Brian Loader, Introduction, "Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency, and Policy in the Information Society"

In this chapter, Loader argues that the discourse of cyberculture leads one to believe that very soon, we will all be united in a vast and equitable communications network which spans the globe. In fact, this is a fantasy relevant to a very small segment of the world's population. Expanding technological developments in certain parts of the world have had little meaning, or worse, overtly negative effects on people in other parts of the world. Capitalism, nationalism, class and other systems of power intersect to determine access and effects. However, although these technological developments matter little or negatively to the majority of the world, they are nevertheless producing new means of production, and concomitantly new social structures of hegemony by corporations, institutions, and the state.

A second theme which Loader identifies is determinism, in that technology is cast as a kind of social steamroller which operates independently from social and other relations, and cannot be denied nor controlled. This theme serves the interests of those who control and promote technological change, because it diminishes the potential for resistance and activism around technology and its effects.

This model of analysis views technology not as a tool of linear "progress", but rather "through the often competing social forces of innovation, competitive advantage, human agency and social resistance."(p.15)

Trevor Haywood, "Global Networks and the Myth of Equality: Trickle Down or Trickle Away?"

Haywood's focus here is the development of technological networks and the lack of political debate about their manifestations and effects, as well as the problem of access and power relations. Critics of technological development argue that technologies recapitulate and reinforce existing inequalities; "the network as a marketplace of ideas will move from metaphor to reality where established patterns of consumer detriment, the compounded disadvantages of low-income groups, are replicated in digital form."(p.22) The "trickle-down" of technologies has meant that marginalized groups do not experience the technologies in the same ways that privileged groups do; both are implicated in the practice, but with much different effects. For the most part, power relations are not challenged for either. Users are not creators or owners.

In addition, those who have access to informed use of the technology will easily outstrip less privileged users, further widening the gap between them. "As those with the deep knowledge dig deeper, they inevitably extend their hold on the developing sophistication of systems."(p.24) Thus systems of privilege and power actively replicate relations of dominance, both within so-called developed and between so-called underdeveloped and developed nations.

Another problem with networking technology is that although it connects people electronically, it can also isolate them physically, resulting in communities of disconnected receivers of information, rather than active producers of connected knowledge. As Haywood writes, "Testing and reviewing information and knowledge within lively and articulate communities is still the most important safeguard of our democratic freedoms."(p.27) Haywood argues that networks move information from the public (as a collection of people existing and interacting in real, material spaces) into the increasingly privatized sphere, individualizing and commodifying knowledge.

However, this private sphere of individual remoteness is not really private. Creators and controllers of technology maintain a commitment to privacy that "has proved to be ephemeral", according to Loader. Public hysteria over the threat of "hackers" obscures the significant access to information held by corporations. Data control and access is as much a part of technological relations of power as control and use of technological objects.

Thus, concludes Loader, technological relations are shaped by systems of economic and political power.

Mike Holderness, "Who Are the World's Information-Poor?"

Like Haywood, Holderness begins his article with noting the rhetoric of equality which comprises much of the discourse around technology. He notes that the continued growth of information networks required capital investment, so that the creators and controllers of information networks became corporations. "Information poverty" thus compounds material poverty, and is reinforced by it. Holderness examines global access to information networks, and the implications of disparities in access. Given that market control of this technology has exacerbated and replicated unequal relations of access, Holderness argues that the so-called free market cannot be allowed full control of technological dispersal.

In terms of concrete questions of technology, Holderness points out that access to electronic networks requires a variety of things which many places do not have. Beyond an actual computer, access requires a great deal of functional infrastructure, and as such disparities between north and south, urban and rural in terms of infrastructure contributes to the problem of access.

These disparities are made more significant by the potential advantages to access: increased gender neutrality (according to Loader), universal access to education, and political self-organization (see Haywood on this). Given this potential, argues Holderness, "is there a reason why aid agencies should not assist [certain] areas to leap directly to remote-learning capability—in other words, for development aid financed on the back of interest in communications to create virtual libraries and schools where there are now no real ones?"(p.55) Thus, suggests Holderness, technological projects should shift from large-scale projects to applied, local projects which may be integrated with health or education aid, and "become an integral part of human capacity-building work."(p.56)

Alison Adam and Eileen Green, "Gender, Agency, Location, and the New Information Society"

In this chapter, Adam and Green examine two central themes in the area of gender and information technology (IT): gender differences in IT-related employment and the relationship between gender and cyberculture. (p.83) Between these two themes Adam and Green identify a few common threads: the question of agency and its relationship to the quest for equality; "the spaces and places where gendered relations and IT exist"; and the role of "differences" in terms of access and agency.(p.83) Agency is implicated in discussions of skill and its concomitant gendering. Adam and Green develop an analysis predicated on gender and employment, from which they proceed to an examination of women as users of technology, and feminist responses to this, most notably "cyberfeminism".

Adam and Green begin their examination of IT employment by noting the gendered division of labour as part of the process of technological development. They argue that "patterns of IT implementation vary between the areas referred to as 'women's work', and those traditionally labeled as 'skilled' and mainly populated by male workers."(p.85) The occupational segregation of women and men thus operates both laterally and hierarchically. In terms of globalization and the advent of transnational capital, and the development of the "flexible" work force, labour and technology intersect such that new forms of work organization are facilitated by technology. The effects of IT implementation depend on a variety of factors, such as "social and economic context and the size and level of unionization of the workforce involved."(p.87) Use of IT "ensures a geographical flexibility which enables the relocation of a growing range of tasks and information. Time and space are 'decompressed', facilitating an international labour force sharply divided along gendered and racial lines."(p.88) New forms of labour recapitulate traditional divisions of labour rather than challenging it.

Feminist responses to the challenge of cyberculture have taken a variety of forms. "Radical cyberfeminism" denotes a movement towards women-only cyberspaces, while "liberal cyberfeminism" tends to focus on questions of access and gender neutral communication (Squires is critical of this movement). As Adam and Green argue, cyberfeminism must necessarily take into account gendered patterns of embodied labour.

Joe Ravetz, "The Internet, Virtual Reality, and Real Reality"

Ravetz' critical look at VR argues that rather than true transcendence, VR only allows users to pretend that they are playing with identity in a positive way. "Virtual reality", writes Ravetz, "implies simulation without constraints, not a substitute for experience but the belief that virtual reality is experience."(p.118) Interestingly, although Ravetz is critical of the lack of embodied experience in VR, he makes no allusion to what role gender, race, sexuality, or other physical bodily markers play in the experience of embodiment.

Moreover, VR privileges a particular kind of epistemology, based on a "reduction of open, complex human knowledge categories and experience to syntactical rule-based forms, is a powerful and appealing intellectual idea for solving problems but one with severe limitations of use in human societies."(p.120) Only "connected knowledge", or as Ravetz puts it, "real world grounded qualitative reasoning which includes the use of heuristics and experience and domain knowledge" can function in the real world to address sophisticated and complex human problems. Thus VR is not a solution, and in fact can make the problems of the real world seem less relevant.