Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture

A highly contentious, very readable and totally up-to-the-minute investigation of women’s natural relationship with modern technology, an association which, Plant argues, will trigger a new sexual revolution.

Zeros and Ones is an intelligent, provocative, and accessible investigation of the intersection between women, feminism, machines, and in particular, information technology. Arguing that the computer is rewriting the old conceptions of man and his world, suggests that the telecoms revolution is also a sexual revolution that undermines the fundamental assumptions crucial to patriarchal culture. Historical, contemporary, and future developments in telecommunications and in IT are interwoven with the past, present, and future of feminism, women and sexual difference, and a wealth of connections, parallels, and affinities between machines and women are uncovered as a result. Challenging the belief that man was ever in control of either his own agency, the planet, or his machines, this book argues it is seriously undermined by the new scientific paradigms emergent from theories of chaos, complexity, and connectionism, all of which suggest that the old distinctions between man, woman, nature, and technology need to be radically reassessed.

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