ABSTRACT
The business of spreading promises about information technology and internet connectivity has been taken up by private and public interests alike. Some cyberspace proponents promise that cyberspace provides a medium where gender, race, class, sexual orientation, disability are no longer operative in creating divisions relating to degrees of access and inclusion. Technologies are developed within specific historical and cultural contexts and are interpreted and experienced within the context of specific power relations. Sally Hacker emphasized the connection between eroticism and technology and hence power and technology as a way of understanding how relations of power are built into technological products and processes. Research on the gendered nature of computing technologies suggests that in cyberspace, the category of participants Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger refer to as "old-timers" are largely male, white and middle class. It is no surprise that young males, with their cultural bent to master technologies, are today's computer hackers and so populate the on-line communities and newsgroups.
