Soledad O'Brien is the anchor for the MSNBC television show The Site, where she interviews and discusses current developments with leading figures in the world of cyberspace. Soledad has been writing, producing and reporting in television for nine years. She will moderate our discussion.

Denise Caruso is a writer and New York Times columnist with a remarkable reputation for making sense of technology from a big picture and humanistic perspective. She is quoted in John Brockman's Digerati as saying, 'Women are very involved in the Net. They are invisible only because women are invisible in this culture...You will see more and more women using the Net as a way to command power.'

Linda Jacobson has several identities. She is a widely known technology journalist, consultant and speaker. She is Silicon Graphic's virtual reality evangelist and she is the digital character RiGBy in the band D'CuCKOO, a group of women skilled in high tech methods of making music and sounds in high energy live performances.

Marleen McDaniel is CEO and president of Wire Networks, a leading interactive media company producing original content for women on the Internet. A player, a leader and a visionary in interactive publishing, Marleen has a career spanning 27 years of high technology. McDaniel is an award-winning speaker at many industry events.

Donna Haraway, author of The Cyborg Manifesto

In putting together this panel, I initially found myself shying away from any feminist overtones. Yet I could not ignore the issues of power and access as it concerns women and their relationship with technology. As a man I felt somewhat "unqualified" to raise the topic. But confirmation arrived in the form of an e-mail from Linda Jacobson a couple of weeks ago: "This panel definitely is about feminism...feminism in the late 90s, (since) the tools we have at hand for organizing and communicating are "cyber" at the core." Women are attracted to these tools for many reasons, not the least of which is the opportunity to rebalance traditional spheres of power. The momentum in this direction is unmistakable. Marleen McDaniel said recently in a CNET interview, "Women are not tinkerers, so you'll find that women were not the earliest adopters of the Internet. But now that its moving from, let's just say an experimental new media to a mass media, you're going to see women joining in numbers -- and that's what's going on right now."

In framing this panel discussion, I found it equally difficult to ignore numerous biological analogies. The technology of knowledge and power has been caught up in the politics of the body and its control since the 18th century when, through the application of scientific principles, we began to develop more effective tools to enhance our individual survival. By controlling access to these new tools, power was exercised over populations of individuals with regard to rights over their own bodies. As Michel Foucault declared in his The History of Sexuality, "For the first time in history...biological existence was reflected in political existence." We have been legislating and dictating laws concerning the right to life, to one's own body, to health and to happiness ever since.

Fast-forward to the age of Cyborgs -- where relationships between one's body and technology are so intimate, it's become increasingly difficult to tell where we end and machines begin. Says Donna Haraway, "We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us." While this has broad implications for us as individuals, these changes are also occurring to society as a whole. Individuals are becoming nodes on a network. Our common notions of identity including gender are now instantaneously shared with each other through electronic extensions of ourselves -- i.e. the Internet. What we choose to create, the connections we make together, and the politics of power are more important than ever before.

Unfortunately, those with the most to gain in our society have little or no link to the Internet and the world around it. Connections to "insiders" and to sources of capital remain exclusive provinces; so much so that we risk undermining a fundamental force for our own survival -- diversity. Women are now setting an example for these disenfranchised groups. But as Denise Caruso reminds me, we must continue to ask "more fundamental questions about some of the underlying forces that have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with how the existing power structures are attempting to bend technology to their own ends."

Our conversation this evening follows an eloquent presentation by Jaron Lanier in our first lecture that delved deeply into our hidden motivations and the power structures that sustain them. Jaron noted that "when the quest for power is directed toward overcoming constraints that aren't really there...when the vast majority of human suffering is being created by humans themselves...at that point, we have to wonder what we're doing this for." We will follow this line of inquiry throughout this series as we explore WHO OR WHAT ARE WE BECOMING? Tonight, we are privileged to have these four remarkable women share their ideas and experience.

mark beam
beaming
September 25, 1997