Model Home #3: Home Page and the Computer/Net
Recent ads for web-sites and computers are presenting a new image of social
relations through technology, an image that reconfigures the relation between
public and private space, and reimagines their gendered logics. This is
the image of the home page-- a hybrid site of home and work, where it is
possible to make tele-deals while sitting in your kitchen.
Like the cover of Mac Home, the fantasy of being in the public world is
now less related to romance than it is to the world of work. The computer
and Net offer women a way to do two jobs at once--reproduce and produce,
be a mother and hold down a high power job. Even while the home work model
of domestic space finds a place for women, it does not really break down
the traditional distinctions between male and female, public and private.
Instead, it renegotiates these distinctions through new metaphors.
Given its hybrid status as part private/ part public, it seems appropriate
that this third model home is increasingly represented through the trope
of the coffee house, or as one web site calls it, the cyber cafe. Images
of coffee drinking serve as a form of product differentiation, distinguishing
the Net from the older mode of network TV. Whereas early TV represented
the private home as a theater, the cyber-cafe signals a different form of
engagement for the public. We are no longer spectators, but interlocutors,
social actors, making the scene and having intense, deep, meaningful (if
non-committed) encounters with coffee mates.
For some of the more utopian among us, this new form of social relation
offers liberation. Women don't have to be women; men don't have to be men;
races don't have to be races. People can make up identities, occupy new
dwellings, reinvent themselves.
Despite this utopian rhetoric, this coffee house has its own gender bias.
Coffee signifies mental stimulation as opposed to the TV's image as the
plug in drug that pacifies, feminizes, infantilizes the mind and body. As
a place in between home and work, the coffee house presents itself as a
remasculinized form of communication, a place of productive --as opposed
to reproductive, labor. In so doing, it continues with familiar tropes of
modernity in which femininity (and the idea of passivity, consumerism, and
domesticity associated with it) is the "other" of authentic /male/
active culture.
Even in this interactive, male dominated realm of cyber space, the "threat"
of feminization and domesticity is always somewhere close at hand. The cyber-cafe
carries with it the stereotypically "feminized" culture of gossip,
chatter without purpose, passing time without reason, being out of work,
and shopping conspicuously for luxury goods like fancy coffee and chocolates.
Perhaps to combat these stereotypically "girly" and domestic connections,
images in this cyber cafe genre show guys in suits hacking away at computers
while hanging around the coffee bar. Mac, the more female friendly computer,
has recently made itself compatible with the Java
environment.
Spigel .Trope