2. Doing many things at once 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 Sadie Plant: We shouldn't assume, even now, that women turn their backs on high-tech careers because of the obstacles in their way, and we certainly shouldn't assume that programming a computer or even managing a corporation is the most desirable or socially significant thing to do. As for getting wrapped up in work, I would have thought that this trait far predates computer science programs, and historically has been as closely associated with women as with men -- all those hours of knitting, for example. And while computing can demand this kind of engagement from individuals at particular times, the broader cultural effect of new technologies is to allow people to do several things at once. It's also important not to start with the downside. Given the prejudice about women's ability with math and machines, the number -- and certainly the quality -- of women working in both the creative and business sides of new technologies might be said to be pretty high. Ellen Ullman: Rather than asking why women are not more involved in computing, we might just as well ask why anybody enjoys watching a Net browser tell you how many bytes remain to be downloaded. I have been a programmer and software engineer for nearly 20 years, and the deformations of character that go into the making of a technical person are not necessarily salutary. Programming (and using computers in general) involves a narrow-well horizon -- the world in a small frame -- and a tight, nervous, cycling energy. This strange energy can be alternately exhilarating or unpleasant, but the long-term effect is an abiding impatience. Once you get used to the machine cycling back at you, responding to you and only you, you come to hate it when it's slow. And the diffuse, ambling ways of normal humans can become unbearable. Even after hours and days of programming (or using the system all day at work), returning to the terminal after dinner is seductive. Here is where something, if not someone, can keep up with the strange, nervous energy you've gotten used to. If you are a reasonably sane woman with several friends and acquaintances -- someone who enjoys the ambling ways of normal humans -- it's not hard to understand why the PC in the study is not so alluring. But I have to question Sadie's looking fondly on the Sherry Turkle-ish idea that "the broader cultural effect of new technologies is to allow people to do several things at once." I don't believe computers let us do "several things at once" quite in the way that, say, a mother can bounce a baby, talk on the phone, write a note and watch someone come up the walk. These motherly several things are done at various gradations of attention -- a human way to multi-task. But life around computers reproduces the operating-system version of multi-tasking: a time-slice model. One task is the foreground, and all others are rolled out. That the operating system seems to be doing several things at once is only an illusion, an adjustment of time-slices, a round-robin look at all the possible things to do, with each thing getting a nanosecond or two, and the rest swapped into the background. (Humans have six senses. A computer has one: the current instruction.) Think about talking on the phone with someone who is sitting by a computer. One moment he or she is there, talking to you, present in a regular way. The next you sense a vagueness. Gone. The tack-tack of the keyboard is the dead giveaway: You have been swapped out. My point is that the "culture" that has grown up around computers has tended to re-create the deeper technical solutions embedded in the systems we use. That this culture may be less than pleasing to women (and men) is no surprise. The technical solutions eventually used were not really planned by anybody. Engineering proceeds by tweaking and tinkering: One version follows another; features and errors accumulate; the next version fixes mistakes, adds new features, introduces new errors. It's really no use analyzing all this as a male cultural plot or a bane to females. In the end, from the standpoint of the engineer, a computer program has one and only one meaning: It works, more or less. Laura Miller: To go back to Sadie's point about knitting: That's a highly interruptable activity, which programming (or, for that matter, writing) isn't. One of the things we're talking about here is concentration, and I tend to agree with Ellen that the celebration of multitasking (switching back and forth among functions or activities -- among applications really) among some academics strikes me as misguided. It has to do with deciding that it's wonderful for people to "realize" that their identities are not unified or singular, which is considered a Good Thing in the realm of theory. But in my experience, as a computer user and simply as a worker in a technically sophisticated environment, constantly switching back and forth between activities is exhausting and stressful. Everyone complains about it. For me, the most satisfying work requires undivided concentration, in which case interruptions are an aggravation. I suspect that no woman caring for small children ever spent 12 hours in uninterrupted knitting, but it remains an activity that can be done half-unconsciously -- as Ellen says, with gradations of attention; you can talk to someone at the same time. And as Ellen's phone example points out, reading and talking (or at least really being present in a conversation) are mutually exclusive. Sadie's right that we shouldn't assume that programming a computer or managing a corporation are the most desirable or socially significant things to do, but they are the sorts of work that lead to positions of power in the high-tech world. Sadie Plant: I do take Ellen's point about multi-tasking (and I really don't take any kind of Turkle-ish position on this -- I think that kind of work is naive). It certainly is true that computers are currently serial systems which do one thing at a time, effectively reproducing the most bland, orthodox ways of working. But even at their worst, serial computers can do several very different things -- spreadsheets, communicate, make pictures, music, play games, etc. -- even if they currently have to do them one by one. It's where things are going which really interests me. We've learned from the Net that issues which seemed so important only a few years -- or even months -- ago can quickly lose their pertinence. The near future of computing lies in parallel processing, or its equivalent in simultaneous processes, and this does begin to map onto more varied modes of activity. It may well be that a particular person will be absorbed in a particular process for a particular length of time quite regardless, but I do think that the differences computers make to the wider culture (by which I don't just mean computer workers, users or even people with an interest in computing, but the subtle, pervasive influences which developments like the Net have right across the board) are such that the possibility of doing more than one thing -- at least in a lifetime, if not in the moment -- is becoming increasingly viable and, indeed, necessary. True, anyone can spend their lives watching a browser count, just as they can spend them having babies or whatever. But the point is that there was a time when it was difficult to do anything but one thing. And, for women, that one thing was pretty much prescribed. Watching the counter may be addictive, but it's not compulsory. It's also the case that the kind of concentration demanded by, say, computer programming, or even getting to grips with using particular software, is a little like learning to read, in that one's not learning to read a specific book, but gaining a skill which is extremely transferable and can open up a vast range of other possibilities. Computing obviously does reproduce the old paradigms of work -- we know that all too well. What's crucial is to look out for the ways in which it changes the ways things are done. I very much agree with the point about engineering going its own way -- indeed, this is precisely why getting into supposed positions of power isn't necessarily where it's at for either women or men. The whole notion that technology is intentionally developed as a human tool for human use -- i.e. that we know what it's for, that we're in control of it, and can predict the outcomes and effects it has -- all this is no longer obvious at all. And yes, the Net is an example of the extent to which the people who think they have all the cultural power can be taken by surprise. Machines, men, women -- we're all components of that vast engineering process known as reality. THE AUTHORITARIAN NET DETAIL OF ILLUSTRATION BY BART NAGEL