First, she lists four themes from scholarship on women and technology:
- Women are marginalized due to the language and practices embedded within technologies and suffer under the reinforcement and reproduction of historical patriarchal lines of authority embedded within technologies.
- Women are situated as low-level users or technology workers and face segregation in technology work due to their status as users and workers.
- Women are excluded from the design processes of most technologies, even those designed specifically for “women’s” work.
- Women’s technology-related contributions are deliberately excluded from history due to traditional definitions of technology in terms of male activities.
She wants to look ways “women are deliberately avoiding the formal, official, and legal systems in crafting and sharing their work. We have more ability to do so today and to make that work distributed and visible in part because of contemporary digital tools and networked spaces.”
She argues, “Sites like Facebook, and, moreso, 30reasons, are interesting and problematic because when users post materials to social networking sites, they lose some control of that content—technically and legally. It can be downloaded, otherwise stored, and tagged by other users. And, obviously, just because someone clicks the checkbox indicating that they have permission to upload a photo doesn’t mean they actually do—or that there are any repercussions for behaving as if they do. Likewise, the content uploaded can be databased and archived indefinitely by the sites themselves…At the same time that control and ownership over women’s bodies, voices, and representations must be addressed, we can’t—nor should we—commit all of our energy to critiques and warnings. To enact a progressive feminist agenda in digital spaces, especially where intellectual property issues are concerned, it’s crucial that scholars and researchers also adopt an approach where attention is paid to fissures in the digital intellectual property regime, and how women multimedia authors are exploiting those fissures.”
On another note, Howard Besser makes an interesting claim about the digital divide: “the next digital divide…is the divide between those who merely use digital spaces and those who produce, those who have the rhetorical and technical agency to not only consume digital media, but produce, share, and publish digital media.”
**This is a fairly standard webtext – a kind of print text split into pages. The digital lets her add images, videos, and links, but none of the lines connect content from page to page. They either send the reader further into one of the pages or outside the webtext.