’ Introduction : Gender and the Information Society

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) is being held this year in Geneva, with a follow-up conference in Tunisia in 2005. Under the aegis of the United Nations, the summit addresses issues that are of immediate relevance to scholars in the field of communication, including the “new world order” created by global flows of information, the impact of information technology (IT) on the First World-Third World configuration, the information gap and its effects on practices of democratic governance and civil society formations, and numerous other related topics. Given this timely consideration of the role and place of IT in our lives, we have sought to identify the various ways in which gender is implicated in this brave new world, using the criticism and commentary section to highlight gender as a crucial variable in this debate. Too often discussions of such global topics are enveloped by wide-ranging and global policy concerns, where such a focus tends to ignore the real and material effects that policy has on the lives of women and men. Therefore, we want to highlight the ways in which gender is implicated in both information technology processes and in the access to and use of IT. In other words, through a focus on gender, we want to render visible the opportunities and challenges afforded by the development of the Information Society and explore the ways in which the rhetoric of empowerment masks the perpetuation of existing gender hierarchies. The topic generated a lot of interest and elucidated a broad array of experiences from across the globe. Whether assessing women’s access to technology or the ways in which information systems are mobilised to “develop” the South, a unifying theme is that of uneven development. Even those essays that underscore the beneficial aspects of IT include a cautionary note on the blind spots that emerge when the utopic promise of the technology is materialised. Together the essays outline the challenges feminist scholars face as they participate in discussions of democratic governance in Information Society, especially in the realm of universal and equitable access. Moulding the literature on the digital divide to account for women as subjects and objects of IT discourses, Leda Cooks and Kirsten Isgro ask questions about the empowerment rhetoric focused on information and communication technology (ICT), gender and development which emanates from a First World perspective. They suggest that self-conscious reflexivity about the relationship between capital and technology could provoke changes in First World practices and not simply shift the emphasis onto a more informed and inclusive ICT strategy for the developing world. Following this theoretical roadmap is a series of essays that chart the multifar-