The digital world, its advertising machinery and the popular media are pushing women back into traditional roles and once again creating a "superior" hypermacho expert male. Women must look critically at who is in charge of the new technology and challenge the gender codes that can work against them. In this path-breaking book, Melanie Stewart Millar explores power relations in the digital world and asks us to question what is really going on. How is technology shaping our future? What is the role of women within digital culture? What is the corporate agenda? How is it influencing women's work?
Provocative and incisive, Cracking the Gender Code questions how the gains women have made through feminism over the last decades are being eroded. It looks specifically at how the articles and images of Wired, the magazine of the digital generation, are detrimental to women — a discourse that may be establishing the underlying ideology of a far-reaching communications industry. Stewart Millar argues that simply being computer literate or knowing how to use the Net is not good enough. Women need to demystify the technology and crack the gender code to participate equally in the cyber world of the future.
Introduction: Culture Codes
Chapter One: Tracing the Roots of Digital Culture
Chapter Two: Beyond the Packaging: Western Feminism and the Politics of Anticipation
Chapter Three: The Wired Machine
Chapter Four: Out of This World: Excluding, Reconstructing and Eliminating Difference
Chapter Five: Filling the Void: Building the Hypermacho Man
Chapter Six: Coding Digital Ideology
Chapter Seven: Beyond the Gender Code: Asking Different Questions
Notes
Glossary
Selected Bibliography
Index
Biography
Melanie Stewart Millar is an award-winning scholar and a public speaker. She completed her doctoral studies in political science at York University.
"A pleasure to read … convincingly demonstrates that technologies of the future are fused with traditional views of the past."
Janice Newton, Associate Professor, Women’s Studies and Political Science, York University
"Cracking the Gender Code is a welcome and timely dispatch from the front lines of the communications technology battle."
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