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Gendering the Internet: Claims, Controversies and Cultures 257

were three times longer than the original text. The notes contained a set of
instructions for how to use the Engine. Nowadays we would consider such
instructions to be a computer program and for that reason Ada has been credited
with being the first computer programmer in history. ‘Ada understood the
potential power of a computing machine such as envisioned by Babbage – one
that had internal memory, could make choices and repeat instructions – and she
foresaw its application in mathematical computation, artificial intelligence and
even computer music’ (Freeman, 1996). Babbage’s Analytical Engine and Ada’s
work on it disappeared from the public eye until 1937, when his unpublished note-
books were discovered. Ada’s contribution to computer history has been acknowl-
edged by various sources, most notably the American Defence Department which
named its primary programming language, ADA, after her.
We can consider the telephone and the computer as respectively the mother
and the father of the Internet, the global network of computers that came into
being in the early to mid-1960s. The child is some 40 years old then but its gen-
der is still undecided. Starting out as the masculine technology associated with
the military–industrial complex, it has in recent years been reclaimed as a typi-
cal expression of femininity, by feminists and market researchers alike (van
Zoonen, 2001a). It might even escape these categories and produce completely
new transgender or even genderless codes of human identity and communica-
tion. In the following sections I discuss these claims in more detail. 1

Gender codes and the Internet: femininity

Several highly reputed feminist scholars have claimed that the Internet is
a woman’s medium. This belief has become so widespread and largely undis-
puted that long-time feminist critic of technology Ellen Balka (1997) recently
exclaimed: ‘Where have all the feminist technology critics gone?’ She argues that
earlier critical views on information technologies have given way to an optimism
that is seduced by the radical potential of the World Wide Web. Dale Spender
(1995), for instance, made an early feminist claim on the Internet as a medium
especially relevant for individual and collective networking of women, and also
for other subordinated groups, for that matter. Sherry Turkle, professor in the
sociology of science at the MIT and author of an influential book on the con-
struction of identities through Internet communication (Turkle, 1995), claims
that one needs an ethic of community, consensus and communication on the
Internet and this is what she thinks women in particular are good at (quoted in
Jenkins, 1999: 332). Similarly, Sadie Plant (1998), acclaimed in the British press as
the most radical ‘techno theorist’ of the day, sees femininity to be the core ele-
ment of network technology, which she considers to build on women’s relation
to weaving. Other authors have compared the experience of the Net, the immer-
sion of its user in its textual, visual and virtual realities, to that of the foetus in
the womb. Internet experience is considered analogous to the secure and uncon-
strained experience of the maternal matrix that offers an escape from the constraints
of the body (Smelik, 2000).