day 10: waiting for lighting to strike
The WENT caravan is taking a pit stop today for activities to commemorate the workshop's fifth year anniversary. I'm sitting here inside this small auditorium, listening to symposium speakers discuss about women, power and technology.
As headbint of the training team I was wrangled to deliver the opening remarks for the symposium.
Here be 710 words duct taped together at the 11th hour.
Opening Remarks for the WENT 5th Anniversary Symposium
Are information and communication technologies empowering women or are women empowering information and communication technologies?
"Technology is not neutral. We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us. We're living in a world of connections - and it matters which ones get made and unmade." - Donna Haraway
(Anyong Haseyo. Magandang Hapon. Good Afternoon.)
I came into computing technology kicking and thrashing. It was not love at first sight between the computer and me. The first time I had to share office space with a cloned AT in 1987, I kept myself very far from it. It was at best a lukewarm non-relationship with a side order of wary watchfulness.
I do remember when the computer and I finally clicked, the very instance when the connection was finally made between the machine and me, the moment when such a connection made sense to me.
The many first instances of actual and real understanding of say, how the TCP/IP works, of what the linuxconf utility does, of the syntax rules of HTML - these were for me moments of profound perspective alteration. The only other experience of mine that probably comes closest to this happened when I was five years old, at that instance when I realised that I could actually understand what I was reading.
From the stories of many of the women who I’ve come to know through the Women’s Electronic Network Training Workshop, the moment of recognition of the potentials of ICT and one’s ability to wield it is almost life altering. I do not doubt that ICT has empowered women in different ways and in varying degrees.
This year my 16 year-old daughter started her freshman year as a computer science major. Whereas before she was raiding my bookshelf for fiction, now she’s borrowing my technical books. I have no doubt that in about six months, my daughter will know more than me; she will know much more and comprehend much better how the computer works.
However, I do wonder if my daughter and the young women of her generation will experience the same life-altering awareness of the first instance of connection with the computer and technology itself.
Empowerment is ultimately the instance of awareness of one’s conditions, one’s connectedness to the world at large present, past and future, and one’s capacities and limitations to affect such a world.
So what does it mean, what will it mean for the struggle for women’s self-determination that the generation after mine are coming into technology in a fashion that is almost without the resistance and militancy characteristic of the act of claiming technology and the right to it. When navigating though the Internet has assumed the ordinariness of hitting the “On” button in the washer, will my daughter’s generation be able to appreciate the almost epic proportion of what it took for women to be allowed near the modem? Immersed in an environment where technology is slowly reduced to gadgets and externalities, what kind of resistance will my daughter’s generation put up against such. Will they be able to determine technology?
To be fair to the next generation, I also have to ask my own: As women who have made the connection between our selves and technology and who have been empowered by information and communication technology, how are we affecting the creation and deployment of ICT in particular and technology in general? Are we going to leave behind a world where women are strengthened by the connections made possible through ICT and technology itself? Will we be able to leverage the power gained through the creative and willful use of ICT and technology to enable women across classes, races, generations and geographies to determine technology itself?
I hope that through the presentations and discussions in today’s symposium marking the fifth year of the Asia Pacific Women’s Electronic Network Training, we can wonder collectively whether as women empowered by ICT we are able to make a difference in how ICT and technology itself are created and for what purpose.
Are ICTs empowering women or are women empowering ICTs? It is significant that this question is posed now on the fifth year of the Asia Pacific Women’s Electronic Network Training Workshop, and here at the Sookmyung Women’s University - a technology oasis for women.
16 October 2003
Seoul, Korea
As headbint of the training team I was wrangled to deliver the opening remarks for the symposium.
Here be 710 words duct taped together at the 11th hour.
Opening Remarks for the WENT 5th Anniversary Symposium
Are information and communication technologies empowering women or are women empowering information and communication technologies?
"Technology is not neutral. We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us. We're living in a world of connections - and it matters which ones get made and unmade." - Donna Haraway
(Anyong Haseyo. Magandang Hapon. Good Afternoon.)
I came into computing technology kicking and thrashing. It was not love at first sight between the computer and me. The first time I had to share office space with a cloned AT in 1987, I kept myself very far from it. It was at best a lukewarm non-relationship with a side order of wary watchfulness.
I do remember when the computer and I finally clicked, the very instance when the connection was finally made between the machine and me, the moment when such a connection made sense to me.
The many first instances of actual and real understanding of say, how the TCP/IP works, of what the linuxconf utility does, of the syntax rules of HTML - these were for me moments of profound perspective alteration. The only other experience of mine that probably comes closest to this happened when I was five years old, at that instance when I realised that I could actually understand what I was reading.
From the stories of many of the women who I’ve come to know through the Women’s Electronic Network Training Workshop, the moment of recognition of the potentials of ICT and one’s ability to wield it is almost life altering. I do not doubt that ICT has empowered women in different ways and in varying degrees.
This year my 16 year-old daughter started her freshman year as a computer science major. Whereas before she was raiding my bookshelf for fiction, now she’s borrowing my technical books. I have no doubt that in about six months, my daughter will know more than me; she will know much more and comprehend much better how the computer works.
However, I do wonder if my daughter and the young women of her generation will experience the same life-altering awareness of the first instance of connection with the computer and technology itself.
Empowerment is ultimately the instance of awareness of one’s conditions, one’s connectedness to the world at large present, past and future, and one’s capacities and limitations to affect such a world.
So what does it mean, what will it mean for the struggle for women’s self-determination that the generation after mine are coming into technology in a fashion that is almost without the resistance and militancy characteristic of the act of claiming technology and the right to it. When navigating though the Internet has assumed the ordinariness of hitting the “On” button in the washer, will my daughter’s generation be able to appreciate the almost epic proportion of what it took for women to be allowed near the modem? Immersed in an environment where technology is slowly reduced to gadgets and externalities, what kind of resistance will my daughter’s generation put up against such. Will they be able to determine technology?
To be fair to the next generation, I also have to ask my own: As women who have made the connection between our selves and technology and who have been empowered by information and communication technology, how are we affecting the creation and deployment of ICT in particular and technology in general? Are we going to leave behind a world where women are strengthened by the connections made possible through ICT and technology itself? Will we be able to leverage the power gained through the creative and willful use of ICT and technology to enable women across classes, races, generations and geographies to determine technology itself?
I hope that through the presentations and discussions in today’s symposium marking the fifth year of the Asia Pacific Women’s Electronic Network Training, we can wonder collectively whether as women empowered by ICT we are able to make a difference in how ICT and technology itself are created and for what purpose.
Are ICTs empowering women or are women empowering ICTs? It is significant that this question is posed now on the fifth year of the Asia Pacific Women’s Electronic Network Training Workshop, and here at the Sookmyung Women’s University - a technology oasis for women.
16 October 2003
Seoul, Korea