerment picture in this process, with notable networks specifically designed for this purpose such as the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) Women’s Outreach Program (Gittler 1999: 96 and Gittler 1996; Farwell et al. 1999). The Global Knowledge ’97 conference hosted by the World Bank and the Canadian government with other private and public organizations was another focal point for the women’s ICT movement, to use the term loosely, as was its follow-up in 2000 (Sreberny 1998; Huyer 1999).
As explained below, the WoN project is one among many around the world that are continuing and developing the efforts that have surrounded these major global events. Such work indicates shared commitment to use ICTs to work toward creating forms of global spheres for women’s politics. They are a manifestation of the kinds of local–global connections mooted in debates about globalization and, as I have argued, they are transformative not only in respect to women’s politics but also women’s evolving relationship to new technologies and both are equally influential in defining the future global potential of women.
Technology, and ICTs in particular, have become central to development debates, with technological capacities and access taking up a growing part in considerations of equality and rights (World Bank 1999, 2000; UNDP 1999). The various economic, political and cultural functions of ICTs contribute directly to processes of globalization, and major international reports of recent times have focused on the implications of these developments. In major respects ICTs as definers of the knowledge age help to shape the characteristics of inequities within it. These cover a whole range of communications and technological infrastructure, knowledge, education and training issues. The USA stands out at the top of these league tables in the industrialized world with significant combined concentrations in areas such as e-commerce spending, home Internet use and numbers of personal, including networked, computers (UNDP 1999: 66; see also Youngs 2000c).
Technology gaps are coming to represent one of the most serious concerns in the assessment of what it means to lose in the game of globalization. The ‘new rules of globalization – privatization, liberalization and tighter intellectual property rights – are shaping the path of technology, creating new risks of marginalization and vulnerability’ (UNDP 1999: 68). With the knowledge sector growing fast in the global economy, market and major corporate power are increasingly driving the agenda for control over innovation and technology transfer (UNDP 1999: 67–8). Developing countries figure little in the intellectual property rights scenario, with industrialized countries holding 97 per cent of all the patents in the world (UNDP 1999: 68). ICTs, as the huge profile of the likes of Bill Gates and Microsoft indicates, are among the key money-makers of the high-technology sector. A small but growing number of developing countries have become players in the software market, but the industrialized OECD countries took the lion’s share – 94 per cent – of the 1994 global total of $79 billion for final, packaged software (UNDP 1999: 69). Despite the rapid growth in areas such as mobile telephone use, most of the figures for the global ICT picture at the end of the twentieth century looked depressingly daunting.
There are more Internet hosts in Bulgaria than in sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa). The USA has more computers than the rest of the world combined, and more computers per capita than any other country. Just fifity-five countries account for 99 per cent of global spending on information technology. Most telephones in developing countries are in the capital city, although most people live in rural areas. Connections are often poor in the rainy season, and the costs of calls are very high. In several African countries average monthly Internet connection and use costs run as high as $100 – compared with $10 in the USA (UNDP 1999: 62).
Perhaps the elitist nature of the Internet revolution at this point is its most worrying aspect, particularly in relation to the optimistic claims made for its potential to bring new expanded forms of democracy in relation to information and society. Critical debates in this context focus on the dominance of English (American) on the Internet and the requirement of basic literacy as well as general and technological education. Only 2 per cent of the world’s people are part of the Net, with nearly 80 per cent of websites in English. Thirty per cent of users possess at least one university degree (UNDP 1999: 62). Women represent 38 per cent of users in the USA, 25 per cent in Brazil, 17 per cent in Japan and South Africa, 16 per cent in Russia, 7 per cent in China and 4 per cent in the Arab States (UNDP 1999: 62).
The Internet clearly brings long-established concerns about the gendered character of technology use into fresh perspective. In the information age these divides inform the politics of empowerment. One of the major features of global restructuring has been feminization of the labour force and this has undoubtedly increased the number of women having access to ICTs. However, there are influential contrasts in the possibilities this opens up. While certain professions, such as business, academia and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), provide access to a wide range of facilities and opportunities, we must not forget that a substantial number of women work in secretarial and clerical roles. Their relationships to these technologies tend to be much more rigidly defined, including time to experiment and explore (Runyan 1996; Walby 1997; see also Marchand and Runyan 2000). However, overall, the increased access of women to ICTs across such different circumstances remains a key factor in their potential (as well as actual) empowerment through the use of these new technologies. As one respondent from Peru to the APC’s Women’s Networking Survey of 1996 commented:
After six years of being dedicated to administration tasks I was given the opportunity to combine my work with information and communication tasks and this has allowed me to discover within myself unknown areas and a great inclination for the area of information and telecommunications.
(APC 1997)
The increased double burden for women of work inside and outside of the home has also eaten further into the time available to pursue independent non-work and care-based activities (UNDP 1999: 80–1; Walby 1997: 53–5). As one respondent to the APC Survey explained, ‘in some ways the Internet is a tool for those with lives of leisure’ (APC 1997; see also Youngs 2001).
One of the functions of projects like WoN is to help disrupt the historically and economically created relationships (or lack thereof) of women to high technology. It encourages collective spaces where women can think creatively and independently about what ICTs have to offer and how they would like to capture, utilize and influence these possibilities. In line with other similar projects, most of the work has been done through face-to-face workshops and online debate, development of website material and publications. This includes an accessible introductory digital age handbook to introduce the Internet and to offer practical advice to individuals and groups about getting online (Harcourt 1997, 1999; Women in the Digital Age 1998).
All aspects of WoN’s work have emphasized partnership and collaborative discovery about the actual nature and potential of the Internet. As a project, it has been rooted in the local and the global in different contexts, focusing on the ways in which the Internet brings one to the other and makes linkages within and across them. Fundamental questions underpinning the work have been along these lines: What do we want the Internet to do? How can it help us in our local goals, in education and health? How can we be present there? What kinds of global networks do we want to form and to what ends? What do we want to say about ourselves, our communities, our cultures and our lives? What kinds of technological skills do we need to do this effectively? How easily can such skills be accessed and shared? The list is of course endless. The workshops, which have been both ideas-based and practical, have all been conducted in a participatory manner. The exchanges demonstrate the potential for sharing across national boundaries, for information and for priorities for learning as well as for imagining what is and might be possible.
In trendy terminology we can think in terms of WoN being a small part of women’s Internet learning curve in a global context, or as Jo Rowlands powerfully and simply puts it: ‘The central issue of empowerment is one of process’ (1998: 28). The role of the Internet as part of the overall development process has distinctive qualities in this respect. Among other things, it facilitates ongoing shared connection and learning, and even the development of communities of empowerment over extended periods of time. The communications and information links that it provides enable deep exchange and connection. Of course, these cannot be taken for granted and they don’t just happen. They have to be built by individuals and groups, but, as I have indicated, this is already being done successfully across the North and the South.
Because the Net is both an information and a communication technology, it has a complex role in the area of empowerment. If it can be accessed actively it can be used to gain and communicate information, to work toward building new transnational communities and to obtain and share technical and other forms of knowledge. WoN, in common with other empowerment-oriented Net projects, has been focused on the potential of this medium for generating and sharing new information, including about women’s lives, interests and activities, as well as their communities. Therein lies part of the transformative potential of the Net in Northern and Southern, as well as North–South, communicative contexts.
The collective focus of WoN has tapped into important practical priorities that are driving Net development projects aimed at tackling the global inequalities in technical knowledge and equipment. These priorities disrupt the highly individualistic model of the personal computer at work and at home that tends to be the received view of the information society in the North. Clearly the priority for the majority of the world is how to get access at all to the Net and, apart from the fundamental issues of telecommunications infrastructure, this directs attention to community/collective rather than individual links (UNDP 1999: 63–5). Some of the most innovative work relating to the Internet is centred on the establishment of telecentres and village information hubs. They integrate various communications and computer technologies with energy sources such as solar power, thus providing local, including rural, communities with different forms of access to the Net (UNDP 1999: 64). One example is Canada’s International Development Research Centre’s Acacia project in Africa that is establishing telecentres in four countries: Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda (http://www.idrc.ca/acacia).
Expanding access to the Internet is partly about expanding the sources of information on it, and this has been one of WoN’s primary activities. Two Internet workshops for women, women’s NGOs and community group representatives, in partnership with local NGOs in Tanzania (Zanzibar) and Kenya (Nairobi) in 1999, decided that they wanted to establish websites and enhance those which already existed on local groups and organizations. Information on Africa by Africans, the participants argued, had been a major goal along with access to the Net’s wealth of information for local purposes and interests, including the commercial. WoN’s work has emphasized how the Internet, for all its virtual and boundary-crossing qualities, actually facilitates new awareness of and emphasis on the local, or more specifically ‘place’ (see Development 1998). As Arturo Escobar has put it: ‘a reassertion of place, non-capitalism and local culture should result in theories that make visible possibilities for reconceiving and reconstructing the world from the perspective of place-based practices’ (1999: 46).
The Net is a mechanism for disseminating the hidden stories of globalization. Information about happenings in particular places at particular times can be shared and thus drawn on to increase understanding and to contribute to various local and global political (and other) processes. However, the potential for social transformation, as Escobar stresses, rests partly on the determination to ‘build bridges between place and cyberspace’ with political effect (1999: 52). In this sense it is important that cyberspace and its potential is evaluated within the context of broader social structures and processes.
Hence the new focus on ICTs in development and empowerment debates should be seen as an extension of their more established preoccupations rather than, as in any way, a substitute for them. In certain ways it can be argued that ICTs have made these debates even more complex and challenging. The World Bank’s (1999) key World Development Report: Knowledge for Development highlights the capacity of the new information and communication technologies to fulfil one of the more positive promises of globalization to bring North and South closer together.
This new technology greatly facilitates the acquisition and absorption of knowledge, offering developing countries unprecedented opportunities to enhance educational systems, improve policy formation and execution, and widen the range of opportunities for business and the poor. One of the great hardships endured by the poor, and by many others who live in the poorest countries, is their sense of isolation. The new communications technologies promise to reduce that sense of isolation, and to open access to knowledge in ways unimaginable not long ago.
(World Bank 1999: 9)
We are only talking about promise at this point, as the profound global inequalities in ICT access discussed here make clear, but the WoN project, among others, has taken seriously aspects of the challenges contained within such promise and the possibilities for working collectively and actively to address them. WoN has also, with others, addressed the critical issues associated with the predominantly male- and Western-centred tendencies of these new mainstream development policy debates.
Cyberspace cannot remain the domain of the powerful telecommunication companies and markets which profit from its use, nor the child of the (mostly male) technicians which have created the software and language that goes with it. Rather local groups have to become confident with the medium and to negotiate and to help shape the direction the Internet will take through incisive strategizing. The global communication culture would presumably then take on a much more diverse perspective, responding and interacting to the margins which recognise the politics and power of communications and its potential which is currently only glimpsed.
(Harcourt 1997: 3)
It is hard to be optimistic about global access to the Internet or to ICTs more generally, as it is no more than a distant dream right now. The arrival of the information age has been accompanied by profound and, to some extent, deepening inequalities across the world. By the late 1990s, the fifth of the world’s people living in the highest income countries had 86 per cent of world gross domestic product, 82 per cent of world export markets, 68 per cent of foreign direct investment and 74 per cent of telephone lines. The bottom fifth of the world’s population had just 1 per cent in the first three categories and one and a half per cent in the fourth. The assets of the top three billionaires amounted to more than the combined gross national product of all least developed countries and their 600 million people (UNDP 1999: 3).
The concentration of Internet access in the rich North reflects the dramatic knowledge divides between the developed and developing worlds in the expanding high technology sectors. As more and more activities across the political, commercial and cultural realms intensify on the Internet, concern will continue to grow about those who are left out of this expanding global communications sphere. The discussion in this chapter has illustrated different ways in which women’s movements have launched diverse strategies to tackle this problem, however overwhelming it might seem.
Globally, women’s organizations and campaigns have been actively addressing the challenges of getting online, embracing the empowerment opportunities of the Internet revolution. My arguments have stressed that these opportunities are far from restricted to issues of technology. They incorporate new possibilities for building global networks of, and strategies for, women. Their collective modes, in bringing growing numbers of women together across national boundaries to exchange views and work for shared ends, represent the quiet dawning of what might be considered a new era in international politics. While these developments do not sweep away the historical weight of male dominance in the international sphere, they do potentially disrupt some of its seamless qualities.
Therein lie some of the central messages of the achievements on the Internet by women to date and the orientations of projects like WoN. A starting point is the recognition of the Internet as a tool to be used. Thus, a priority must be gaining access to that tool and to working to overcome historically entrenched gendered technological barriers. Equally important is the creative work to establish precisely what role the Internet can play in building new transnational communities that incorporate ‘place-based knowledge and action’ (Arizpe 1999: xvi). These can only be processes of empowerment because they take time and collective effort. They include the ongoing building and strengthening of horizontal links – some based on established networks and others generating entirely new ones. From these can come strategies to continue both engaging critically with the vertical structures of political and economic power, and pressing for policies and conditions that will expand ICT access and counter the trends toward a global society divided along the lines of the information rich and poor.
Arizpe, L. (1999) ‘Freedom to create: Women’s agenda for cyberspace’, in W. Harcourt, (ed.) Women, London: Zed Books, pp. xii–xvi.
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