Zeros and Ones

Alternate Titles

• Zeros plus ones
• Zeros and ones

Description

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, it suggests that the telecoms revolution is also a sexual revolution which 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.

Description

Beginning with Ada Lovelace and her unheralded contributions to Charles Babbage and his development of the Difference Engine, Sadie Plant traces the critical contributions women have made to the progress of computing. Shattering the myth that women are victims of technological change, Zeros + Ones shows how women and women's work in particular - weaving and typing, computing and telecommunicating - have been tending the machinery of the digital age for generations, the very technologies that are now revolutionizing the Western world. In this manifesto on the relationship between women and machines, Sadie Plant explores the networks and connections implicit in nonlinear systems and digital machines. Steering a course beyond the old feminist dichotomies, Zeros + Ones is populated by a diverse chorus of voices - Anna Freud, Mary Shelley, Alan Turing - conceived as exploratory bundles of intelligent matter, emergent entities hacking through the constraints of their old programming and envisioning a postpatriarchal future.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New TechnocultureFourth Estate1997-01-01
• Zeroes and onesDoubleday1997-01-01
• Zeroes and OnesDoubleday1997-09-15
• Zeros and OnesPaperbackFourth Estate1997-09-18
• Zeros and OnesPaperbackFourth Estate1998-08-20