Address to the Bologna meeting, 4^th European Feminist Research Conference

 

“Imaginary, languages and real life with and into new ICT”

Florence Women's Cooperative telematic group

Edited by Maria Patrelli Campagnano

 

 

We are all different, and we all have a different approach to the new technologies.  We decided to start off the working session with images, because images encapsulate meanings and identity.

And so here we have Lara Croft, the creature brought to birth by the new technologies, the quintessential image of that being which the male imagination desires to possess and/or to be.

She is not a woman; this is not simply because she is virtual, but because she is a hybrid, made up of “attributes of sexual power” which are both male and female: holster belted at the hip and pistol at the ready, voluptuous of breast with lips which are full but cutting.  Yet she also embodies contours which are soft and, in some ways, even “adolescent”.  Lara fascinates many women, particularly the young, because to some extent she represents aspects of their own characters which the reality of the moment brings to the fore: aggressiveness, determination and individualism.

 

They say that no woman could impersonate her.  But why try?!  The virtual operates through a process of suspension of the real to create a different dimension where new self-projections, images and models of identity, which the crude physicality of the real does not permit, can come to life.  Reality judges you, it leaves no space between you and your emotions, it shouts its essence in your face.

But how do we women see ourselves in this new dimension?

In our images do we aim at an integral whole?  At a balance between the different parts and/or relations?  At the harmonisation of our different types of knowledge? Or do we manage to express the elements of brokenness which we need to be truly ourselves (and not simply to compete in the manner required of us by the work market)!

Among women’s sites, the visual element as a form of self-expression seems underdeveloped, leaving the task of expressing ourselves to the written word, almost as if images were too direct, revealing and definitive, potential elements of rupture in the flow of our being, or a worthless appendage.  This is a terrain which it is difficult for us to tread; it has been exploited by others and we ourselves have always been the most fertile element of the exploitation.  But is this sufficient reason to justify such an absence?

 

So, we began this study departing from an image which encapsulates one of our ways of experiencing the virtual relationship. “…I’ll be straight back, I’m there but I’m here too, like the continuous ebb and flow of the waves, bearing things with them, bearing shells, bearing tar,.. going and coming.”

We are in a safe and real place: a room in our own home or in the office, with a sterile machine in front of us.  And it is here that we set in motion this “coming and going”.

There are those who don’t risk much, but who nevertheless set up relationships with others, experimenting new and original ways of speaking, using word-images in their e-mails, a new language made up of expressions borrowed from comic strips, or a stream of typing errors deliberately uncorrected to give the idea of immediacy.  The intention is to communicate, and therefore also to offer a part of oneself which belongs to the sphere of the emotions and which will provoke in the recipient a reaction which goes beyond the mere receipt of a message.

But there are also those who, still within the context of going and coming, and knowing that they can return to a security which in fact they never actually leave, advance further in a communicative adventure which involves them at deeper levels.

“No-one can see you, no-one can hear you, they can only read you.  You are alone with yourself and at the same time you are with someone else, and here the wavelength can be longer or shorter, more or less profound, it can bear you green algae and it can lap your shore with greater or lesser force…!”

But among us, there are other voices give greater emphasis to acting and interacting in relation to the concrete reality of our existence in the world:

-“…for me the wave evokes a serene, but passive image…”

- “…I don’t always feel like coming back! I prefer rather to float here and there (and I don’t deny that the speed of the bits is an incredible attraction), in any case what I really want is to bring my own identity with me everywhere, and by this what I mean is my own story (what I am, type, species etc.) and maybe it’s the rootedness, the inner force, the energy which some speak of….”

-“anyway, what instead I really love is the extension of relations which computer technology enables, the fact that I don’t have to share all but even just parts of myself: they are “real” connections, even if most of the exchange takes place via e-mail”.

- “the most distinctive thing about internet is that each of us can make the concept of “nomad individual” his or her own.  In front of the computer screen, when we are surfing the internet, we don’t have to define our own identity. What passes through the language of the web is a being, an individual as ready for comparison as for silence, an individual who can exploit his or her own capacity to feel free, in the first place as regards him or herself.”

The new technologies make possible, even if dangerously so for those whose own concept of self is not clearly defined, a contiguity understood not only as closeness, but also as contact with the other.

Each of us has an identity which is absolutely unique but which can also evolve. But, in the relationship with the other, how can we manage to absorb elements vital to growth without the risk of being violated?

Maybe the way is to see one’s own confines and those of the other as an interior frontier, a no-man’s land of interchange  We break bounds to enter into relation with the affinities or divergences of the other, to feel them, understand them and possibly to set up a reciprocal contagion to increase the chances of reciprocal encounter, managing to avoid, where possible, inevitable conflicts when the method of contact approaches that of the raid.  Finally we return to our own territory enriched by the difference of the other.

 

But in the communicative process of the new technologies, it is also the conceptual models of  the “link” and the “forward” which fascinate us.  Cerebral neurotransmitters.  Non-linear thought, which proceeds by association and synchrony.  We can attempt to bring individuals and information into contact, to bring like minds together, to forward useful information  to ramifications of friends and acquaintances.  This is the vital necessity and the beauty of being within a friendly network of sharing and exchange, which also creates bonds and links, provokes acquaintance and creativity.  Inter-est in the sense of “being between” says Annah Harendt.  Against this advantage we have to balance the fear of competition (in the work sphere for example) or of the loss of the power represented by the “possession of knowledge”.

 

But the net’s  enormous communication potential is also the source of its limitation.  The levelling out of difference takes place through mechanisms which are gradual and easily accepted.  We can become convinced that we are all speaking the same language, uniting our knowledge in a single “telematic” thought, that we are eliminating the slightest hint of exclusion or ghettoisation.

The small delirium of omnipotence which we can feel in front of a computer, which enables us to give substance to a thought and circulate it in almost real time, the expansion of the self which we perceive simultaneously at various different levels or dimensions may provide the incentive for a type of absolutism which would give supremacy to the world of information technology, creating alongside an increasingly marginalised world for those situations which it does not encompass.

The freedom which each one of us seeks for ourselves and other women brings with it a recognition of the freedom of another way of thinking which is different from ours.  My gaze is thus enlarged, expanding to include multiple and different realities, which come to form part of my sphere of reference.  The subject is not one but many, and among the many  - female, male, cyber, post-colonial – there is also the “non-computerised” individual (and not only in the sense of not having access).

 

And here it seems opportune to tackle another significant aspect which, in the use of telematic communication, influences our minds and our lives: the space-time transformation.

Time is telescoped (synchrony, speed of communication) and space is transformed, since to interact with the new technologies we have to have a terminal, a screen and kilometres of cable, but the space which we explore and probe, while virtual, is also vast.   The times of thought, elaboration and writing do not coincide.  Thinking and writing one’s thoughts are acts and moments which are different both physiologically and symbolically.  While in the gesture of writing the entire process of elaboration of thought and feeling is perceptible, the “distancing” which the act of writing requires is somehow brought into question by the radically different relation which is created when the writing, at times almost automatic, is carried out on the computer.  

Greater freedom and enrichment, or an undefined delirium?

 

And what is to become of “history”, which is also based on the existence and the transformation of documents?  How can all this “memory” ,which is constantly modified and updated with a speed previously unthinkable, ever bear witness to an epoch?

 

The suffocating impression is that in the ether everything tends to exhaust itself rapidly, including the enthusiasm and the pleasure of finding a space for private personal reflection and communication with another person. Dialogues, which are born above all from the need for profound communication, can go through phases where we feel intensely involved and then, suddenly, uninterested, almost bored.  We feel this is due precisely to the speed which, if on the one hand it enables us to satisfy contingent urgencies and desires, on the other can become a sort of noose which drags us on by inertia, an almost automatic mechanism which it seems we cannot resist, even when we no longer have anything to say and much, instead, to elaborate.

If we take time out to re-read some of our e-mails, we realise, for example, that our reading and writing time in the sphere of telematic communication, while gaining in speed loses in quality.  Frequently we create a vicious circle, so that we go on repeatedly talking about things which we would have been able to clarify once and for all if we had given ourselves time to reflect on what we were writing.  Beyond the time zones, the simultaneous aspect therefore seems at times to bring in its wake anxiety, superficiality, and an only partial understanding of the communicative flux in progress.  This is why, through our experience of the creation, management and editing of the “Tempi e Spazi” site within the Prato Town Council civic network, we have attempted to find an equilibrium.

As well as the simple information – news available for direct reading and continually updated -  the decision to also maintain more complex texts, proposed for different (off-line) moments, has been determined by a conscious desire to cater for the space and time of each individual, as dictated by his or her own lifestyle, by the complexities of his or her daily life and by the different means which each may have available to link up and eventually to download the text.

On this site the intention to bear in mind the different characteristics of the potential interlocutors is not constrained by the need to consider a potential “market” of users who are targeted as “clients”. 

Our ambition, which we restate here, is to stimulate interchange and collaboration among those who are interested in developing a dialogue on these themes.  The scope is not competition among those providing information, but the ongoing development of new threads in an effective network of women and men who are interested in reflecting on the time and space of our lifestyles and in the circulation of “good practice”.  At the heart of this we wish to maintain time to reflect.

The decision to research deeper into micro-sectors of these themes enables us to maintain contacts with the sphere of global communication in which we are involved.  This approach can be compared to that of certain architects; designing solutions for micro-sectors of the city which are considered essential for the urban development which will radiate from them, they elaborate projects which take into consideration the real needs of the inhabitants.