CyberFeminism

 Introducation:

Cyberfeminism is a feminist approach which foregrounds the relationship between cyberspace, the Internet, and technology. It can be used to refer to a philosophy, methodology or community.

 

Cyberfeminism’s star rose throughout the 1990s, as a growing constellation of women began to practice under its umbrella in different corners of the world, including North America, Australia, Germany, and the U.K. The VNS Matrix, a four-woman collective of “power hackers and machine lovers” in South Australia, began to identify as cyberfeminists in 1992. In their own words, the collective “decided to have some fun with French feminist theory,” coding games and inventing avatars as a way to critique the macho landscape of the early web. As one of its members, Virginia Barratt,  in an interview with Vice’s Motherboard, “We emerged from the cyberswamp…on a mission to hijack the toys from techno-cowboys and remap cyberculture with a feminist bent.”

They wrote their own Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century (1991) in homage to Haraway, presented as an 18-foot-long billboard, which was exhibited at various galleries across Australia. The text bulges from a 3D sphere, surrounded by images of DNA material and dancing, photomontaged women that have been transformed into scaled hybrids. “We make art with our cunts,” the manifesto reads. “We are the virus of the new world disorder.”

Cyberfeminism is a term coined in 1994 by Sadie Plant, director of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick in Britain, to describe the work of feminists interested in theorizing, critiquing, and exploiting the Internet, cyberspace, and new-media technologies in general. The term and movement grew out of “third-wave” feminism, the contemporary feminist movement that follows the “second-wave” feminism of the 1970s, which focused on equal rights for women, and which itself followed the “first-wave” feminism of the early 20th century, which concentrated on woman suffrage.

cyberfeminism itself, a growing area of thought and study, is not a unified set of ideas concerning women and new technologies. Cyberfeminists explore many areas of theory: that women are naturally suited to using the Internet, as both share important commonalities; that women can best empower themselves by becoming fluent in online communication and acquiring technological expertise; and that women would do best to study how power and knowledge are constructed in technological systems, and how and where feminists can disrupt and change these practices for the betterment of all members of society

 cyberfeminism argues that the idea of women gaining power and authority merely through greater use of new-media technologies is overly simplistic or reductive. Australian feminist scholars, such as Susan Luckman of the University of Queensland and Anna Munster of the University of New South Wales, believe that this approach reduces complex technological systems into mere tools and ignores their historical contexts of production and use. They believe that technologies are embedded in structures of power, which are not always positive. In their opinion, calls for women and girls to uncritically take up and advance the use of these new technologies does nothing to critically assess technology's larger role in culture, and how we wish to see technology develop—or not. Women must be part of this future, not by simply advocating for more women to engage in using technology, but by becoming more critically aware of the perils as well as promises that new technologies offer.

What should the Cyber  feminist critics do?

Early cyberfeminists conceptualized cyberspaces as fundamentally liberating, theorizing their capacity to move beyond the traditional binaries and limitations of popular gender and feminist politics. Human-machine mergers made possible by technology were imagined as facilitators of “post-gender worlds”: and virtual spaces were initially envisioned as utopian sites of unrestricted, transcendent emancipation from gender-related constraints. Cyberspaces showed promise to disrupt conventional patriarchal hierarchies, colonial power interests, and militarized, commercialized technologies of advanced capitalism.

cyberfeminist debate to disturb commonly accepted binary notions surrounding gender and online spaces, and considering how cyberfeminists can work together to achieve common goals. In doing so, it maps the trajectory of major contemporary cyberfeminist discourses to consider how cyberfeminist critique could ultimately be mobilized to move beyond these artificial binaries, critiquing current policy initiatives that attempt to govern gender and virtual spaces and contemplating new directions for future regulatory strategies. Finally, this chapter looks at how future cyberfeminist research initiatives could work to fill these gaps and engage in discussions that are ultimately more productive, inclusive, intersectional, and empowering.

Conceptualizing cyberfeminisms as a plurality is an attempt to reconcile differences between various feminist frameworks that could fall under a digital purview. Through this theoretical lens, questions of difference between schools of cyberfeminist thought become less important, and cyberfeminists, regardless of their differences, can begin to integrate a variety of theoretical backgrounds and intersectional viewpoints into emergent feminist discourses. Such integration is a reparative move away from divisive interfeminist disputes, recognizing that diverse cyberfeminist perspectives can simultaneously yield fruitful theoretical discussions while working toward a common goal of greater online equality. This chapter will embrace this operationalization of cyberfeminist theoretical thought, in the spirit of acknowledging the diverse perspectives that cyberfeminisms encompass.

The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture

As Bruce Grenville noted that A culture of cyborgs is intelligently rendered, though some contributors occasionally flutter into loopy agitprop. Some of the contributors view the cyborg as an ideal representation of an evolved human form through which the “arbitrary patriarchical notions of gender and sexuality” might be swept away – a key development, we are instructed, in mitigating the abuses of male-dominated capitalism. As one contributor exclaims, “We feminist-socialists need a myth to believe in.” It’s difficult to say how seriously they take themselves because the arguments are often dense with academic pretence and deeply coded in curator-speak.

Now, Here i  wrote about ted talks by kirti sharma  on AI

Kirti Sharma: How to keep human bias out of AI?

She has explained about biases in AI and also her personal experiences with AI. she also added that AI algorithms are helping make critical decisions in areas such as crime and policing, credit and lending, recruitment and health care. This is often powered by a technique called deep learning, which makes it difficult to build  explainability"  into the algorithms, thereby reducing trust.

  she also talks about Bias against women in the technology workplace is not an uncommon or unknown issue. However, it is interesting that these patterns also exist in open-source technology projects. As reported in  this study  by Terrell J., et al.

she mainly pointed out some major points and those are

•  Be aware of  own biases
•  Make sure that diverse team is making technology
•  Give AI diverse experience and atmosphere to learn from.

Can we protect AI from our biases?

-Robin Hauser 

As humans we're inherently biased. Sometimes it's explicit and other times it's unconscious, but as we move forward with technology how do we keep our biases out of the algorithms we create? Documentary filmmaker Robin Hauser argues that we need to have a conversation about how AI should be governed and ask who is responsible for overseeing the ethical standards of these supercomputers. "We need to figure this out now," she says. "Because once skewed data gets into deep learning machines, it's very difficult to take it out."

Here she discussed ‘Tay’ and Tay tweets. Microsoft sent its artificial intelligence  bot Tay out into the wild to see how it interacted with humans  people started messing around and taught her inappropriate things such as  racism, sexually-charged messages, politically incorrect phrases, and even talked about the Gamergate controversy.

As per my view there is biases in field of AI  as we observe that in the field of AI there is less number of girls are there and that is because of this biases  so to improve the situation in this field we have to take serious step against it. it is very necessary.