Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Over the past decade an extraordinarily wide-ranging field of related studies has developed which focuses on cybernetics and information technology. This chapter is concerned with the relationship between feminist theory and the emerging fields of enquiry which come under the broad heading of cyberculture. All these fields are concerned with the social and cultural impact of information technology and with the ways in which the barriers between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ space are being broken down. Indeed, the conceptual, electronic environment of cyberspace, initially described as a ‘consensual hallucination’ in the fiction of science-fiction writer William Gibson, is now taken for granted, so much so that, as Michael Heim suggests, cyberspace has become ‘a tool for examining our very sense of reality’ (1991: 59). In order to address what she refers to as ‘scary new networks’ being set in place by the increasing domination of information technologies, Donna Haraway invokes the term ‘informatics’ (1990: 203) to describe the inextricably linked cultural, linguistic, social, sexual and biological connections and networks that derive from these technologies. New technologies have also generated an abundance of Utopian and dystopian fantasies, many of which are reiterated in cyberculture, but as Constance Penley and Andrew Ross argue, such fantasies are an expression of ‘real popular needs ... log in or subscribe to read full text