media representations of women and technology

At the Association of Internet Researchers conference last weekend, there were a number of interesting papers given on the topic of women and technology.

Sarah Stein's paper on "Hacking women: media representations of the technically proficient woman" was one that drew my interest, because I'm often frustrated by the media-fueled invisibility of technologically proficient women. Stein looked at two media represntations of "hacker women"--the characters of Angela Bennett in the movie The Net, and Sidney Bloom in the tv show VR.5. Both are portrayed as technically skilled but socially inept women. More strikingly, both characters also have literally incompetent (comatose, institutionalized) mothers--which leads to all kinds of interesting questions about what in what contexts women can be "safely" portrayed as technically competent. Women can go into the technical domain when they are freed from family demands—but they can only reclaim their femininity by “rescuing” their mothers, and taking on the caretaker role.

Later in the conference, researchers from the University of Indiana's Blog Research on Genre project talked about their investigation into weblog writer characteristics. They described an interesting disjoint between media representations of bloggers, and actual "average" characteristics. Their research found that men predominate in mainstream news reports of weblogs, media photographs and cartoon representations of webloggers, and attendees at weblog-related conferences (e.g. Bloggercon) and presentations (including the ones at AoIR). In contrast, of the weblogs they surveyed (a random sample from blo.gs, excluding LiveJournal and DiaryLand), 54.2% were authored by men.

My take-away line from this? "Popular conception of blogs reflects an unrepresentative elite, which foregrounds selected practices and marginalizes others."