Page 204 - Culture Technology Communication

New Technologies, Old Culture:
A Look at Women, Gender,
and the Internet in Kuwait

Deborah Wheeler

Introduction
In 1994, a “comprehensive and reliable look at the user base of the
1
Internet” found that nearly 90% of Internet users were male. By
1996, studies suggested that one in four users of the Internet were
female, an increase from 10% to 25% (Cherney and Weise, 4). 2
Jupiter Communications projects that by the year 2000, women will
constitute approximately 44% of the on-line audience around the
3
world. What social impacts will result from women’s increased ac-
cess to information and communication capabilities? According to
Eduardo Talero and Phillip Gaudette, consultants for the World
Bank, access to new communications technologies can “raise cultural
barriers, overwhelm economic inequalities, even compensate for in-
tellectual disparities. High technology can put unequal human be-
ings on an equal footing and that makes it the most potent
democratizing tool ever devised” (Talero and Gaudette, 2). Will this
be true for women? We are told that “wide spread networking cou-
pled with the ease of publishing multimedia materials within the
4
Web will support radical changes” —but will the introduction of new
media mean the creation of revolutionary new circumstances for
women? Can women use new information and communications tech-
nologies to enhance their power and position in daily life? Lourdes
Arizpe, Assistant Director-General for Culture at UNESCO, pro-
vides an answer when she suggests that “women can be on the front
side of this revolution” and can use these new technologies to pre-
sent their autonomous voices in the service of their own culturally
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diverse and regionally specific forms of liberation. Such promises,

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