CS and Feminism - Cyberfeminism: Artificial Intelligence and the Unconscious Biases

 CS and Feminism - Cyberfeminism: Artificial Intelligence and the Unconscious Biases :-

Cyberfeminism is a term coined in 1994 by Sadie Plant, director of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick in Britain, to describe the work of feminists interested in theorizing, critiquing, and exploiting the Internet, cyberspace, and new-media technologies in general. The term and movement grew out of “third-wave” feminism, the contemporary feminist movement that follows the “second-wave” feminism of the
1970s, which focused on equal rights for women, and which itself followed the “first-wave” feminism of the early 20th century, which concentrated on woman suffrage. Cyberfeminism has tended to include mostly younger, technologically savvy women, and those from Western, white, middle-class backgrounds. The ranks of cyberfeminists are growing, however, and along with this increase is a growing divergence of ideas about what
constitutes cyberfeminist thought and action. Prior to the advent of cyberfeminism, feminist study of technology tended to examine technological developments as socially and culturally constructed. One major argument was that technology has been
positioned as part of masculine culture something that men are interested in, good at, and therefore engage in more than women. Even though women throughout history have been active in developing new technologies, feminists have argued that technology has still been looked upon as a masculine creation. For example, although women had been involved in the creation and development of the computer, their contributions were
largely marginalized, and their participation often ignored or written out of history. Therefore, feminists such as Judy Wacjman, a professor of sociology at the Australian National University in Canberra, and Cynthia Cockburn, an independent scholar and activist in London, argued that technology needed to be continually interrogated and re-conceptualized, and that women needed to become more active in technological areas as
well.
Also pointing the way for cyberfeminism was the work of Donna Haraway, a professor in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In her groundbreaking essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” she argues for a socialist, feminist cyborg that challenges the singular identities and “grids of control” that work to contain women and other marginalized groups. Haraway agreed that women needed to
become more technologically proficient, better able to engage with the “informatics of domination” and challenge these systems. But Haraway also and importantly argued that women would need to be savvy and politically aware users of these technological systems; simply using them was not enough.
From these beginnings, cyberfeminism began to develop. Plant, an important early proponent, has argued that women are naturally suited to using the Internet, because women and the Internet are similar in nature both, according to Plant, are non-linear, self-replicating systems concerned with making connections. She has argued that although previous feminists have believed computers to be essentially male, we should instead see computers and the Internet as places for women to engage in new forms of work and play where women are
freed from traditional constraints and are able to experiment with identity and gain new avenues for claiming power and authority. Her view of cyberspace is as a welcoming, familiar space for women, where they can and must seize opportunities to advance themselves and to challenge male authority.
Therefore, it is unlikely that readers will find every chap-ter useful for their interests, research or personal, althoughthey are likely to be introduced to cyber worlds about whichthey had not previously been aware. For this reviewer, one ofmany examples was that of BlogHer and Blogalicious, twopopular annual blogging conferences that the author, JessieDaniels , enjoyably describes using her ethno-graphic fieldwork. Readers may find some chapters moreaccessible than others depending on their familiarity with thelanguage of feminist theory, literary theory, and the academicfields of communications and media studies. For that reason,for some readers, the chapter titles may tilt toward theobscure; thus, abstracts or summaries at the beginning of eachchapter would have been helpful guideposts for assisting the reader to locate relevant chapters. Furthermore, the division of the book into three sections was not that beneficial an orga-nization because many chapters had the potential to belong tomore than one division.In fact, it may be a shock to readers accustomed to standard scientific format how engaged the authors are in their cyberfe-minist projects, rather than scientifically detached. All written in the first person, , mostly essays, typically exhibita proud feminist perspective and are often examples of datacollected through participant observation. For example, Lau-ren Angelone  included her blog as one of the fiveshe subjected to critical discourse analysis.