© 2002 Katie King, Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College Park

do not quote or cite without permission: katking@umd.edu

Book Outline: preliminary drafts current:

• Why not talk instead about the history of the book, or about oral and print cultures, or perhaps especially about cyberfeminism?
• Why should literature be called technology?
• Doesn't using the word "feminism" and focusing on women narrow the field of writing technologies?
• But doesn't this decenter the Humanities?
• This book is truly an "introduction."

5. What does this have to do with 17th c. Quaker women, and female fandoms of global TV?

Afterword: Linking to the Web Site & Writing Technology Ecologies

We seek to understand classification systems according to the work that they are doing and the networks within which they are embedded....When we ask historical questions about the deeply and heterogeneously structured space of classification systems and standards, we are dealing with a four-dimensional archaeology. The systems move in space, time, and process. Some of the archeological structures we uncover are stable, some in motion, some evolving, some decaying. They are not consistent....

What are the intellectual consequences when a feminist investigation takes "writing technologies" as the broader historical and cross-cultural category into which "new technologies and media" fall as particular contemporary instances? First, it becomes obvious that both "writing" and "technologies" today have expansive meanings that bespeak rapidly changing historical interrelationships. For example, publication in a wide variety of communication forms today, including the internet, converge with television, telephone and their broadcast, satellite and cable systems of delivery. Words, images, sounds altogether create this understanding of "writing"; the descriptions of divisions between oral, handwritten, print, and electronic communication that appeared useful once turn out to obscure such convergences. A focus on feminism and writing technologies suggests that such convergences and other overlayerings are pivotal today and indeed have been pivotal in the past. This focus opens up cultural technological production to new inspections, to enlivened realities of practice. When we alter what counts as technology, what counts as cultural production, we open up realities in which the contributions of women become visibly more numerous, more valuable and increasingly complex. Opening these realities, we also see changing ranges of power, in varying salient forms of which gender is only one. Others include nation, language, race and ethnicity, ability and more. Then we have to search for models of a dynamic mode of writing history that speaks to how our new understandings of contemporary technologies and of gender relations within fields of power vary what we see of writing technologies and women in the past. The examples I use in this book are meant to illustrate richly and model both why one would want to engage technologies in this way, and also how to do so.

The department and professional field I work within--Women's Studies--is interdisciplinary, and this book is indebted to and engages directly Women's Studies together with (at least) three other large interdisciplinary formations:

• To Women' Studies-- this book contributes a feminist historical analysis of cultural technological production by analyzing what is often naturalized as literary practice as technological process. Doing this requires interchanging and interrelating the kinds of objects of analysis usually addressed by feminist technoscience theories and methods, and those of feminist literary historians.

• To Cyberculture Studies-- this book contributes to building the nascent historical methodologies of Cyberculture Studies, positioning this new field as a contemporary instance within the history of the book. Doing so means engaging its yet slender theories of gender and society by demonstrating that too narrow understandings of what counts as technology undervalue the processes of women's cultural technological production.

• To The History of the Book-- this book calls for and begins the process of conceiving a more dynamic historiography, one that includes in a gendered analysis our grasp of objects of study in the past within and because of the politics of our own changing historical and technological circumstances.

So, why not talk in turn about the history of the book, or about oral and print cultures, beginning perhaps especially with cyberculture and cyberfeminism? Instead, thinking in terms of "feminism and writing technologies" allows us to animate each of these areas of intellectual activity and everyday life in dynamic interrelationship. The word "dynamic" is essential here: my point is to consider how to talk about these interconnections as moving, changing, shifting and transforming across locations and through time, in what I call "layers of locals and globals." Contemporary feminist activist interests in Web culture, research and everyday life are then intertwined with long-standing multidisciplinary critiques and examinations of cultural work through the lenses of orality and literacy. Understandings of the book as a product of history and technology are also contextualized within contemporary feminist analyses of power. It is the examinations of epistemologies--ways of knowing, ways of producing knowledge, all inflected by power--that are at the heart of feminism and writing technologies. These literary materialities and the human sciences themselves are thus historicized.

Studies and practices of new cybercultures unfold out into histories of the book with their archival concerns, which in turn unfold out into multidisciplinary studies in orality and literacy–and it becomes evident that all these require the methods and passions of feminist analysts of technology. Indeed these interdisciplinary formations are perspectives each upon the other, are practices each producing the others, are modes of critique and forms of everyday life. Changes in our contemporary meanings and uses of technologies of communication and their rearrangements of body experience, of social inequalities, and of perceptions of the past, violate our assumptions about "writing technologies." For example, "the Book" multiplies in complexities of circulations: renewed are intuitions about pasts of manuscript and print, scroll and codex, in the light of today's newly competing commodities: on the Web in database and coded in XML, as text on electronic hand-held device, as instant publication, and more. Such proliferating technologies under the sign of the Book, remind us, indeed require us to notice that such proliferations existed locally in these other inspectable pasts as well.

Feminism and writing technologies is full of questions and questioning, in layers of locals and globals. What are the politics of making distinctions between the oral and the written? As if orality were one thing? As if such distinctions were self-evident? As if there were a pivotal historical divide? As if these ideal categories existed in the world? Whose "revolutions" are the alphabet, literacy, printing or the internet? Global conceptual categories are interrogated by local material practices, but what counts as local? What counts as the material? the practical? the global? Assumption after assumption is necessarily excavated in feminism and writing technologies, each such assumption pointing to alternative pasts, alternative materialities, alternative contemporary possibilities. We remember what might have been, in order to really look to see what is in the process of happening today. We inspect the technologies that make such new sightings possible, in order to re-inspect our pasts, and newly imagine how they become usable today, and under what regimes of power.

The field of writing technologies includes histories of specific technologies. Consider internet, satellite TV and other interpenetrating communications infrastructures; printing, xeroxing and other forms of reproduction; computers, book wheels, codex and other linking devices; alphabets, chirographs, sound and video recording and other forms of inscription; pencils, typewriters, needles and other marking implements; paper, screen, sand and other surfaces of display; epic poetry, telenovelas and other formalized oralities; pictographs, web sites and other artifacts of visual culture. It also includes the methods by which such technologies are studied in the academy and understood in everyday life, formal and popular technologies of knowledge-making, if you will. "Writing" in this sense comprehends its largest meaning; it participates in oralities, rather than becoming their opposite. It stresses meaning-making in many cultural forms; it stresses social processes that are momentarily stabilized in human devices. And "technologies" here are not just the latest machines for sale, or the instruments and infrastructures of science, but the cultural refinements of skills and tools, extensions of human bodies and minds with which the world is continually reshaping in complex interconnecting agencies. "Writing technologies" are the objects of study, but "writing" technologies is also the process of engaging these objects.

Specific momentary skills and devices--for example, the hand-held e-book today--are conflations of local materialities on the one hand, and global relations protected and connected to other skills and devices under global signs, such as "the Book," on the other. Taking apart these global signs in order to examine local materialities and other global (including historical) relationships is one task of feminism and writing technologies. Literature is a powerful global sign under which writing technologies are conflated, universalized, and decontextualized. Inspecting literary materialities is a method for taking apart literature as such a global sign and understanding its protected relationships to other skills, devices and signs. Thus, understanding literature as technology, as cultural refinements of skills and tools in historical flux, is the first method in feminism and writing technologies.

Thinking about the technologies of literary practice opens up cultural production to new inspections of various contemporary uses and meanings. Public alarms about education generally and the status of its culturally hallowed symbol, the Book, are powerful forms of public engagement today. ("End book worship" was a slogan of the Chinese Cultural Revolution for concrete reasons, if out of a very specific history of literacy, bureaucracy and power elitism, and if leading to excesses not to be valorized now. In the U.S. of the early twenty first century perhaps an added slogan might be "end test worship"--an alternate vision calling into question today's coalescing Education Management Organization, through which the corporatized state produces its accountancies.) Cultural products understood traditionally as literature or the arts (such as poetry, novel, essay, drama, sermon, letter, memoir, biography, painting, sculpture, dance) are joined by other cultural products, overlappingly understood as popular culture, as high art, and as commodities delivered technologically (such as documentary film, video game, TV miniseries, magazine ad, guerrilla theater, graffiti, environmental installation, public mural, internet discussion group and web site). Contemporary forms of cultural production create interference patterns upon the symbolic resonance field of author-text-reader (producer-object-consumer; production-distribution-consumption; production-reproduction-transformation). Such idealized a priori categories break down with the examination of new cultural products, are revealed as historically and culturally specific forms of protected relationship, and turn out to obscure as well as illuminate usable pasts and presents. Literary and intellectual properties are in unsettling flux. While a future of "content-providers" rather than authors is one bleak vision mobilized by the relentless commodification of every new writing technology, the very instabilities of productive agencies that multinational capital is attempting to manage and exploit, may be more interesting than it yet appears. That is, may be so if feminism engages with such writing technologies of these possible presents, as well as with altering our shaping of usable pasts.

For example, the field of women's writing has generally focused upon the literary works of the last three centuries, with exceptional authors and texts surfacing only occasionally in earlier periods. This is because literacy has been understood as the limiting horizon of writing by women, and authors to be the necessary originators of visible works, cultural processes, and literary intelligibility. But shift the terms of value and the kinds of cultural productions that count, and far richer worlds of relationship among women and culture become intelligible and important. Feminism and writing technologies is a lens into those richer worlds. Readers and collectors of books emerge as gatekeepers, facilitators and patrons of literary culture. Ballad hawkers and retellers' acts of sedition and improvisation are recognized, documented in court records. Women printers and preachers participate in political and religious public life. Consider commonplace books and cookbooks: women as collators and copyists...prayers, visions and songs: women as visionaries and Trobairitz or troubadours...manuscript publication and circulation: women as intellectuals and colleagues...signatures and personal marks on public petitions: women as citizens and historical agents. Thus multiple objects and multiple agencies characterize feminism and writing technologies. Here, where authorship is not understood as the only or even the most important productive agency, but one of many in material systems of writing technologies, enlivened realities are made visible. These are writing technology ecologies of interdependent parts, under specific historical regimes of power. My point is not to produce a new functionalist history using the notion of ecologies, but rather to open up our understanding of how writing technology ecologies are dynamically interconnected, revealing materializing social change and cultural forms in flux.

Locating "feminism" as social and intellectual method, as privileged approach to writing technologies, both insists upon and extends beyond a focus on women in cultural technological production. Feminist intellectual and activist methods continually draw attention to hierarchies of power, to historical consolidations of authority, to racializations, to cultural resistances in everyday life, and to agencies of social change. When feminists focus on women such a focus does not narrow categories of human agency, but instead attempts to unsettle and to call to account specious universalisms and unmarked categories of thought that leave unnamed and unexamined power and its hierarchies. Feminism and writing technologies is actually a more extensive field than writing technologies "alone."

To imagine otherwise is to inhabit and animate only unmarked categories, those categories that purport to stand for all humans by instantiating and centering humanity in themselves. Although feminism is certainly not immune from such fantasies, and the figure of Woman can be and has been mobilized as such an unmarked category, feminism in internal and external critique continues to call itself to account on this basis and to examine these processes of marking and unmarking, however imperfectly. Thus feminism inhabits and animates layers of marked and unmarked categories, which shift and change as power shifts and changes. It is self-conscious if not innocent of consolidations and reconsolidations of power, and works toward intellectual and political accountability by examining a range of social inequalities and their histories and cultural forms. While no feminist theorists or activists are immune from the practices of illegitimate power, as feminists they expose themselves to accountability on this basis. Thus feminism and writing technologies understands writing technologies as constituted within fields of shifting powers. Writing technology ecologies are ways of describing knowledge / power relations. Specific to locations, times and social arrangements, they require us to think of technologies as feminist theorist Donna Haraway analyzes them, that is, as "frozen social relations."

Feminists today ambivalently engage with technologies. Technologies are sites of contestation among feminists and feminisms. Agreeing that technologies are about power, what to do about power divides feminists. Thus feminism and writing technologies is also about the technology question in feminism. Feminism and writing technologies works to ask questions about so-called digital divides: not only to analyze patterns of inequality continued, exacerbated or created by new technologies, but also to ask who engages in what kinds of discourse about digital divides and for what purposes? For example, how is media public speech about digital divides hijacked by multinational capital for its own benefit? Under what regimes of power does it makes sense that www.digitaldivide.gov was produced by the U.S. Department of Commerce during the Clinton Administration? And that information on the digital divide under the Bush Administration today is embedded deeply in an alternate DOC site? What sort of information about social inequalities is the DOC likely to valorize? How has this information been used to increase market penetration under the rubric of ameliorating social inequality? What policies for addressing social inequalities and new technologies ought to be practiced? International cyberfeminists imagine new forms of activism, new works of art and culture, new body / machine interconnections, new ways of telling stories, new acts of conceptualization and sexualization. What forms of feminist accountability do such enthusiasms call upon? To what degree will these imaginations enlarge feminist agencies and to what ends? Whose worlds will be enriched and whose impoverished? What roles will feminisms play in multiple locals and globals?

It is a trick of unmarked categories to represent as narrowing the field of discourse our focusing on marked categories--that is to say, on the unnamed relations of power and the varieties of humans shaped by and shaping them, protected by and made vulnerable by them. This trick requires those with their modest privileges to wonder worriedly if those too are about to be lost, as they newly or repeatedly have to ask, Will I (still) be included? What will I lose if these others are acknowledged? Will I be rightly acknowledged? This trick masks specious universalisms anxiously tended, set into opposition with other tentative emerging "universals" constructed in layers of locals and globals. Think for example of those emerging universals tentatively grounding labor intensive global interventions into human rights abuses. Addressing the processes of marking and unmarking, of the making of new and the passing of old universals, of the human work of shifting power and altering social inequalities, feminism in its multiple relationships to writing technologies enlarges our fields of discourse about technology, names social processes otherwise unnamable, and calls attention to our ways of thinking about thinking about technology.

Ironically those in the humanities find themselves represented today by senior scientists --in the hierarchies of research universities and speaking to legislatures funding state institutions; by journalists--in public debates about education moderated by media; and by foundation officers--in grants and fellowships and in public appropriations. Trying to appeal to their centrality in the education of citizens, in the structure of the academy, in the ideals of liberal arts, those in the humanities anxiously labor to keep from having their share in various allocations of resources continually reduced under the "management" of these varying representatives. The instabilities of the institutionalizations and meanings of the humanities reveal sites of social contestation over time. In the 1940s and 50s the ideals of a "classical" education were dramatically reshaped in limited but real democratizations of the U.S. academy and in construction of the great state research institutions following World War II; each respectively set into motion by the GI Bill and the military-industrial-educational complex produced by the Cold War; and historically contextualized by international movements of decolonization and U.S. movements for Civil Rights. (Cold War collaborations, for example, were instantiated in the ARPANET, the precursor to today's Internet.) Today's humanities in the U.S., as ideals, curricula, and organizing educational socializations are also reconfiguring under the pressures of globalization and neoliberal (and increasingly neoconservative) economic and political policies, now represented by media public opinion as producing "knowledge workers" for the so-called New Economy. Demographic changes and political understandings are shifting the patterns of racialization, immigration and participation in U.S. political and economic life, while revivals of old orthodoxies compete with movements for social justice. The humanities are inevitably caught up in all these social changes. Feminism and writing technologies is a sign of such changes and tools for progressive engagement with them.

Feminism and Writing Technologies highlights particular threads of interconnection among the natural and social sciences and the humanities. It interrogates and has interests and histories in threads through all of them, through their academic instantiations, objects of knowledge and methods, and also threading through their uses and meanings in everyday life as writing technologies. Caught up in the struggles for resources and authority in academic and state institutions, those in the humanities have been constrained to emphasize their separations and distinctiveness from the natural and social sciences, an ideological tradition shot through historically with meanings of class and privilege, and appeals to character, religion, morality and nation. The attempts by those in the humanities to hold themselves and their institutions and curricula accountable to movements for social justice and for changes in multiple U.S. cultures have been caricatured by media and neoconservatives in the so-called "culture wars." Any progressive social changes occurring through the agencies of the humanities have been held up to ridicule. Increasingly in media debate and in the management of universities as corporations --as if it were their only realistic and laudable alternative, as if making up for those "excesses"--those in the humanities are urged to name themselves anew in the terms of corporate policies, as producers of knowledge workers and content providers, even urged to give "money back guarantees" for an education that results in economic success. The shifting powers of marked and unmarked categories matter here. What kinds of institutional and social powers are available to a humanities in the U.S. distinctively naming itself against the natural and social sciences, indeed as the very opposite of science and its contemporary cultural meanings and powers? Another intellectual tradition also exists, with its own ideological dangers, in which the humanities share with the social sciences the so-called "human sciences." Paired with the natural sciences, this intellectual mapping etymologically emphasizes the term "science" as the great universal "knowledge," its original Greek meaning. Will this be a specious or a reemerging progressive "universal"?

Feminism and Writing Technologies suggests that the "writings" of the humanities, are always already "technologies." That the competition for resources that current institutional arrangements foster obscures the equally real interconnections among the natural and social sciences and the humanities (or within and between the natural and human "sciences"). It suggests that it is these interconnections that are what matter today in reconfigurations of knowledge and knowledge institutions. Indeed, it suggests that what are needed are new educational institutionalizations that foster our apprehension of these interconnections and that limit the kinds of competition for resources that misleadingly overemphasize their separations in the course of urging status hierarchies among them (and consolidations of corporate power). And finally, Feminism and Writing Technologies requires that such global disciplinary and interdisciplinary categories be interrogated by the kinds of interventions in knowledge construction feminism has undertaken in the academy, interventions that emphasize accountability in the making of knowledge, rather than efficiency in the production of knowledge workers. Writing technologies defined expansively can be the heartening entry way into the technologies / technics of knowledge production in the natural and human sciences. Feminism and Writing Technologies enlivens understanding and participation in such knowledge production through historical and cultural perspectives that center human and other natural agencies complexly intertwined. Humanism, humanistic inquiry, the humanities and human agency are culturally and historically contextualized, engaged and interrogated. These are the stakes that a reconfiguring humanities has in Feminism and Writing Technologies: for scientists, social scientists and humanists all to be educated to grasp current technological and social change in perspective, to learn comparisons, cultural and historic, that illuminate what sorts of powers are shifting, embodied in the technologies of arts, science and culture altering before us.

Once I imagined writing an omnibus book that both set out the kinds of arguments I will talk about here, but also engaged in primary research in two deliberately divergent intellectual areas of cultural technological production. I thought that book could provide illustrations for the abstract argument I make here, but also would demonstrate directly how different kinds of research in feminism and writing technologies could be conducted. However the realities of limited resources, especially time, have compelled me to rethink this initial form in which to share my materials.

Instead this book is a very small introduction to the very large intellectual questions and connections that feminism and writing technologies entail. I have done my best to make it as lively and engaging as possible, to explain issues rather than assume them, and to offer suggestions about how to forge connections to these materials and the "ecologies" of which they are part. It is inevitable that such synthesis will create oversimplifications, that the book's eclecticism will prove to decontexualize materials, although it should also recontextualize them, that its argument will be abstract, and that its practices of defamiliarization will at some times be more irritating than others. This book could have been many very different other books, some of which I (and perhaps you-all, as varying readers) might well have liked more. It is not an investigation of primary materials itself, even when it refers to the case studies I am working on today. It depends upon secondary sources for what are largely illustrations of principles, not in themselves specific claims about the past or present.

The intention of this introduction to feminism and writing technologies then is to defamiliarize various intellectual territories. Accomplishing this task without also assuming familiarity with all the territories through which I wander, is daunting. It can only happen if many readers are willing to do much of the work. Parts will be only too familiar, other parts either strange or (I hope only at first glance) just boring. My hope is that the very work I am asking you-all to do will initiate new curiosities, offering alternate connections that come to matter as you engage the book. In the spirit of the seventeenth century Quaker women, whose writing technologies anchor one of my case studies, I offer here some "advices and queries" for reading this book. I hope you can hear me laughing ruefully as you read them, although I take them quite seriously: serious, ironic, self-conscious "jokes."

ADVICES AND QUERIES FOR THOSE IN (INTER)INTERDISCIPLINARY TRAVEL:

The stories we tell about technologies highlight or elide how they are made and why, their outcomes and calculations, and they urge or assume how we might best encounter them. These stories can be dramatic or low-key, urgent or thoughtful, inviting or estranging, analytic or active, critical or admiring. As a result of these stories we can value technologies as opaque, multiple, and difficult; or as singular, transparent and seamless. These stories are very powerful; indeed four different types of such stories seem to take up all the story-telling space. Each one creates its own universe of legibility; yet even so they can paradoxically overlap and reinforce each other. Here I am going to call them "technological determinism," "symptomatic technology," "neutral technology," and "technologies as frozen social relations." Some of these stories are better than others; indeed I want to argue that "technologies as frozen social relations" is the least misleading narrative with the most possibilities. I want myself to use this technological narrative throughout this book. But I also need to point out how compelling these other stories are, and that talking about technologies within only one of these narratives is quite difficult and perhaps not always most important. Consciously and unconsciously I simply will not be able to use only one narrative, even when that is what I intend. Each of these narratives has its virtues (that is, powers) and each is persuasive and useful. Learning which of these narratives one is using, habitually uses, matters more than producing a single critique.

Why do you want to know about these stories? If your interests are in Cyberculture, say, your stakes in such stories might be obvious, but then, the materials presented here might seem only too familiar, at least initially. (As I go along my argument may turn out to be less familiar after all.) If your interests are in other areas of cultural production, technologies and their stories might embody the very areas of culture that you define your interests against. In such a case, they might be merely "boring," they might be anxiety-provoking, or they might even raise your ire. The reason I engage and tell and retell the stories of technologies at this point is in order to create with you-all, various readers with varying interests, one of the pidgin languages we can use to communicate across the ranges of power and discipline this book and its productions and receptions inhabit. For those for whom the stories of technologies are familiar, I begin to make connections that may be current and currently interesting, as well as highlighting the contributions of feminist analysts. But for those for whom technologies are part of the everyday furniture of contemporary life, not to be taken too seriously perhaps, you will now be asked to do exactly that. If your interests are in the history of the book, say, you will be asked to do more than touch base with contemporary technologies as a way to enliven your arguments about the past. And if your interests are primarily in women as agents and actors, you will have to enlarge your ideas of how to examine women's agency. The examinations of power here are formed within feminist principles, and yet, however counterintuitively to some, they assume that gender or other identity politics are not the only salient lenses through which power is analyzed, even though these are lenses I do myself privilege.

I am going to describe each of these narratives of technology in terms of television. TV is the global sign for a fascinating set of technologies that complicates a range of assumptions people bring to the phrase "writing technologies." At first glance it may even seem rather silly to call the various TV technologies writing technologies, especially to those who privilege inscription as "writing" and for whom writing is the very opposite of the aural and the photographic. But even for those who resist the largest meanings of writing technologies, as particular formalized processes of meaning-making embodied in specific cultural skills and devices, a second look in this age of WebTV may give them pause. Satellite and cable television are converging with telephone, computer and internet technologies in ways that only this largest meaning of writing can apprehend. These convergences are explicitly commercial, political and technological in ways that are highly visible right now. This makes TV an extremely interesting example for description and analysis, one that calls upon and creates new intuitions about writing technologies.

There are other reasons to use TV for my examples as well. TV is a technology in which many interested in cultural production already have some investments. Those interested in new media have reasons to know more about the old media elements of TV (and its interrelations with film), as well as its convergences with and as new media. Of course contemporary TV carries with it a range of cultural attitudes too, some of them about the values of elite and popular culture; or commercial and artistic production. TV in these ranges is utterly "dirty": it occupies no purities and has no single idealized author. When we attempt to examine, say, the Book, and objects under its sign, we have to work very hard to recover these hybridic confusions, these instabilities, these corporate and collaborative productions. (Think for example, of Chartier's work in the history of reading.) But TV is very obvious in its confusing materialities and its disturbing statuses, and we have a complicated set of literatures that describe and analyze them, if not always adequately. Finally, TV is a site for feminist work with women as producers and users of para- and intra-TV cultures: as fans and as consumers, employing a range of writing technologies. Indeed, one of my case studies is about such female fandoms, producing, using and circulating sexualized images in global TV "networks." So, think of these women playing with and speaking these TV technologies, and think counterintuitively of objects under the sign of the Book, as I describe the stories of technologies in the terms of TV.

The narrative of technological determinism is possibly the most pervasive story about technology. This is the narrative in which we elaborate the social consequences that follow inevitably upon "the seemingly accidental invention" (as Richard Ohmann puts it) of TV. For example, telling this kind of story we might say: "The TV caused middle-class families of the 50s to retreat from community life and concentrate their nuclear focus, huddling together around the warm glow of the living room TV set." A journalist considering the convergence of TV, telephone and internet opines more generally, "Technologies acquire historical weight by reshaping the human condition." Ohmann focuses on what is misleading about such technological determinist stories: they suggest that these consequences are inevitable, that the technologies were invented without specific intentions, and that the technologies are singular, in themselves social forces. Agreeing with Ohmann I want to add that stories of technological determinism convey a dramatic sense of significance, sometimes of discontinuity ("revolution") that is exciting and enticing. My examples are intended to highlight how attractive these stories are, how progressive people might use them, deliberately or unconsciously, and to what purpose. I am deliberately not giving examples that I think are easy to dismiss. I do not intend to dismiss these stories at all. I point myself ambivalently to the sublime stories of technological determinism told by Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, theorists to whom I am deeply indebted for arresting stories, although of whom I can also be very critical. To the extent that some writing technologies belong to more and less distant pasts, recovering information about specific agencies and intentions is at times unlikely (and for that reason may misleadingly appear less salient). Histories of the Book and print cultures, and studies in orality and literacy are only too intertwined with narratives of technological determinism, and many of the pleasures of defamiliarization in these fields are tied up and together with these dramas of discontinuity and revolution.

Symptomatic technology names the narrative in which TV, invented on the margins of the social, is used by central forces informing society. Telling this story we might say, "Our children have become ravenous consumers of junk watching TV commercial after TV commercial." Or we might declare, "Digital hype about the AOL-Time Warner merger is a symptom of rapacious late capitalism's death grip on every new market." What is deceptive about the narrative of symptomatic technology is the idea that technological invention is marginal to other great social forces which exploit such invention. On the other hand, such stories convey urgency and sometimes imply manifestos for social change. While we can critique these critiques, we do not have to renounce them. They contrast importantly with the third narrative, that of neutral technology. This is the narrative in which TV can be put to an amazing multitude of uses, oppressive and democratic, sexist and feminist, altruistic and profit-making. Inside this narrative we might say, "TV could either contribute to or work against teenage drinking; for every ad for drinking visible during the broadcast of athletic events, there is also some anti-drinking homily delivered by national and local stations and advertisers." (Yeah, sure, after much social protest, and as if that is a sufficient response.) Or in addressing the so-called digital divide we might assert, "Computers are not the problem, it is everyone not having access to them that is the concern." Such stories simply do not recognize technologies as created and deployed within, indeed embodying relations of power. Still, these stories can allow for the de-escalation of rhetorical passion, thus making room for uncommon collaborative engagements with technology.

But the problem is that each of these kinds of stories elides the processes of production of technologies and their agents and intentions. Ohmann clarifies, "technology...is itself a social process, saturated by the power relations around it, continually reshaped according to some people's intentions." (681) Ohmann points out three tell-tale signals that one of these mystifying narratives is in play. The first is using phrases like "the computer" "as if it were one single stable device." The second is deploying such a phrase as a grammatical agent (for example, making it the subject of a sentence), and the third is using phrases like "man," "the mind," and "the human condition." The great theorist of orality and literacy Walter Ong does all three as Ohmann quotes him saying, "...the alphabet or print or the computer enters the mind, producing new states of awareness there." (How often have you told or heard a similar story?) Ohmann observes, "[i]mplying that the technology somehow came before someone's intention to enable some minds to do some things" and making it appear "that technologies interact with people or with 'culture' in global, undifferentiated ways, rather than serving as an arena of interaction among classes, races, and other groups of unequal power." (681) It is to this clarification and correction that I attach Donna Haraway's term, naming the fourth narrative technologies as frozen social relations.

But giving you an example of a sentence within this narrative requires some explanation. That is because this narrative isn't simply parallel to the others, but intended as their correction and clarification (if we follow and elaborate upon Ohmann, who doesn't actually offer an alternative narrative but only a critique of mystifications). Such a demystification, in Marxist terms, has a dynamic, visionary element: it is the narrative just in the process of coming-into-being as fields of power shift and reveal relationships previously difficult to apprehend. It is also the narrative within which such shiftings are examined in particular pasts, momentarily connected to this present when recent apprehensions shed new light on earlier configurations of technology and power. So working within this narrative requires us to actively consider which demystifications to elaborate and how; Ohmann's telltale signals are instructive here. How do we describe technologies without using phrases like "the computer" and making them grammatical agents, and without using other phrases like "man," "the mind," and "the human condition" and mobilizing the assumptions they embody? Do we want to do this? Will this sufficiently emphasize the processes of production of technologies and speak to their agents and intentions? How do we illuminate the saturation of social processes by power relations? How do we describe technologies without implying that they interact with people and culture in global, undifferentiated ways? The "virtue" of such narrative is the creation and scrutiny of newly usable pasts and alternative presents. What about the drama and urgency of these other narratives? Or their de-escalations and engagements? What sorts of contradictions are revealed here? What kinds of animated engagements are envisionable and enactable?

Indeed, how about trying to do without phrases like "the computer"? What happens when you do this? Is a critique of mystifications properly addressed by an act of renunciation? Well, consider for a moment the phrase "the VCR" (referring to the video cassette recorder, sometimes just called "video"). For whom (and when) is the VCR a single stable device, and for whom is it multiple, fluidly shifting, differentially stratified by nation, region, television encodings, expense, professional and folk uses, and users raced and gendered? Let us emphasize the word "use" here and consider it too as various, not global, not undifferentiated. For the last eight odd years I have been hanging around with media fans, folks who come together to play with and to discuss television in its many possible enjoyments and intellectual engagements. Participating in and studying female media fandoms of global television is one of the case studies in feminism and writing technologies I work in. And it is while inhabiting worlds of media fans that I personally learned how much the VCR is not single or stable. Some of you too may find yourselves remembering the time when you had to specify whether you meant JVC's [Victor Corporation of Japan] VHS [Video Home System] or Sony Corporation's Betamax when referring to a VCR. Betamax persisted in some countries and among some professionals for a while, but today pretty much around the world the standard VCR is VHS.

But that does not mean that the video wars that Sony lost and JVC won resulted in a single stable device everywhere. As these women media fans I study know in very material ways, if you intend to share VHS tapes with other international fans you have to take into account whether your television signal format uses the U.S. standard NTSC [National Television Standards Committee] or the European standard PAL [Phase Alternating Line] and note that in France, Greece, parts of the Middle-East, and the former Soviet Union, TV is in Secam [Societe Electronique pour Couleur Avec Memoire]. A few very fancy very expensive, so-called "multi-system" players will play all these versions (Samsung puts out a "world-wide" player currently), but most VCRs will only play one of these variations, the local variety. Multi-system recorders and players are especially difficult to find and expensive in the U.S. European media fans find them more easily and less expensively. This is because the U.S., as dominant economic power and one of the great entertainment production centers of the world, consumes mostly its own products, while other countries, while wanting U.S. products, also want other international products, especially their own.

Female media fans might want to view, copy and exchange television shows made in countries other than their own, and / or to make their own alternatively same-sex erotic music videos (a genre called "slash") from video clips copied from broadcast, cable, or satellite TV (more than one "the TV"). These folks sometimes have such fancy VCRs to facilitate their use of copies made by fan friends internationally; but most do not. They know, because they have to work around it, that the phrase "the VCR" could mean at least Betamax (historically anyway), VHS NTSC, VHS PAL, and VHS SECAM, and only appears to be "singular" in one's own little local spot (which of these possibilities is "the VCR" is the result of winners and losers in various economic struggles in layers of locals and globals). The phrase "the VCR" (or "the TV" or "video") hides this play of possibility and the fields of power in which all these many objects are created and used. Notice too that naming it as a single stable device also obscures the varying gendered uses of this technology, especially its annexation as another domestic task. However, even if you are a media fan (dominantly but not exclusively female), when you practice home video taping in the U.S. in order to see your favorite program which is inconveniently showing on that evening when you have to go to your friend's birthday party, "the VCR" is a useful phrase when you tell your partner that yes, you've just programmed the VCR. Replacing the phrase "the VCR" does not result in a sentence, it results in several paragraphs, paragraphs which include information that is not always in local circulation (or is only in very local circulation; note locals and globals in layers).

Of course, as my friend Bill says, the VCR's days seem numbered with the rise of DVD (Digital Video Disk). Under its sign we continue to experience a range of competitive struggles. When I began writing this book, in 2000 CE, two were embodied in the name DIVX, which actually named two different devices. The first one was a failed pay-per-view scheme fostered by Circuit City, creating special DIVX enhanced DVD players; while the second DivX refers to a video equivalent of MP3 audio players' software, which compresses video files off of the web and plays them on your computer, using a media player. (Some versions can play protected or encrypted content). DVD has also referred to DVD-ROM, a player intended not to be freestanding or connected to your TV, but part of your multimedia computer system. The software development for that has included variations that allowed for internet interactive DVD, referred to by its Intel evangelist as "infinite DVD." Meanwhile the standards for DVD are in construction, so-called "standards" which actually appear to refer to company promulgated standards developed by Microsoft and which may depend upon its continued economic domination. (Instructive to think of Sony and Sony consumers who lost the Betamax wars.) Wisecracks about DVD include joking that it stands for Digital Vapor Disk, emphasizing that lots of people have DVD stars in their eyes, imagining a range of DVD-based and DVD-type technologies, many of which will either never come to market or will not remain there long. Imaginable software or hardware that does not pan out is called "vaporware" in similar witticisms. The cartoon PICKLES by Brian Crane, summer 2002, encapsulates the story of succession from VCR to DVD: Grandfather Earle says to very young grandson: "Come here, Nelson. I want to show you something." He continues as he manipulates VCR: "Look at this. I finally figured out how to program the VCR. Aren't you proud of me?" Grandson says, looking up at Grandfather: "People don't use VCR's anymore. They use DVD players." Grandson continues, "Poor Grampa!" as grandfather hits his head against the wall, "Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!"

Media fans increasingly view DVDs rather than videotape, especially as television franchises realize that there is a market for entire seasons of past shows on DVD. But media fans who want to view international DVDs, or exchange them with international friends, find new complications. Not only do the various TV formats in which you watch the DVD still differ (NTSC, PAL and SECAM) but often DVDs are "regionally-coded" precisely so that they cannot be viewed outside the region of the world in which they were sold. This allows their manufacturers to control both prices and release dates, which differ from region to region. Again, there are multi-region DVD players, easier to find in Europe which did not really jump onto the DVD bandwagon until they became available. These are players in which regional coding has been deactivated in what was at first a semi-official menu option made available by Samsung, but which is now usually produced by hacking, or unofficially learning how to deactivate the code manually. But for media fans who informally copy, reuse, and recreate TV, DVD currently makes their "poaching" much more difficult, as corporations and professionals attempt to increase their share of revenues by charging for every possible use of their product, even these non-commercial ones. (Or believe that every instance of use beyond that of the franchise itself will infringe their copyright, or compromise "virtual" profits: those perhaps possible in some future.) So those fans are often still using videotape. As my neighbor Kit says: "There are still vids being made with two tape decks, a tape recorder and Scotch tape, from what I've seen."

And not only VCRs and DVDs but now PVRs or DVRs make the scene. TiVo and ReplayTV are current examples of these "personal" or "digital" video recorders. PVRs are networked recorders that make home taping easier for so-called "time-shifting." The first versions prevented "librarying" or creating personal home collections for multiple re-viewings (a necessity if cultivating the kind of knowledges important to media fans), but the latest versions allow for users to send copies of shows to others over the internet. Broadcasters are fearful that they will lose control over "primetime": the viewing time they charge advertisers the most money for. They are fearful that viewers will stop watching commercials altogether, as PVRs make fast forwarding through them a breeze. On the other hand, PVRs can collect data on viewers through its network with greater precision than any previous ratings system, and may make it possible to design ads for specific viewers who will want to watch them. As broadcasters loose control, they may nevertheless reap greater profits, a counter-intuitive possibility that the VCR seems to have instantiated. It was the so-called Betamax Case that defined the current parameters of fair use in video copying, another reason media fans remember Betamax even today as PVRs reconfigure copying possibilities. Copyright and fair use are of special importance to vidders, those using two tape decks and scotch tape and those who "rip" DVDs.

Notice that issues of technological access here are not either/or: you have it or you do not, you can afford pricey equipment or not. There are many more complicated possibilities, involving substitutions of hardware, software, folk knowledges, international communications--substitutions each for the other, with implications for who knows and can do what, where and for how much. Access is too unidimensional a term to describe what is really about accumulation and assemblage: workarounds, borrowing, sharing, using what someone else is throwing away, patching old stuff together. Users are inventive: "access" does not capture what are in fact multiple forms of agency, individual and collective. Knowledges of such workarounds in the U.S. are not confined to media fans either: in fact, some of the best places to get multi-system players, as well as international and regional DVDs and Video tapes, CDs and audio tapes, and international phone cards, is in sites that cater to recent immigrants: South Asian Indian grocery stores or sari shops, Asian restaurants, Ethiopian food and music stores. These are cultural locations in which skills, devices and the resources for their multiple cultural productions and interconnections are shared.

It is relatively easy to "see" multiple technologies, even under a single sign, during the very period of intense economic struggle, although knowing about their agents and intentions may be much more difficult, information available to insiders or astute observers with specialized knowledges. Knowing and discovering women's roles as agents in relation to such technologies is complicated and often requires new research agendas. Without sophisticated research and research strategies, much of this information can be lost, or is rendered invisible by dominant presumptions. After the fact histories may make available more of that sometimes proprietary information, but the appearance of an unmarked, ungendered "single stable device" becomes the very indication that popular knowledge of these struggles is now virtually invisible, or "transparent." Operating within a local sphere in which that invisibility is never challenged, as when in the U.S. you pop your videocassette into your VCR without reference to which standard is in operation, makes the technology "seamless"; that is, device, software, skills, access and so on are all mutually reinforcing, enhancing that very invisibility with every use. The creation of a single, stable device is precisely what corporations often mean when they speak of "user-friendly" technology, and what most users want; indeed, the economic domination that creates the appearance and the material reality of a single, stable device is precisely the object of the argument Microsoft has been making for its own practices in its suit with the Justice Department. Gender, class, race and nation are among the varying ranges of unequal powers shifting and refigured over time as "markets" within such arenas of interaction, and also mobilized by users as sites of identity, engagement and appropriation.