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gender is located in the circuit of culture that constitutes the Internet. I borrow the
idea of technology as constituted in a circuit of culture from Du Gay et al. (1997),
who use the Sony Walkman as a case study of the way meanings of technological
artefacts emerge. Five cultural processes are identified – representation, identity,
production, consumption and regulation – which when applied to the Internet
raise questions as to how the Internet is represented and which representations
it carries, what social identities are associated with it, how it is produced and
consumed, and what mechanisms regulate its distribution and use. In a study of
the mutual shaping of gender and the magnetron, Cynthia Cockburn and Susan
Ormrod (1993) have used a similar approach defining mutual shaping as taking
place in a sequence of moments in the life trajectory, or the biography of a techno-
logical artefact, which runs from design, development, production and marketing,
to distribution, sales, use and domestication. Thinking back once again to the
claims of the Internet being respectively feminine, masculine and beyond gender,
we can see that these claims are in fact all built on a partial understanding of the
Internet as a socially constructed technology. The claims for masculinity are located
in the moments of design, development and production, and in the moments of
representation. The claims for femininity are mainly located in the moments of
marketing, distribution and use, whereas cyberfeminism manifests itself foremost
in moments of representation.

Mutual shaping

What then would be an alternative approach to the mutual shaping of gender and
the Internet which takes into account the different dimensions of gender as well
as the circuit of culture that constitutes the Internet? The theoretical issue behind
that question concerns how social meanings of technology come into being, and
whether there is a decisive moment in the circuit of culture that is particularly rel-
evant in relation to the gendering of technology. Histories of technologies all seem
to point in the direction of the moments of usage that may be the most important
in the development of social meanings. Thinking back on the history of the tele-
phone, it was the usage of women that turned the technology into a sociable
instrument. Thinking back on the history of the computer, the early and key pres-
ence of Ada Lovelace in research and development did not result in the construc-
tion of the computer as feminine. The history of the radio suggests that its initial
two-way interactive nature, providing communicative possibilities much like
today’s Internet, disappeared under pressure of usage patterns in the family which
turned the radio into a passive receiving practice (Moores, 1988). Television’s
history shows similarly its adaptation to circumstances of use in the family (van
Zoonen and Wieten, 1994). Silverstone and Hirsch (1992), in their studies of
domestic technologies, have coined such adaptations as a process of domesti-
cation in which technologies are incorporated into the routines of daily life.
Domestication is not a smooth linear process, but has – especially at the early
stages of the introduction of a technology – the nature of a struggle for meaning,
a process of framing which even after meanings have become more solid and