In her book, Designing Culture, Anne Balsamo shares her ideas on various topics related to technology and culture. Her first chapter, titled “Gendering the Technological Imagination,” focuses on gender and technology. Balsamo opens the chapter with a story about a former president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers. Summers gave a speech in 2005 about the lack of women with high-level positions in science and mathematics professions. He claimed women don’t want these high-powered jobs and they don’t have the “intrinsic aptitude,” or natural skills, to do them. This blaming of women overlooks the many social, institutional, and technocultural factors that have historically prevented women from entering these professions due to discrimination based on their sex. Balsamo thinks STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) programs should be more diverse and include women. However, she does not agree with the idea that women, because they are biologically different than men, are guaranteed to use technology differently.
Balsamo defines technologies as assemblages or combinations of “people, materialities, practices, and possibilities.” They are products of the current time, place, people, resources, and ideas. Technological imagination is the creativity people have as they analyze, design, and develop technologies. It’s based on the idea that technoculture is made up of different perspectives. Women can contribute to this diversity of viewpoint in technoculture, but they need the proper resources. Feminist-specific maps and tools will allow women to enter STEM and challenge the figure of the “white man hero engineer.” Men represent the typical STEM professional, which makes women in tech the “other.” Women are considered outsiders, despite their past contributions to STEM. Balsamo wants to gender the technological imagination by introducing diversity and focusing on the process of designing.
Designing relies on past knowledge that’s built upon. This building process gives agency and individuality to designers who go through a series of “intra-actions.” Intra-actions are the ways people make meaning through observations of objects in the material/physical world. They construct boundaries and markers based on an individual’s time, history, and/or culture. Intra-actions build off one another and allow for varying experiences with tech and the world as a whole. New insights from multiple points of view benefit technological imagination because there’s more creativity. Balsamo’s call to gender the technological imagination is a call for diversity as a whole. Everyone participating in the creation of tech brings individual “gendered, racial, and class-based assumptions to the designing process.” Context, or background, is important to how technology contributes to and is used in culture/society.
Balsamo uses Women of the World Talk Back, a project she designed with Mary Hock, as an example of gendered technological imagination. It was created for the 1995 NGO Forum at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. As part of the Georgia Institute of Technology delegation, Balsamo and Hock focused on women’s scientific and technological literacy and the influence of mass media on the perception and treatment of women around the world. The project used the digital technologies of video narratives and interviews to create cross-cultural dialogue about women. Balsamo discusses how the project was initially designed to be event specific with the goal of creating meaningful conversations within the context of the NGO Forum. Women of the World Talk Back was modeled as a “call-and-response ritual.” The interactive media encouraged Forum participants to engage and communicate openly with global leaders. The project went through many stages of redesign as Balsamo and Hock adapted their work to suit their audience. Unequal access to digital technologies and a new idea of who would be using/viewing Women of the World Talk Back required a new design. A changing context influenced the reformatting of the project into a multimedia documentary that could be more accessible through digital technologies used at the time. The project was designed as a piece of feminist media activism, but it had influence beyond the original Forum audience. This illustrates technology’s reach outside the typical “white man engineer” story. Tech has the ability to shift boundaries and create identities that contribute to a more diverse worldview. Underrepresentation of women and minorities in STEM hurt tech innovation and limit technological imagination that contribute to progress. Now is the time for diversity because now is the time to redesign the technocultural terrain.
digital feminisms 