From another
place
to
put
things
http://andrakeay.blogspot.

com

in 2010, i anticipate putting much content relating to my Masters Digital Culture here

Sunday, April 11, 2010

The Internet Architecture of Gender / Decoding the Layers

The internet, like any new technology, has a disruptive effect on society and
governance. As Milton Mueller of the Internet Governance Project says, “For a
while, when its effects are new and unanticipated, it empowers in a relative sense
some actors at the expense of others. This relative empowerment alters the
composition of interest groups, further promoting political change.” (1)

The rise of the internet economy has occurred at a time when the gender gap has
actually been increasing in many indicators of highly developed countries, which
is somewhat of a surprise to those who believed that the second wave of
feminism in the 60s and 70s had born legitimate fruit.

It seems, on reflection, that legislation of equal opportunity and the rhetoric of

empowerment has failed to have any effect in some crucial areas, most
noticeably computer science, ICTs and engineering, where the numbers of women
in higher education and employment have actually declined since the 1970s. (2)

an example of gender division by workplace from The Guardian, UK.

Technology is not gender neutral although much of the rhetoric, like the end to
end principle, simplicity and net neutrality, obscures this. Technology is socially
shaped. As Hrynyshyn says, ‘values are embedded in a technology through a
social process of the interaction of different groups of relevant actors who are
involved in the process of design…. Often what is not recognized is that the
decision about the development of technology are made by agents with different
locations in structures of social power, and the different locations create
differences in the extent to which different agents are able to participate
successfully in the process of social shaping.’ (3)

I am taking a social shaping of technology approach to this situation (as

ARIN6902
:
Andra
Keay
:
309345332
 1

described by Mackenzie and Wajcman, Williams and Edge), where at every stage
in the development of a new technology a decision is made, a fork in the
branching logic paths is taken that incrementally changes the direction of
development, and of necessity excludes some directions. As Lessig puts it in Code
2.0, 'The ‘nature” of the Internet is not God’s will. Its nature is simply the product
of its design. That design could be different.’ (4)

I am using the Layers Principle as adapted by Solum and Chung from Lessig’s
work, and endorsed by the WSIS in 2005, for my analytic framework. The six
layers that constitute the Internet are:

• The Content Layer—the symbols and images that are communicated.

• The Application Layer—the programs that use the Internet, e.g. the Web.
• The Transport Layer—TCP, which breaks the data into packets.
• The Internet Protocol Layer—IP, handles the flow of data over the network.
• The Link Layer—the interface between users’ computers and the physical layer.
• The Physical Layer—the copper wire, optical cable, satellite links, etc. (5)

These layers were defined for internet governance but also serve as a way of
examining how different structures have evolved in seemingly comparative
isolation from other layers and how these isolated instances are part of the
interrelated whole. How the internet has created a society in which women, in
many important areas, are further from equality and self determination than they
were in 1960. How we can decode the layers of gender discrimination to see how
the architecture of the internet limits our global society.

(The Internet Architecture of Gender / to be continued....)

1. Milton Mueller, "The New Cyber-Conservatism: Goldsmith/Wu and the

Premature Triumphalism of the Territorial Nation-State: A review of Goldsmith
and Wu's 'Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World'" (June,
2006). Internet Governance Project. Paper IGP06-003. Available at
http://internetgovernance.org/pdf/MM-goldsmithWu.pdf

2. Maria Klawe, Telle Whitney, Caroline Simard, "Women in Computing - take 2"
(February, 2009). Communications of the ACM. Volume 52, Issue 2. Inspiring
Women in Computing. Pages 68-76. ISSN:0001-07682. Available
at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1461947#

3. Hrynyshyn, D, "Globalization, nationality and commodification: the politics of the social

construction of the internet" (2008) New Media and Society. Volume 10 (5): 751-770.
Available from http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/short/10/5/751

4. Lessig, L. "Code 2.0. Chapter 4: Architectures of Control" (2006) Available at:

http://codev2.cc

5. Solum, Lawrence B. and Chung, Minn, "The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the
Law" U San Diego Public Law Research Paper No. 55. Available at SSRN:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=416263

ARIN6902
:
Andra
Keay
:
309345332
 2

Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Is the Internet an Ogre?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/19melissa68/

The internet, like ogres and onions, has layers. Layers, transparency and the
end-to-end principle are considered the defining characteristics of a free,
accessible and innovative internet. Lessig describes the internet as the most
important ‘innovation commons’ the world has ever seen, both through culture
and architecture. (6)

The end-to-end principle means a network should be as basic as possible and

intelligence should be located at the ends. This can be traced back to Paul Baran’s
shift from circuit to packet switching network design but was first articulated in
1981 by Jerome Altzer, David Clark and David P. Reed. It is NOT the default
property of networks but a constructed one that is critical to the operation of the
internet as we know it. (7)

The internet is really a network of networks, combining so many different

technologies, companies and countries that as the internet has grown, problems
of governance have arisen. Internet architecture was based on the layers
principles as described by Solum and Ching, where the first corollary is the
‘principle of layer separation’ and the second corollary is the ‘principle of minimal
layer crossing’. (8) The internet is arranged in a vertical hierarchy of layers and
wherever possible issues within one layer should be addressed within that layer
only. If layers must be crossed, either literally or legislatively, then the least
distance crossed is the best ‘fit’.

The idea of utilizing internet architecture principles to inform the governance of

the internet is generally credited to Yochai Benkler, Harvard Professor of Law.
This was developed further by Lessig, Solum and Chung. Currently the UNCTAD
(post WSIS2005) proposes, in the Information Economy Report 2006 (IER), to
use the layers principle for internet governance. (9)

ARIN6902
:
Andra
Keay
:
309345332
 3

 Benkler Solum&Chung IER
The Content Layer—the The Content Layer—the
The Content Layer—the
symbols, images and symbols, images and
symbols and images
material that are material that are
that are communicated.
communicated. communicated.
The Application Layer—
The Application Layer—the
the programs that use
online technologies or
the Internet, e.g. the
programs
Web.
The Logical Layer—TCP/IP, The Logical Layer—TCP/IP,
The Transport Layer—
the ‘code’ or software that the ‘code’ or software that
TCP, which breaks the
enables data to travel enables data to travel
data into packets.
across the wires and cables across the wires and cables
The Internet Protocol
Layer—IP, handles the
flow of data over the
network.
The Link Layer—the
interface between users’
computers and the
physical layer.
The Physical Layer—the
The Physical Layer—the The Physical Layer—the
copper wire, optical
copper wire, optical cable, copper wire, optical cable,
cable, satellite links,
satellite links, etc. satellite links, etc.
etc.

Lessig explains that the internet mixed free layers with controlled layers. The
infrastructure or physical layer is fundamentally owned. The content and
application layers are partially owned, but the center, the code, was free.

The internet is an ogre analogy can now be extended. As the donkey replied to
Shrek, “You know, not everybody likes onions. Cakes! Everybody likes cakes.
Cakes have layers.” (10) The code is the cream in the cake.

(The Internet Architecture of Gender / to be continued....)

6. Lessig, L. “The Future of Ideas” (2002) New York: Vintage Books Chapter 2
p23. Also available at
http://lessig.org/blog/2008/01/the_future_of_ideas_is_now_fre_1.html

7. Lessig, L. “The Future of Ideas” (2002) New York: Vintage Books Chapter 3
p34. Also available at
http://lessig.org/blog/2008/01/the_future_of_ideas_is_now_fre_1.html

8. Solum, Lawrence B. and Chung, Minn, "The Layers Principle: Internet

Architecture and the Law" (2003) U San Diego Public Law Research Paper No. 55.
p4. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=416263
9. “Information Economy Report 2006” (2006). UNCTAD United Nations
Conference on Trade and Development. Paper E.06.II.D.8. Available at
http://www.unctad.org/Templates/WebFlyer.asp?intItemID=3991&lang=1

10. “Shrek” (2001) Quote from http://www.billionquotes.com/index.php/Shrek




ARIN6902
:
Andra
Keay
:
309345332
 4

Thursday, May 27, 2010
Women in the Tubes

The almost total absence of women from the infrastructure of the internet is
striking. Both the management and manufacture of the wires, pipes, and cables
of the internet infrastructure is gendered by absence. Even Malaysia, where
women constitute half of all computer scientists, has the lowest numbers of
women in the area of external cabling or outdoors infrastructure construction. In
Malaysia, ICT is seen as a respectable career for women, as opposed to medicine
which is considered too physical, combining quiet private office work with good
remuneration. (11)

US and Australia have had declining female participation in the internet

infrastructure over the last 30 years, aside from in companies like IBM and CISCO
who have been consistently incorporating positive discrimination strategies to
remedy a shortage of skilled workers and gain a competitive edge. Billions of
dollars globally are currently being invested in infrastructure and all the G30
nations are presenting reports on mantaining standard of living in the information
economy through innovation and increasing the skills of the population.

Yochai Benkler says that “communications technologies have ‘biases’ that affect
the patterns in which societies that utilize those technologies interact with and
around information and knowledge.”
Technological biases interact with social patterns of use. Through a reflexive
relationship with existent institutional frameworks and incumbent social relations,
there is ‘institutional and adapative lock-in’ which limits new technological
possibilities and causes a ‘network effect’. This contributes to perceptions of
desirable innovations and practises, creating a ‘feedback effect on the path of
technological development’. Organisations invest most heavily in technologies
that fit their values and needs. Those technologies reinforce the continuation of
existing practises. (12)

ARIN6902
:
Andra
Keay
:
309345332
 5

According to Judy Wajcman, “SST studies show that technology does not develop
according to an inner technical logic but is instead a social product, patterned by
the conditions of its creation and use.” (13)

On the one hand, women are excluded from the business side of decisions about
technology. The number of women on boards, in CEO, CFO or CTO positions or in
government through out the Western world remains minimal, less than 15% is a
generous interpretation of available figures. On the other hand, following the
design concepts of ‘lock-in’ and reflexive reinforcement described by Benkler,
then gender discrimination is likely to be occurring by design. From the bottom
up.

The smallest decisions made at the lowest level of the internet’s layers, the
infrastructure, can ‘lock-in’ everything above. Elizabeth Churchill describes how
the lack of women in powerful technology design positions maintains the
dominance of ‘gender neutral’ design practises that don’t consider women. She
gives several examples, including car airbags, which have been so dangerous to
people shorter than ‘average’ height (mainly women), that cars with airbags now
have to have ‘turn off’ mechanisms and there are legislations against small
statured people travelling in seats with airbags. (14)

The high numbers of women in Malaysian ICT education and industry described
by Lagesen suggests strongly that the lack of women in western ICT is a cultural
construction. Lagesen makes the point that all of the women she interviewed not
only enjoyed working with computers but did computer science because their
families and friends encouraged them. It was a sensible and supported career
choice. (15)

This occurred in a particular socio-economic climate. In Malaysia, ICT is a

government priority area, on the back of a previous governmental push to
redress women’s disadvantaged education position. So young Malaysian women
had a larger pool of female role models in ICT professions and at university than
available in the ‘Western’ worlds, as well as strong encouragement across the
board to learn computing for themselves and Malaysia’s future.

Malaysian women in computing is a modern story. The story of the internet was
written much earlier on the wires and pipes of older communications
technologies, where there are very few women in the tubes. If our freedoms are
architected in the code layer, then they are built on a gendered base.

(The Internet Architecture of Gender / to be continued....)

11 & 15. Lagesen, Vivian A. “A Cyberfeminist Utopia? Perceptions of Gender and

Computer Science among Malaysian Women Computer Science Students and
Faculty”. (2008) Science, Technology & Human Values, Vol. 33, No. 1, pp1-10.
Sage Publications Available at
http://sth.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/33/1/5.

12. Benkler, Yochai. “Communications Infrastructure Regulation and the

Distribution of Control over Content” (1998) Telecommunications Policy. Vol. 22.
No. 3. Pp 183-196. Great Britain: Elsevier Science Ltd. Available at
http://www.benkler.org/

13. Mackenzie, Donald & Wajcman, Judy “The Social Shaping of Tehcnology -
Second Edition” (1998) Open University Press - Buckingham

14. Churchill, Elizabeth. “Sugared Puppy Dogs Tails: Gender and Design” (2010)
interactions XVII.2 - March/April 2010 Available at
http://interactions.acm.org/content/?p=1346

ARIN6902
:
Andra
Keay
:
309345332
 6

Friday, May 28, 2010
Discrimination by Default

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rakka/123380632/

Lawrence Lessig says that code is political - code has values. (16) Code also has
binary values. 1010101010101. In the most literal of senses, the bits of
information that make up all code are built on dichotomy: on/off, 1/0. Just like
black/white or male/female. No room for indecision or shades of grey.

Zero has been troubling for sometime now, most famously in the paradoxes of
Zeno of Elea who is credited by Aristotle with creating dialectic argument. How
can being be many? How can something be nothing? And was zero a number or a
separation? Although some form of zero has been in use for thousands of years,
including an early form of binary similar to Morse code created by the Indian
scholar Pingala, the Persian mathmatician Al-Khwarizmi was the first to define
zero as a numeral 1500 years ago, and rules governing the use of zero first
appeared in Brahmagupta’s book “The Opening of the Universe” in 628AD.

Although Leibniz calls zero “an amphibian between being and non-being”, (17) he
also hoped it would convert China to Christianity through the power of union
between zero and one, nothing and god, seeing as how everything falls in
between. If this is indicative of the potential power of 1s and 0s then believing
them to hold the power to permanently ascribe gender is nothing unusual.

The power of binaries at the deepest level continues a discourse of difference

between male and female, rather than a unity or trinity or something else
altogether. As Baudrillard said about language, meaning is derived as much
through absence as presence. We understand dog to mean ‘not cat’. Signs are
situated within a web of meaning and the ‘not’ is as important as the ‘is’ for our
understanding. This powerful gravitational force prevents us from achieving
escape velocity from the gender well.

Evelyn Fox Keller as a practising scientist writing about gender, notes that the
dichotomies that encode our thoughts limit our thinking. For example, no one
searched for mobility in the ovum because of the assumption that male/female
correlated to active/passive. The binary mindscape we inhabit is inhibitory. (18)

And in the digital world, our Weberian bureaucracy, we are compelled to answer
to our sex over and over, regardless that it is either neither here nor there or
immediately obvious under the circumstances. Default values. The iron cage of

ARIN6902
:
Andra
Keay
:
309345332
 7

rationalization has enclosed us with the ‘irrationality of rationalization’. (19)

The International Standard ISO 5218, Information Technology - Codes for the
representation of human sexes, specifies:
0 = not known
1= male
2= female
9= not applicable
“No significance is to be placed upon the fact that “Male” is coded “1” and
“Female” is coded “2”. This standard was developed based upon predominant
practices of the countries involved and does not convey any meaning of
importance, ranking or any other basis that could imply discrimination.” (20)

This standard is, by the way, used in several national identification numbers,
including China and France. Many nations use other techniques to separate
citizens numerically by sex. eg. Bulgaria uses odd national identification numbers
for females and even numbers for males, Estonia reverses the polarities.

Our constant self identification as ‘gendered’ epitomises Foucault’s notion of

governmentality. The sadness to me is the disappearing Ms. Ms is resistance to
being defined by marital status, which means loss of self possession and second
class citizenship in many countries. One or two small letters that signify a large
battle.

When I google Ms, I get many results for either Multiple Sclerosis or Microsoft. I
have noticed in recent years that many database forms have dropped Ms out of
the list items. When I’ve insisted on being Ms, it frequently makes no difference.
Even the Hon. Carmel Tebbut, my local female MP, has ignored my request to be
Ms and sends me Mrs letters.

As I teach web and database design, I realise just how little thought goes in to
the creation of default fields. All the effort goes into the tricky parts like the
relationships. Not the easy bits like what sex or title someone is.
As Lu-in Wang says in her recent book about race and law, “Discrimination can
occur by default because discrimination is the default.” It is a self fulfilling
prophecy. (21)

Discrimination is biopolitical. Code is political by default not just design.

(The Internet Architecture of Gender / to be continued....)

16. Levy, Steven. “Lawrence Lessig’s Supreme Showdown” Wired Magazine

Archives. Retrieved on 27 May 2010 from
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/lessig_pr.html

17. Padua, Sydney. “2D Goggles” Retrieved on 27 May 2010 from

http://2dgoggles.com/

18. Keller, Evelyn Fox. “Gender, Language and Science”. (1996) Templeton
Lecture Sydney University. Retrieved on August 15 2009 from
http://www.scifac.usyd.edu.au/chast/templeton/1996templeton/1996lecture.html

19. Ritzer, George. “Sociological Beginnings: On the Origins of Key Ideas in

Sociology”, (1994) McGraw-Hill: New York pp154

20. ISO 5218:1977 International Organisation for Standardisation Retrieved on

15 April 2010 from
http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=11219

21. Wang, Lu-in. “Discrimination by Default” (2006) New York University Press:
New York

ARIN6902
:
Andra
Keay
:
309345332
 8

Friday, May 28, 2010
Women on YouTube

http://www.flickr.com/photos/butterberries/3879989340/

Content is the final layer of the internet cake. “Content is king.” Even though in
the Long Tail, Chris Anderson says, that “in a world of infinite choice, context, not
content, is the king.” (22) Clearly, the issue is that we are still talking about kings
not queens.

In Unmarked, Peggy Phelan said that “If representational visibility equals power,
then almost-naked young white women should be running Western culture. The
ubiquity of their image, however, has hardly brought them political or economic
power.” (23)

These wonderful halcyon days, where the ‘apple at last hangs.. indolent-ripe on
the tree’ (24), pose a question. Who eats the apple now? Almost exclusively,
public debates about gender and the internet have focussed on issues of the
digital divide. As if the problems facing women can be solved simply by giving
them enough computer skills and internet access to freely provide the bulk of the
content that men can mine for money.

Since getting access to reliable contraception and abortion, women have had the
freedom to engage in sexual activities in a way unprecedented in civilization.
However, there is no evidence of changing socio-political dynamics other than a
post-feminist YouTube culture of exposure and exploitation. There are no women
winners in the porn industry, although it was the practically the first public
content on the internet.

From the moment the internet became commercial in 1988/89 sex became the
big business traffic. In 1995, 4 out of the 10 most popular bulletin boards were
sex related (alt.sex). Adult businesses developed uuencode to transform text
code into pictures. HTML set the stage for the picture porn explosion which has
continued with development of streaming video. There is a lot of money in porn

ARIN6902
:
Andra
Keay
:
309345332
 9

on the internet, but it is not flowing into female purses. Tera Patrick, infamous as
one of the few exceptions, believes that the industry won’t see another female
star reach her relative power due to market saturation of free content and the
lowering of entry barriers for content producers. (25)

Phelan said that you can’t protect porn under the guise of free speech. Porn
perpetuates dominant gender power relations and is a continual enactment of
oppression. In 1965, Marcuse wrote that “what is practiced as tolerance today, is
in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression.”
(26)

Marcuse believed that tolerance should be subversive, undermining dominant

ideologies rather than perpetuating them. It follows that whenever tolerating a
freedom of speech is at the expense of a section of the community, then there is
a power imbalance at the bottom of things.

Angela McRobbie says, “The new female subject is, despite her freedom, called
upon to be silent, to withhold critique, to count as a modern sophisticated girl, or
indeed this withholding of critique is a condition of her freedom.” This
individuation goes hand in hand with the self government of the modern neo-
liberal subject in which wrong choices are always individual not societal. (27)

The poor postfeminist girl must try to embody sex, gender, career, beauty, porn,
popularity, individuality and happiness in her visible identity. Failure to do so is
her problem alone. In silence.

Internet governance must encompass all these things, because the internet and
its governance produce and reproduce all of these things. Lessig calls for a new
breed of technocratic philosopher kings to dispense wisdom and be our
guardians. (28)

Kings, you note, not queens. May all the queens of cyberspace arise and reclaim
their realms.

22. Anderson, Chris “The Long Tail” (2006) Hyperion: New York

23. Phelan, Peggy. “Unmarked - the politics of performance” (1993) Routledge:

New York

24. Whitman, Walt. “Halcyon Days” in “Leaves of Grass” (1891-92) Retrieved on

May 27 2010 from
http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/324

25. Nowak, Peter. “Sex, Bombs and Burgers”. (2010) Allen&Unwin: Crows Nest,
Australia

26. Marcuse, Herbert. “Repressive Tolerance” (1965) in “A Critique of Pure

Tolerance” (1968) Boston Beacon Press. pp 95-137

27. McRobbie, Angela. “Postfeminism and Popular Culture” in “Interrogating post-

Feminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture” eds. Tasker, Yvonne &
Negra, Diane. (2007) pp26-39 Durham, NC: Duke University Press

28. McCullagh, Declan “What Larry Didn’t Get” (2009) Cato Unbound Retrieved on
May 20 2010 from http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/05/04/declan-
mccullagh/what-larry-didnt-get/

ARIN6902
:
Andra
Keay
:
309345332
 10