The Art and Science of Everything

Formerly thoughts on gender and technology, I'm expanding this as a place to just generally geek out on gender, technology, design, cognition, perception, and culture. The title should not be considered hubris, but instead enthusiasm.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

From an email I sent someone, again, to hold on to it:
How communication technologies are used and appropriated to uphold, subvert, or make flexible traditionally gendered divisions of labor.

What are examples of this? Required background reading is Ruth Schwartz Cohen's "More Work for Mother" where she describes how many labor saving devices actually just raised standards of, say, cleanliness and saved labor for the sorts of things that men used to do.

What has the history of these technologies getting developed? What kind of utopian narrative did the designers have in their heads? Where they male?

But how are labor "saving" -- or displacing -- devices different from communication technologies? Are there ways that technology is making invisible work visible? Or is it simply enabling women to manage more tasks, but still saddling them with kinwork?

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