"Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net> wrote:
Well, I think there clearly _is_ a gender gap on these sorts of issues.
Technologies that matter make daily life less obnoxious, and you can leverage them all the time. The Net is going to start mattering in a significant way when it relieves people of the burden of dealing with the garbage inherent in the information flow of everyday life. The net is going to matter when I can rely on it to store the information I now keep on disk, and the computer is a completely transparent object. All the documents that are important to me are maintained by the Net with sufficient reliability that I can unplug my computer and smash it with a hammer without affecting anything. Under this scenario, strong, reliable crypto becomes similar to electricity. The entire infomration infrastructure is built on it, but hardly anyone gives it a second thought. What kind of people use the Net and what are their activities doing to the country, the world, the culture? It may sound like a parochial issue that women don't much like computers, but they don't, and the issue is a tremendously important one. They're not attracted to this world, certainly not to the extent that men are, and that's one of the reasons why it is such a spiritually impoverished world. Most reasonable sophisticated men are happier in an environment that included women. One of the problems with the computer society is that not only is it an almost all-male society, but it's part of a little-boy society, part of an ongoing infantilization of the society over the past half century. Excerpt from Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite (HardWired 1996) where David Gelernter, a Yale computer scientist, comments on the Web.
This may sound sexist. But sexism, like other "isms," is often based on plain old truth, however politically incorrect it may be to some.
--Tim May
Galileo, you must recant. You are in blatant disagreement with the truth. Ciao, James