The Electronic Salon

   [IMAGE] The Electronic Salon is a women's discussion site on the Net
   that was established in order to give women a space to post discussion
   papers, ideas and interests in a relatively flame and harassment free
   environment.
   
  DALE SPENDER, NET CRUISING AUTHOR
  
   Almost everything I learned has transferred to the Internet. Almost
   everything I know about the way topics are set up, how agendas are
   determined, who gets to speak, who's experience is discounted, who
   gets harassed in conversation applies in exactly the same way on the
   Net.
   
  PROF. SUSAN C HERRING
  
   I think people are very much aware of others out there. I don't buy
   the idea that people flame because they're sending their messages out
   into an anonymous cyberspace and they don't feel that they will have
   any consequences. I think a lot of what we're seeing is sexism from
   the larger society just carried over wholesale onto the Net.
   
  LIBBY REID, CULTURAL STUDIES PROGRAM,ROYAL MELBOURNE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
  
   Sexual harassment certainly exists in cyberspace, but I must say I
   hesitate to refer to it as rape. Even if harassment does take the form
   of a textual simulation of rape, I think it belittles actual cases of
   physical rape to refer to the on-line equivalent as that. With rape
   there's no way of really getting away from it. In cyberspace you can
   always turn off your modem, or just log out. You're not forced to look
   at it.
   
  AMY BRUCKMAN, MULTI USER DIMENSION DESIGNER, MEDIA LAB MIT
  
   Last week I logged on to LambdaMoo and I received a rather obscene
   page from a person I'd never met. I was sitting around feeling
   somewhat depressed about this, wondering what in the world could be
   done about it, and feeling frustrated, when I got a message from a
   friend of mine on-line who said,'Did you get that page?' I said yes,
   and she said,'Well it seems to have gone to all the women logged on
   and we've started a mediation process against this person.' So within
   half an hour after this incident happened there had been a formal
   process of mediation against the offending person started, and about a
   dozen people sent in their personal account of what happened and the
   person apologised. The mediation was finally resolved. The person who
   had sent the obscene page to all the women logged on, despite the fact
   that he apologised publicly and promised never to do it again, had his
   right to program on LambdaMoo suspended for three months as a result
   of the mediation process.
   
  ST JUDE
  
   It's the ultimate prankster's medium, of course. You're bounded only
   by your ingenuity. You can prank anybody with whatever outrageousness
   you can concoct, but it seems to me that sort of the ultimate
   outrageousness though, is refusing to be honest. You have also the
   freedom to...tell the truth, to say personal things you wouldn't dare
   tell anybody face to face, and you can say them from behind your
   pseudonym. There seems to me the possibility of understanding what
   human beings are about, quite beyond men understanding what women are
   about and women understanding what men are about. I think it's very
   touching that men pretend to be women in order to get some kind of
   insight into the alien species.
   
  BRENDA LAUREL, INTERVAL RESEARCH CORPORATION
  
   I believe that we are always spinning ourselves right in various
   contexts, various situations, constructing various versions of
   ourselves, and I see nothing wrong with that. We are given, children
   especially are given, an incredibly impoverished palate of choices
   about who they can be and what they are in terms of gender and
   sexuality, in terms of how they use their imagination and what they're
   allowed to think about - and they construct a notion of what reality
   is and what authority is. I think that the tremendous freedom,
   relatively speaking, that we have in electronic virtual worlds for
   exploring those issues is a healthy thing, especially for young
   people.
   
  FUTURE SEX MAGAZINE
  
   There's a group of women on the board now called Cyberchix and they're
   kind of like the Riot Grrrlsare in rock 'n roll. They go around on the
   different boards and post erotic thoughts and messages and I think
   it's a part of the guerilla mentality that a lot of women are getting
   now, and the technology is part of it. It's very empowering and it has
   nothing to do with physical strength. It's all about what's between
   your ears.
   
  MARIA FERNANDEZ STUDIES CULTURE AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
  
   I think that communication with somebody in other countries through
   the Network or even through other means of electronic technologies
   doesn't mean that we understand the culture, particularly if we use
   English as the language. I mean, culture is so separable from
   language, it's just like talking on the telephone to somebody you
   don't know...how much of the culture do you understand? But I think
   this is the dream... There is certainly increasing communication, but
   one of the things that people don't realise is that it is class based
   in many of these countries. Although we may be talking on the Network
   to somebody in Bolivia, this is not the people of Bolivia, this is a
   privileged woman from Bolivia. So I think it is very difficult to
   think of something that will work universally. I think that things
   have to be developed in the context of each group or each culture to
   serve them.
   
  AMY BRUCKMAN
  
   I mean, there area lot of annoying people on the Net. Needing to
   sometimes gag people is not a gender issue. The one thing I will say
   is that you can solve social problems in a technological way or in a
   social way. You can gag someone, which is a technological solution
   using the programming language to no longer be able to hear anything
   someone says, or you can have a sympathetic systems administrator to
   have a discussion with someone who's being troublesome, or have
   feedback from peers to someone who's being troublesome. I believe that
   social solutions are always preferable to technological solutions.
   
  BRENDA LAUREL, INTERVAL RESEARCH CORP
  
   I think what's happening now is that what we're calling information
   technologies is being co-opted by individuals to put to their own
   uses, which has much less to do with exchange of information as we
   know it as some sort of authoritaritive thing, and much more to do
   with the exchnage of social behaviour, of communities of social
   behaviour, of self representational behaviour. These are the things
   that we are placing value in and that we're sharing with each other
   increasingly on computer networks. So information technology I see as
   this wonderful appropriation of something that started out as a very
   establishment kind of thing, if you'll excuse the 60's terms, by
   people who are so hungry for community and self expression and for a
   world where there are different points of view again. Generations of
   people who had the imagination beaten out of them by television are
   taking it back. We're just taking it back in a very centralised way.
   
  DONNA ZELZER, MIDWIFERY TODAY ON-LINE
  
   A woman goes on-line and needs to access sensitive information,
   whatever to her is sensitive. You can be anonymous. You can go on-line
   and nobody is there looking over your shoulder. However, right now in
   the United States we're having all this big fuss about wire tapping
   and the government being able to look at where you're going. Like, if
   you were in a State where midwifery was illegal and you wanted to find
   out information about it, they could see that you have accessed this
   bulletin board about midwifery. So in that sense it's kind of
   frightening to me. If you're going out there to be anonymous, you
   don't want somebody following you around and seeing every place you
   went to get information. So that's a little scary.
   
  MINH MCCLOY
  
   If people don't know how to use the technology then they're not going
   to be able to control it. They're not going to have any say, it will
   be the people use use it. Undoubtedly there's going to be attempts by
   various groups on a commercial basis, or a government power basis, or
   a military basis or whatever, who'll attempt to control it, or part of
   it, or access to it, but you can say one thing for sure, people who
   don't have access are not going to have any control at all.
   
   The Electronic Salon was produced for The Coming Out Show on Radio
   National by Rosie Cross and Fiona Martin 1994
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