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Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture
 
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Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (Paperback)

by Sadie Plant (Author)
3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Fourth Estate (18 Sep 1997)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1857023862
  • ISBN-13: 978-1857023862
  • Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 15.6 x 3.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 962,674 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review
Meet Ada Lovelace, daughter of mathematician Annabella Byron and poet Lord Byron, and a major contributor to Charles Babbage's famous Analytic Engine. Lovelace is in many ways the patron saint of Sadie Plant's exploration of women's roles in the creation of modern technology. The book begins with Lovelace's story, and elements of her writings appear throughout the book--sometimes to emphasize points but often to exemplify attitude. They also serve to anchor Plant's dynamic, almost stream-of-consciousness approach as we travel to 19th-century Europe to meet the nameless women who laid the foundation of modern technology with the development of weaving, survey the major female technological innovators of today, and even explore female figures in technology-based fiction.

Plant's "cyberfeminist rant", as William Gibson calls it, attempts to demonstrate that women have always used technology. You won't find victims here, rather women who were empowered by the technological innovations in their lives. What emerges is a very nontraditional feminist picture, one in which women are neither bystanders nor victims but are in many ways the unsung heroes of technical innovation. The author also points to a future where, within the zeros and ones of cyberspace, many dichotomies such as life/machine, let alone male/female, may blur in unexpected ways. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Synopsis
Arguing that the computer is rewriting the old conceptions of man and his world, this work 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 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, women, nature and technology need to be radically reassessed.


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3 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent analysis and a web of fascinating references, 14 Jan 1999
By A Customer
Sadie Plant brings to the table a unique feminist viewpoint grounded not in hype or rhetoric but well thought out, yet exciting, views about digital life. Not only does she make her own points, she draws remarkable inferences across a vast historical canvas by linking quotes from fascinating sources in remarkable ways.

A fun and worthwhile read.

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7 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Incoherent burble, ruining what could have been good history, 30 Jan 2001
By A Customer
SOMETIMES, when women write about women, I wonder if I'm a woman at all. Take this book. I was expecting a history of women and machines; what I got - and if I'd read the jacket blurb, I would have known - was a "provocative and inspiring manifesto". Provocative? Certainly... and just when I wasn't in the mood.

The book begins by showing all the signs of being a history: Countess Ada Lovelace working with Babbage on the Difference Engine, the emergence of the earliest computers and the curious affinity women had with them. So glamorous a character as Ada Lovelace (daughter of Byron, hysteria sufferer and ground-breaking mathematician) makes an excellent beginning. Plant describes the politics of fashionable thought that blamed her hysteria on "over-exertion of the intellect", to the point where Ada herself thought "too much mathematics" had resulted in her "derangements".

But with a few exceptions - on Turing and Bletchley, for example, and an interesting account of how the Western counting system came to be - Plant soon loses her didactic position and the rest of the book becomes increasingly woolly and less enjoyable.

The style is the main problem; it's suggestive, non-specific, and loosely structured. It consists of mini-chapters entitled things like "Grass", "Holes", "Amazone", that never conclude anything; they just hint, wafting past like kitchen smells in a restaurant, leaving people to guess their food without the benefit of a menu. When direct statements are made, they are sometimes left hanging: "the picture's [Mona Lisa] composition is completely obscured. As if it had come complete, intact a ready-made interactive image slotted into the read only memory five hundred years too early." That means next to nothing to me.

If only Plant were more forthright in her assertions. She's obviously an expert in her field, and I wanted to know less about what she felt and more of what she had found out about her subject.

And now sex. There's so much sex that the title truly misrepresents the book by excluding it. At best, Plant's commentary is clever and subtle, if far-fetched. At worst, it's long-winded, silly and really, really wimmin-ish, with references to weaving, Freud and pubic hair. Don't ask... You either love all that stuff or you don't, and I don't. As for cybersex, it's as meaningless a word as cyberfeminist.

Cyber this, cyber that. The Guardian recently dubbed Plant a cyberwarrior. I wish I'd known before I read this.

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3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars What is she saying?, 21 Jan 2000
By A Customer
Impressed by the scope of the undertaking and inspired by Ada's gift for software and programming. But is Sadie arguing that there is some kind of parallel between mitochondrial dna coding and binary coding? and the potential development of them as host/parasite. Is this posthumanism suggesting that digital is organic? Whatever you think, she has certainly raised some questions about where we're all going...
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