Implicit/Explicit Alliances between Gender and Technology in the Construction of Virtual Networks

Abstract

Today, very different forms of computer networks, mainly the Internet, are used for professional, political and/or inter-organizational “virtual cooperation”. The Internet appears here as a phenomenon in which current social transformation processes crystallize, making them accessible for social science research as if under a magnifying glass. It is the place where social knowledge of what a network is, how it functions and what it means for people to be linked in a network is actually under construction. I assume that the design of Internet technologies necessarily includes social constructions of the understanding of the users and of their subjectivity. This relationship between the design of technology and the social construction of subjectivity is of particular importance in the field of networking technologies since they are, more than other technologies, based on the activity of their users. In short: Networking without active participants is doomed to fail. That means that the elaboration of networking goes along with new conceptions of how people should understand themselves especially as social beings, i.e. in relation to others. Furthermore, today’s technology development processes need to be seen in connection with extensive social transformations that are often described in the social sciences with key words like “network-”, “information-” and “knowledge-” society (see e.g. Castells 1996). Current tendencies in social theory also diagnose new conceptualizations of the subject. Accordingly, they are sociological analyses of the current discursive order of knowledge, which constitutes the formations of subjectivity and also the epistemic framework for the development of Internet technologies.