DID I RE·FIND THAT ONE 80s ARTICLE ABOUT GENDER IN COMPUTING THAT I THINK ABOUT CONSTANTLY?!?! stay tuned
« I ask Robin to talk to me about her relationship with her piano, a machine, but she insists that it was a completely different thing. The piano took her away from people, but then it brought her closer to them. The involvements of her male peers with the computer only shut people out. »
« To take an analogy from the world of the computer's second cousins, the video games: it is almost impossible to learn to-play a video game if you try to understand first and play second. Girls are often perceived as preferring the 'easier' video games. When I have looked more closely at what they really prefer, it is games where they can understand 'the rules' before play begins. Both Lisa and Robin crave transparent understanding of the computer. For example, although both apologize for their behavior as 'silly,' both like to program the computer to do everything they need to build their larger programs, even when
these smaller, 'building-block' procedures are in program libraries at their disposal. It makes their job harder, but both say that it gives them a more satisfying understanding. They don't like taking risks at the machine. What they most want to avoid is error messages. »
« First, insisting that the computer is just a tool is a defense against the experience of the computer as the opposite, as an intimate machine. It is a way to say that it is not appropriate to have a close relationship with a machine. Computers with their plasticity and malleability are compelling media. They have a psychological 'holding power.' Women use their rejection of computer holding power to assert something about themselves as women. Being a woman is opposed to a compelling relationship with a thing that shuts people out. »
i’ll spare you the knockoff freudian analysis
« In ‘In A Different Voice’, Carol Gilligan talks about 'the hierarchy and the web' as metaphors to describe the different ways in which men and women see their worlds. Men see a hierarchy of autonomous positions. Women see a web of interconnections between people. »
i do not in any way, shape, or form recommend you investigate this piece by Carol Gilligan; however, devoid of context i quite like this (anachronistic; this predates it) framing of The Web as Feminine in relation to the Masculine file system
« Lisa reacted with irritation when her high school teachers tried to get her interested in mathematics by calling it a language. 'People were always yakking at me about how math is a language—it's got punctuation marks and all that stuff. I thought they were fools and I told them so. I told them that if only it were a language, if only it had some nuance, then perhaps I could relate to it.' »
@aescling as someone who has studied higher math, it is a failure of both
it is true that if you understand math as axiomatic and understand that the axioms you choose determine the possibilities of the system, a whole world of nuance opens up
but mathematics is still characterized—perhaps solely characterized—by its persistent divorcement of those axioms from any significatory power beyond their mere logical outcomes
anything else is, at the very best, “applied”