Dr. Kimberly Sawchuk, Concordia University
Dr. Barbara Crow, University of Calgary
This paper outlines the dominant discourse operating in public policy on the "information highway." We will begin with an analysis of how this discourse is playing itself out in Canadian policy and end with a feminist intervention on the "information highway."
We are feminist techno-perverts eager to drive on the information highway, but uncertain where to go, or where it is going to take us, despite Canadian government proclamations that it is the only way to travel. The highway metaphor has been embraced by all of the departments in the Canadian government concerned with its creation: Heritage; Industry, Science and Technology; and the Secretary of State. This metaphor of the highway has been embraced, touted and flaunted in the media for its elixir -like capabilities to heal the ailing Canadian-body politic.
According to Industry, Science and Technology’s John Manley:
I believe that as a result of the new information technologies, Canadians will see an improvement in the quality of their lives as they gain access to the employment, educational, investment, entertainment, health care, and wealth- creating opportunities represented by the creation of this network and the services it can provide.(May 17, 1994)
Part of our ongoing research is a) to try and keep apace of these technologies in order to better comprehend the bull that is being served to us, b) to figure out how to strategically intervene in our institutions and to foster connections outside of the University environment, and c) to map out the movements of this information highway promotion within a multiplicity of "Public discourses" which overlap at several conjunctural moments. It is, as sister Cassandra Heather Menzies argues, a discourse that is fast forward and out of control.
These documents articulate a very broad policy agenda that encompasses three very laudable points that are officially reiterated over and over: 1) Job creation through investment and innovation; 2) Promoting Canadian sovereignty and cultural identity; and 3) Ensuring universal access at a reasonable cost. These are to be the principles, the cornerstones, of a National policy. This agenda, according to the government, must be achieved by creating a number of operating principles to guide its creation including public and private sector development, healthy competition and by protecting privacy and network security.
There are definite blind spots being written into these policy objectives and in popular discourses. This morning, we want to play off the these putative goals and suggest that within the existing environment, the creation of a new information superhighway for "all" Canadians is riddled with potholes. Why?
1) Job creation contains occupational hazards; while it is being promoted as a new form of employment this policy goal is being forgotten very quickly. At the recent CRTC hearings, for example, citizens were basically conceived of as consumers or "purchasers of new bundles of services." This has far reaching implications: when questioned about privacy issues, a very real concern in areas like telemedicine where health records will be on-line, the CEO of Bell Canada and a member of Stentor responded that he conceived of "the privacy issue as a marketing opportunity";
2) that fostering national identity in these documents, a position promoted by one of the other major players, the CAB, is tantamount to promoting technological masculinism that refuses to acknowledge the ever important issue of gender in relationship to access. Furthermore, that this so-called introduction of private and public collaboration in the development of services is happening in the context of the enforced trend to globalization; and
3) finally, that the third policy objective, universal access, must take into account local contexts and begin with community based needs if it is not to become a euphemism for market penetration. In this paradigm, culture and communications are subsumed under the more fashionable term information. In this instance, communication is not attentive to diversity, dialogue, communities of users, or subaltern publics (Carey 1989). Culture is Information, conceived of as a commodity, and the highway a transportation system to distribute it. It is about providing services to clients and markets. This transmission model is the basis of current government declarations and models for the provision of information services: but it is not the only model that is available.
Let us return to these points for a closer look.
Job creation
According to the logic of policy makers, education and employment are connected. In current policy documents the statistical story told is that technological advancement "boosts economic activity." Furthermore, the assumption is that because, to quote Ostry, "what you earn depends on what you learn." It has nothing to do with structural issues, employment patterns. You--the individual--are responsible. But the idea that technology can solve these problems is problematic. Bill Leiss has documented that the term "information economy" has often been used interchangeable with the term "service industry": the service industry can refer to anyone working outside the manufacturing sector from lawyers to waitresses. Further, according to feminist economists Myra Stromber and Carolyn Arnold (1987), while high tech industries in general and computer occupations in particular are often seen as "great equalizers," especially for those with higher education, men and women do not earn equally, nor are they employed equally throughout the industry. Like gender, the race and ethnicity of the workers in computer occupations is associated with the pay and status of the occupation. As the so-called deskilling of computer related tasks has occurred, women have been forced into those less-skilled, lower paying Mcjobs; at the same time, in the United States, the lowest level of programming is occupied by racial and ethnic minorities whose percentages become higher than their labour force percentages. The higher the status and pay, the more white men are over represented. In clerical occupations, men virtually disappear(Stromber and Arnold 1987, 152-153).
What is eliminated from the current debates are the studies conducted by the Department of Labour in the 1980’s that explicitly warned of the economic impact of high technology on employment in specific sectors of the economy, such as manufacturing, and the effect of technologies on the health and safety of workers. Within the present climate, questions that dampen the enthusiasm for this economic "injection" that the new information economy is supposed to provide are not encouraged Just as the objections of the early Luddites has been maligned, our resistance is not to technology per se, but to the present division of labour, working conditions, and income levels in the very industries deemed "high tech." Magazines such as Wired, whose majority readership are males under the age of 41 and whose average income is $85,000 plus, are helping to perpetuate these myths in Barthes’ sense- not so much by what they say, but by what they omit.
Technological Masculinism
The sidestepping of these issues, and their attendant circumvention of considerations of current inequities correlated to race and gender, should not come as a surprise considering the pivotal role played by communications technology in our catalogue of Canadian foundational myths. What one witnesses in the current phase of documents is the re-writing of an epic drama of technological prowess, replete with heroes and minions, with scarcely a woman in the picture: a nauseating romance of colonization that obliterates the violence of conquest.
Maurice Charland identifies this genre of legend as a quintessentially Canadian tale which he dubs technological nationalism, an ideology that ascribes to technology the capacity to create a nation by overcoming geographical impediments through transportation and communications. This rhetoric has a constitutive function: it seeks to promote the idea of a sovereign, united "Team Canada." Economically, it serves to legitimate the building of a communications infrastructure with public money, but in the present case, without fulfilling the traditional "public good." However, the irony within this position is that the creation of new media carriers to promote Canadian identity are the very same means used to transgress national borders, in broadcasting with US programming and now the "information highway"--but, of course, not language. For this is another, unspoken issue.
In an earlier epoch, the threat of "Manifest Destiny" or the doctrine of assimilation into the United States was crucial to the ideology of technological nationalism. The new discourse depends, for its force, upon a new common enemy which is at the same time rather paradoxically presented as an opportunity: globalization.
Globalization and "the debt" are not just buzzwords sawing through the dead weight of our past, but act as semiological sceptres to justify free trade, weaken the power of unionized and non-unionized workers, and to slash social programs. Globalization is being deployed to argue "we have no choice, we must accept, we must compete," accompanied by a chorus of "we can no longer afford universal coverage of basic services" abdicating, as McQuaig states, political control on a national or regional level to abstract forces. There are choices to be made: one could increase revenue of the country by imposing inheritance taxes for example, but increasing the tax base in any way is not a popular argument within the current political climate.
These public statements contain a very definite ontological and epistemological vision - one of heightened individualism akin to Adorno and Horkheimer’s description of Odysseus as the first bourgeois man -which underpin these policy statements. Any policies issuing forth must be regarded with suspicion for in their present articulation they only reinforce and exacerbate existing tendencies towards greater social inequity brought on in the new transcapital situation known as the global order, which is constructing some very effective invisible frontiers for us in the name of the "free flow of information," "increased productivity" and the new improved push button democracy.
Universal Access
We are concerned about why the "information highway" is being built, whose interests it will serve, how it will shape our future, and what feminists in our locale can and should do to shape the discourse and the technology itself.
How do we heed the significant feminist theory and practice on technology without reinventing the process?; and how do we keep the tension between what we do know about technology--its capacity for surveillance and control and resistance and subversion?
With these two points in mind, we would like to describe the process we embarked on at the University of Calgary to intervene in the datasphere. How did we counter "technological masculinism"? What happens when we "...take into account local contexts and begin with community based needs"?(Franklin 1990, p. 5)
In January 1995, the umbrella organization the Women’s Council and Network - WCAN met to discuss a variety of issues pertaining to their organization. During the discussion, several of the group members (there are 20) raised the issue of using email and the Internet as a device to increase our communication with one another. Julie Kearns, the director of Student Resources and a long time advocate for women’s issues on campus and Barbara Crow, a new junior faculty hire in women’s studies, offered to write up a proposal regarding the costs and conditions to get campus women at the University of Calgary (U of C) on-line.
Another important dimension we would argue that was ultimately relevant to the success of the WWW workshops--were the conditions and opportunities available at the University workplace. These were: 1) access to computers and internet addresses (they are available to anyone who applies including staff, student and faculty); and 2) the staff’s internal email system called AOS(Administrators’ Operating System). This system has been fairly successful in connecting this community and developing email literacy.
Julie and Barbara returned to Women’s Council and Network (WCAN) with a proposal. The proposal included information about costs, resources and training required to go on-line--as well as a vision of the kind of material we would want to make available. Also, we asked that each of the women’s groups identify one individual to participate in the initial training session. This was incorporated within the project in order to increase the pool of women with knowledge of the Internet.
In our original proposal, we wanted to establish a campus women gopher. One of the reasons for pursuing gopher was because most of the campus women’s groups had access to it. Also, Julie and Barbara were familiar with gopher--not the WWW. The move to the WWW was facilitated by Linda Tauscher, a computer science graduate student at U of C.
Meeting Linda was a happenstance event. Barbara read about her offer to provide free Internet training to non-profit women’s groups in a local women’s newsletter--Women Looking Forward. Barbara called her up to congratulate her on her work and to discuss WCAN’s gopher proposal.
Linda asked why we were not considering the WWW. She argued that the WWW was more user friendly and that the University was shifting from gopher to the WWW. WCAN was not considering the WWW because the women organizing the project--Julie and Barbara--were not familiar with the system. Linda then offered to provide some WWW workshops. We discussed what we thought would be required and sent out a notice itemizing two workshops requiring a 3 hour commitment for each one. As well, after the notice (http://www.ucalgary.ca/~crow/notice.html) had been in circulation for approximately a week, Barbara called each group and reminded them about the workshop.
Linda and Barbara met again to discuss the workshops. Linda produced a variety of documents that Barbara went through--to see what she didn’t understand, where the stumbling blocks were. Also, Barbara has been on the Internet since 1986 and has offered several workshops on email and Internet and has also provided several one-on-one sessions with friends. As a self-taught user, Barbara operated as a translator between the programmer and the user.
These workshops were offered this past May from 11:30 to 2:30. The objectives of the first workshop (http://www.ucalgary.ca/~crow/workshopone.html) were to introduce the WWW and allow WCAN members to explore the web and to get comfortable with the web commands. The second workshop (http://www.ucalgary.ca/~crow/workshoptwo.html) was designed to learn about and create html documents.
We have just completed the second workshop and have several WCAN members’ web sites. At the end of the workshop, we agreed to establish a user group to meet in the fall to discuss software, web sites and html documentation. As well, we discussed how to make this information available to off campus women’s groups. Barbara is currently meeting one-on-one with the workshop participants.
We would argue that the relative success of our project was the result of a number of interrelated factors. First, the move to go on-line was forwarded by WCAN-WCAN members wanted to do this project. Second, two individuals, on behalf of WCAN, pursued the initiative and produced a document regarding this communication vision and one way to make it possible. Third, Linda Tauscher had the technical knowledge and feminist commitment to train women on the WWW. Linda and Barbara met to discuss the various ways to provide the information about the WWW to WCAN. Fourth, the workshops were offered by WCAN members and therefore, it was identified as a WCAN project. Fifth, the workplace had the various facilities and flexibility to allow for the workshops. And finally, women volunteered their time to learn this information and take it back to their group.
This intervention at the University of Calgary is also in tandem with some other practical initiatives on campus--in particular Women in Science and Engineering (WISE)--to increase the participation of women in science (currently women comprise 16% of these occupations--engineering and computer science). However, we would argue that our intervention works with the structure as it currently exists--we are not developing software--the crucial dimension defining how we ‘navigate’ on the "information highway." We are hopeful that a feminist intervention may shape how we use the WWW and what we make available on it. Finally, many of my criticisms of this process return to access--why are we doing this? Ultimately, who will have access to the WWW? Will public access networks such as the Free-Nets provide the conditions or the opportunities to subvert and resist this communications technology? How does this kind of feminist intervention address the gendered and racialized division of labour, poverty, and violence? What about local conditions--language, culture?
On some level, we are quite excited about the project. On another, as feminists, we need to recognize the various ways privilege operates--who is intervening in this process? What are the conditions allowing for this intervention? What are the limitations of our intervention? How complicit are we in the policy making and popular texts rhetoric on the "information highway"? In what ways will our intervention be co-opted by the University?
Finally, our vision of access, and what is to be done with these technologies is a little different from John Manley’s vision of a...
...client-centered one stop shopping center for a range of information services.
We do not think that all citizens are only consumers or that people are a market. There too many exclusions when you consider that the definition of a market is "people with needs, but also those with the economic means to satisfy those needs." The homeless, the elderly, the minimum wage earner, those on welfare have needs but they are not a market. This is the McDonald’s franchise model of decentralization and democracy which only reinforces centralized power. Perhaps the appropriate model would be one of the public library, not the mall. Market forces will not necessarily deliver basic services to all, nor is the only alternative "open competition" versus the monopoly control of services. We need to have a discourse on what essential public services would be, and who they benefit; we need to assert, now, that like the airwaves in Canada, spectrum and bandwidth are public property that can be licensed, not owned. We need to ensure that a requisite number of lanes are kept open for public institutions and alternative, community based groups. Perhaps the Charter of Rights needs sections on information, including privacy provisions and non-discrimination in access by users and services providers to public networks. Finally, we need to imagine, as feminists, what we would like to transform in that space called RL, Real Life, and how these technologies facilitate or impede these changes, and we need to debate and deliberate on this NOW as we, in Women Studies, establish our own Web site.
Once these conditions are built into the current policy debates we can talk about travelling down the road together on the new information highway. Otherwise what is being presented as choice is nothing but coercion and what is being proclaimed as universal access is merely the most vile form of market penetration.
Industry Canada Documents: File location: debra.dgbt.doc.ca /dbd/ftp/pub/isc/Industry.Canada.News.Releases Date archived: Thu Aug 25 11:21:24 EDT 1994 Archive name: Industry Canada, Canadian Federal Government Archived by: tyson@debra.dgbt.doc.ca
World Wide Web http://debra.dgbt.doc.ca/isc/isc.html
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For more information, please contact:
Dr. Kimberly Sawchuk at sawchuk@vax2.concordia.ca
Dr. Barbara Crow at crow@acs.ucalgary.ca