Internet

Women have primarily been engaged in community building on the Internet nationally and globally, primarily through content sharing and development. Although women have virtually no documented role in the creation of the Internet, they can easily be credited for its evolution since its public debut in the mid-1980s. Moreover, since 2000, women have become increasingly engaged in online activism on various fronts, such as empowering women to use the Internet and related Web-based technologies to communicate and train girls and women on critical regional and global issues. Near the end of the 20th century, a number of ideas and inventions led the way toward wireless communication, all of which have been credited to men. It is significant to review the emergence of wireless communication as an extension of masculinity, and contextualize the subsequent birth and maturity of the Internet within the field of cyberfeminism.

British, American, and Indian scientists and inventors across Europe wrestled with concepts of electromagnetism that would lay a foundation for wireless [Page 763]communication. For instance, the first telegraph message was sent by inventor Guglielmo Marconi in 1902 as a wireless transmission. Marconi would become a leading member of the Fascist Party in the years that followed, embracing some of the tenets of Italian Futurism that lauded the masculinity of technology, emphasizing concepts of power and speed and contextualizing industrialization as progress. Women's voices were often overshadowed by an escalating emphasis on technological change, rather than social change. But by 2000, women had found new ways to promote social change through the Internet, networking across the globe to other women instantaneously to places once disconnected from the world where women were alienated to confront dire circumstances with limited resources and communication.

The Galactic Network

Transcript

• They may not look like rebels, but Mahasen and Doa[?] are shaking Egypt’s conservative society. After their marriages ended in failure, they took to the airwaves, launching the country’s first online radio station dedicated to fellow divorcees.
• Motalakat Radio teaches women a new way of thinking of marriage and a future husband so that they avoid divorce. And it teaches women to take their time before making the decision to get married, so they don’t have to go through this experience.
• Divorce rates in Egypt are up by more than 9% in the last two years, with three people divorcing every minute. And Mahasen and Doa say it’s always women who get the blame.
• We want to show that divorcees are not automatically bad women who engage in indecent behavior, psychotics that go after men. When people listen to our radio they understand that divorcees can be part of society and are not bad people at all.
• But the Cybercasts have their critics. Abdul Rahman Hamed is the head of the Cairo based Divorced Men’s Association. He blames a surging divorce rate on a law introduced in 2000 which gave women the right to divorce.
• They have more rights than they should; they really have gone too far. Egypt has the largest number of divorced women, and they took advantage of this law for their own personal gain, and it’s the family that ends up paying the price.
• But with as many as 10,000 hits a day, Motalakat Radio continues to trail-blaze a new path, its founders determined to succeed in public where they failed in private.

In the 1960s, a group of MIT researchers proposed the creation of a Galactic Network, a global computer network. The Internet, in its earliest form, dawned in the early 1960s, and began at a time when major U.S. universities and military defense contractors sought ways to transfer data among their respective laboratories and research centers. Katie Hafner wrote one of a few extensive histories on the creation of the Internet, complete with its initial funding during the Eisenhower administration through the U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). An earlier model of the Internet, ARPANET, was established for information sharing among scientists and military personnel. Hafner documented the lack of women involved in these early projects, with the then female computer scientists often opting home over careers to raise children.

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