ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the Women’s Electronic Village Hall story as an example of what happened in the voluntary sector during that heady and somewhat turbulent period. It argues that the rhetoric used to promote the use of information and communications technologies– rhetoric which informed the way in which voluntary organizations were given funding – effectively separated the world in which people currently lived from the ‘future’, from a world lived through or with these new information and communications technologies. The underlying aim in the project was to analyse the relationship between concepts of ‘virtuality’ – the idea that new information technologies would allow forms of interaction that were constrained by physical location – and the fact that all people, and computers, have to physically exist somewhere, and are also constituted by the historical and social contexts in which they exist.
