Carina Yervasi

University of Michigan
cly@umich.edu

 

Carla Sinclair, Net Chick: A Smart-Girl Guide to the Wired World. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996.

 

“An Ironic Dream of a Common Address”

 

Not since reading Donna Haraway’s 1985 “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” have I thought so much about gender and machines, or more accurately, about women and computers, modems, and network connections. Harking back to the “Manifesto,” we might consider that the day has arrived when part woman, part machine working in/on the Net may be staging that perfect “coupling.” Or, this is at least one image of women and the Net evoked by Web Guide guru Carla Sinclair in Net Chick: A Smart-Girl Guide to the Wired World. Taking up the challenge to see where technology and gender intersect on the Web, Sinclair offers an abundantly informative (and by no means exhaustive, as she herself acknowledges) Internet guide and e-dress book for “cyberchicks.” In the introduction Sinclair initially sets out to dispel two popular notions: that the cybercareer world is male-dominated and that the Web is an all-“boyz” club. Throughout the rest of the book, she interviews women who have successful careers using the Internet, gives advice on necessary software and hardware (e.g. ergonomic chairs) and, finally, reviews important Websites (mostly created by women) and newsgroups, which Sinclair believes are especially useful to women.

 

That Net Chick should arrive when it did into the print and paper publishing world of the Internet guidebook “genre” is worthy of mention. Fortunately, Sinclair, co-editor of ’80s zine bOing!bOing! and co-author of The Happy Mutant Handbook, still believes in introductory accessibility. As Internet guidebooks go, way too many uninspiring and corporate-centered tomes have appeared in the past two years. Net Chick, however, is the first non-corporate, and intensely personal Internet guide to combine photographs, cartoons, history, interviews–as well as the main attraction; URLs and online newsgroup addresses. Sinclair’s book is very different from the commercially generated “Internet guides.” They often tend to look and feel (hefty) like the Manhattan Yellow Pages, positioning paid-for ads in between large (expensive) or small (cheaper) directory entries (cf. The Internet Yellow Pages; Microsoft Bookshelf Internet Directory; New Riders’ Official World Wide Web Yellow Pages ). Most of the Websites discussed in Net Chick are Personal Home Pages. Not that Sinclair has anything against commercial sites (“mersh sites”), but she is more interested in the independent sites because they “are created by individuals who want to share and show off ideas, information, and art” (10) and presumably don’t share a commercial concern for profit margin.

 

Net Chick is a sort of Our Bodies, Ourselves for the ’90s computer grrrl generation, for the “cyberchick”: the “female Internet explorer” (234). This book may not read as a manifesto for technocratic or Webworld subject/object relations, but it is and will prove to be invaluable for a variety of Net surfing publics. As a guide and resource, its target audience is specifically women. It is an indispensable tool for those who teach women’s studies or contemporary culture and want to integrate more electronic media into their courses. Moreover, it has especially inspiring e-dresses for those who are simply seeking a grrrl-related beauty, health, or spiritual tip while surfing the Web. In other words, this guide is part fluff and part real stuff.

 

So wait not, fair grrrlie: hie thee to a modem connection and get thine ass online!
--Kristin Spence, Foreword

 

And what is a Net Chick or a Net Grrrl anyway? Being a Net Chick for Sinclair means “having a modem,” using a keyboard “to navigate through…cyberspace,” and, ultimately, “becoming empowered by…acces to and knowledge of the Internet” (6). Sinclair’s “grrrl” is the “same as chick, except grrrls can be even tougher” (235). I imagine that a Net Grrrl is a combination of Tank Girl, Roseanne, and Valerie Solanas, whereas a Net Chick throws a bit of Barbie/Cindy Crawford into the mix. Cybergrrrls (with apologies to Aliza Sherman whose “cybergrrl” is a regular feature in her Website: http://www.cybergrrl.com) are akin to indy rock’s Riot Grrrls. And according to the spoof Cyberpunk Handbook, they “are fierce girls who like tech [because] [g]rrrls with tech experience are irresistible. NOTHING is more attractive than a fierce, blazing, ninja-type grrrl right now, and if she knows UNIX…the world is hers. Hrrrs” (31). Evidently, anyone (any woman) with access to the Internet can be a Net Chick.

 

For newcomers to cyber- or Internet culture who want to explore the feminist and post-feminist wired world, Sinclair’s book is an important first stop. She includes a comprehensive “ABC’s” to the Internet in the Appendix and gives a clear explanation of many online services available with such stats as service fees, percentage of women users, most popular topics, etc. (220-221). For those who have successfully surfed the Net and have a few bookmarks already tagging their favorite sites, her guide will help to build a personal cybrary with other informative sites and addresses.

 

Keeping in mind these possible user-groups, it would appear that Sinclair’s purpose in putting this book together is two-fold: to get people to think about gender and technology and to get more women involved in the Internet and cyberculture in general. Terms like “community” and “communication” are fundamental in understanding Sinclair’s encouragement for women to join chat groups, surf the Web, and ultimately create their own Home Pages. As suggested by the Australian Network for Art and Technology online newsletter–whose URL I found through a link from Australian e-zine geekgirl (http://www.next.com.au/spyfood/geekgirl)–“Collaboration replaces the individual author whose rotting corpse of privileged solitary genius long ceased to nourish the cultural body of ideas” (2). Well, maybe Sinclair doesn’t push cooperation that far, but she does see the Internet as the newest locus for putting communication skills to use. In this sense, then, Sinclair has written this woman-centered guidebook in order to develop, through a general understanding of the potential of cyberspace, informed publics and future “cyberchick” Web surfers.

 

Brief introductions providing the basics about the World Wide Web begin each section. In chapters like “Sexy” and “Stylin’,” or “Media Freak” and “Entertain Me!” or in the health chapter, “Feelin’…Groovy,” Sinclair attempts to deal with all matters “femme” and wired in what she considers “post-feminist” chick cyberspace. By subdividing the chapters into “Profiles,” “Interviews,” “Hot Sites,” and “Tips,” she tries to capture the quirky cross-over cyber/print nature of the book. As Sinclair contends: “Net Chick [is] the only guide to stylish, post-feminist, modem grrrl culture” (5). This claim is true. It is the only printed guide that directly addresses women and the Internet. For online guides Sinclair recommends “Webgrrls!–Women on the Net” (http://www.cybergrrl.com/) and “Voxxen Worx” (http://www.phantom.com/~barton/voxxen.html). On the very last page of her guide, Sinclair includes the always-changing, always-updated URL of her net chick Web site: “The Net Chick Clubhouse” (http://www.cyborganic.com/People/carla) where links can be found to most of the other always-changing net chick sites in her book.

 

One significant feature of this guide is the use of interviews with some of the pioneering women on the Web. Sinclair promises that readers will “meet the gals who are involved with cyberculture and how it relates to sex, style, the media, entertainment, recreation, health, employment, and political issues” (11). In light of this promise, Net Chick, g-URL guide extraordinaire, doubles as a cultural history of women working on the Web. Particularly impressive is the wide representation of Sinclair’s pioneering “net chicks” and their various fields of work.

 

Because the general tone of Net Chick is playful, tongue-in-cheek, the advice given by many of these women ranges from the silly to the pragmatic (how to “flame” back) to the radical (how to subvert commercial technologies). Chapter One: “Sexy,” begins with Lisa Palac, “The Cybersex Chick” who, in the early ’90s, was editor of Future Sex, “the only magazine devoted to the fusion of sex and high-technology” (16). In Net Chick, Palac and Marjorie Ingall give humorous and practical tips on Online Dating. Another of the interviewees, in Chapter Three: “Media Freak,” is Rosie (X) Cross, editor of the “first cyberfeminist zine,” geekgirl (88). This interviews reads very much like a Situationist manifesto. Cross, also known as RosieX, became involved in digital culture because she thought it was a “subculture” (89). Unlike Sinclair’s American “net chick,” Cross, from Australia, prefers the term “geekgirl.” When asked to describe these “geekgirls,” Cross says that they “like machines, ‘specially computers. They wanna get history straight, they wanna subvert the mainstream…. They investigate the murky and sometimes mean worlds of postmodernity and the obsession with technology” (88-89). This slightly anarchistic sentiment is further echoed in Jude Milhon’s interview in the same chapter. Milhon, a.k.a. St. Jude, former managing editor and columnist for Mondo 2000, is described as “the patron saint of systems programming” who “was hacking computers before the word ‘hacker’ was even around” (94). Her interview nicely parallels the short bio of 19th-century mathematician Ada Lovelace, whom Sinclair bills as “the world’s first hacker” (190-191).

 

Some of the other interviewees include Rene Cigler, jewelry designer for the film Tank Girl; Reva Basch, “data sleuth” and cybrarian; Debra Floyd, Program Coordinator for a nonprofit Internet service provider, Institute of Global Communications (IGC) (200) and Director of African American Networking (http://www.igc.apc.org/africanam/africanam.html); and Jill Atkinson, who undertook the first Ph.D. in electronic publishing at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Atkinson is also the creator of a rather racy Website, “Bianca’s Smut Shack,” which has information, interactive chat, and “activities” in every room. These interviews are supplemented by descriptions of Sinclair’s favorite personal home pages, which are “hand-picked, based on a high level of creativity, frankness, sex appeal, or plain old charm” (74).

 

From the interviews and some of the Home Pages covered by Sinclair, one can conclude that these pioneering “net chicks” experienced difficulty breaking into once male-dominated cybercareers; that many of them are self-taught Internet explorers and creators; and that, by and large, most of them have some connection to electronic publishing. Interestingly enough, Sinclair and her “cyberbuddies” are convinced that the electronic industries’ gender imbalance is shifting because of the relative accessibility of the Internet.

 

Spence, in her candid “Foreword,” argues that since “cyberspace is a world ruled by knowledge” (xi), women who know how to maneuver within it can gain access to knowledge and power through this and other media. Furthermore, she contends that the Internet connection is “all about communication, power, equality” (xi). For Spence, as well as Sinclair, to get online is to “seize power” (xii). More women online, for both these writers, means the addition of more grrrl-connections to calibrate the gender and power imbalance of the Net. And fundamentally I don’t disagree. Nevertheless, I take issue with both Spence and Sinclair for offering unsubstantiated new-agey essentialist nonsense like “the feminine energy now flooding the Internet” (3) and “the root forces driving this medium [the Net]–communication, community, and creativity–are inherently feminine. They are things women innately excel at. Plainly put, this means we were built to do this” (xi). Pop feminism or not, I don’t think that anyone is “built” for sitting and surfing the Web.

 

Important to this guide, however, are Sinclair’s attempts to come to terms with the specificity of cyberculture. She endeavors to describe through her research (evidenced in the multiple and overlapping lists, reports, and interviews) that what the Web can hold and contain, all at once, is exactly that postmodern capacity to specify and generalize simultaneously, to show concurrently singularity and difference. Sinclair’s valiant efforts to disclose the nature of cyberspace in print are this book’s greatest strength, but this also opens up my major critique of her book. There is an inherent irony in describing the complexity of genderless electronic media while purporting to provide “femme only” sites and addresses. Perhaps more than ironic is the particular impossibity of singling out what makes a site a “grrrl-site” or a “chick-site,” especially when many Webpages are collaborative projects or are produced by–gulp–men. Kristin Spence, Section Editor of Wired, echoes this concern in her “Foreword” to Net Chick when she acknowledges that “[w]hile, it is always tremendously affirming and empowering to hang with your own posse, such a ghettoization of the Net would be a tragic step backwards” (xi-xii). Recognizing the irony and heeding Spence’s warning, I was none too anxious to continue on my “estrogenic journey” (3) through online “femme” culture.

 

Confession

 

After cruising the Web for over five hours checking out some “Hot Sites” listed in “Chicks and Flicks” (117-121) and surfing through others, from “Tank Girl,” incidentally created by a man, (http://www.oberlin.edu/~jdockhor/tg/Default.html) (91) to “Women Homepage” (http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/sorokin/women/index.html) (207), honestly enjoying myself, I began to feel keenly self-conscious of my own privilege: computer equipment, ethernet connection, and time to spend (waste). It was at this point that I realized that Sinclair’s guide, while claiming accessibility as the path to empowerment, also unknowingly raises questions about basic accessibility that simply are not addressed. Supporting Spence’s opening comments on online equality and power, Sinclair maintains that “cyberspace, the net, is an equal space” (72) and that “everybody has equal access to the same global soapbox” (9). But the word “privilege,” not “equal access,” comes more easily to mind when I think about computer culture. Sinclair, although well-meaning, is underestimating the real costs of such communication both in hardware and time. Equally naive is Sinclair’s statement that the Net is “[a]n anarchistic means of expressing oneself to the masses” (9). To which “masses” are we expressing ourselves? Contrary to cybertopian predictions of a growing cadre of decentralized information workers, Left Business Observer‘s Doug Henwood cites cashiers, janitors, and retail salespeople as some of the occupations with the greatest projected growth over the next ten years (2). I cannot stress enough the importance of having an online connection, but I also know that it isn’t currently as materially accessible as the telephone.

 

Inasmuch as both Sinclair and Spence believe that our contemporary techo-Web world is post-feminist, one wonders why the need for all of their ersatz feminism, or what I called above “nonsense.” The problem for me comes back again to the very fact that Sinclair, while claiming this post-feminism, enumerates, catalogs, and calls for woman-, female-, grrrl-centered Web space and communication, in order to counterbalance the male-dominated fields within cyberculture. It would seem that in Sinclair’s “post-feminist” world, problems of power imbalance just wouldn’t exist. And yet feminists recognize that the scales of knowledge and power are still (and not always just a little) tipped in gender-, class-, race-, and sex-advantaged directions.

 

Getting informed and staying active on the Internet is Sinclair’s Net Grrrl credo. After surfing through many of the Websites Sinclair suggests, I now realize just how implicated I am in this culture. And especially implicated when I feel that coming back to the printed text is a bit of a let-down. Acknowledging my preference for the “point, click, link, and go” of the endless space of the Internet–a space the book can’t possibly duplicate–feels like a freedom. At the same time, however, I certainly know that I am not liberated from the vise-grip of postfordist anxiety when corporate and electronic media America (Microsoft and NBC) announce that they will collaborate on a new online project: MSNBC, an “innovative” live news series that, as Jeff Yang reports, has been critically received by some as an “experiment in small-d media democracy” (39) for the technoliterate. But that is the split condition of living in a culture where information and communication are increasingly becoming the common (and only, perhaps) currency.

 

Being a Net Chick therefore is not only about getting “empowered by access” (6): it is also about using that accessibility to try to figure out a way to provide it for others. This being the case, Sinclair’s book is a positive attempt at providing information for people who, with the right kind of opportunity, can get connected and make the Internet a source and object of everyday use.

 

Works Cited

 

• Frauenfelder, Mark, Carla Sinclair, Gareth Branwyn, Will Kreth, eds. The Happy Mutant Handbook: Mischievous Fun for Higher Primates. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.
• Hahn, Harley. The Internet Yellow Pages. 3rd Ed. New York: Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1996.
• Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Ed. Linda J. Nicholson. Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1990. 190-233.
• Henwood, Doug. “Work and Its Future.” Left Business Observer 3 April 1996: 1-3+. (http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html)
• Microsoft Bookshelf Internet Directory, 1996-1997 Ed. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1996.
• New Riders’ Official World Wide Web Yellow Pages. Summer/Fall 1996 E. Indianapolis: New Riders, 1996.
• Sinclair, Carla. Net Chick: A Smart-Girl Guide to the Wired World. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1996.
• St. Jude, R.U. Serious, and Bart Nagel. Cyberpunk Handbook: [The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook]. New York: Random House, 1995.
• “Virtual Futures.” Australian Network for Art and Technology Newsletter 24 (1996): 10 pp. Online. Internet. 7 March 1996. (http://www.va.com.au/anat/newsletter/issue24/virtual_futures.html)
• Yang, Jeff. “Joined at the N.” Village Voice 6 August 1996: 39.