Rommes, Els

Gender and commercialization; the construction of gendered user-representations in a changing design-context


Abstract

In the last five years, more and more parts of the Internet are financed by commercial organizations. In the same period of time, the percentage of female users has risen considerably. Is there a connection? A review of the present literature on the connection between the commercialization of the Internet and the inclusion of women is not conclusive. To get more insight in this connection, empirical data on Amsterdam-based Digital City "De Digitale Stad" (DDS) will be used. DDS was founded as a grassroots-based and publicly financed, highly idealistic digital city. Gradually, DDS had to earn money from more commercial sources. The data used in this study are obtained in twenty-five extensive interviews with founders, policy-makers and designers of DDS and by studying archive-material. In the interpretation of these data, the concepts "genderscript" and "user-representations" are employed: during the design of an artifact, designers (un)consciously make gendered representations of the users, that become congealed in the artifact and that pre-structure its use (Akrich 1992/1996; Latour 1992; Oudshoorn 1996). The questions will be asked: what were the effects of the change in funding for the design-context, the design-methods, the user-representations of the designers and the technical choices that were made in the successive interfaces DDS 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0? And how can these changes be judged from a gender-perspective? Surprisingly, other factors than the funding were more important in the construction of gendered user-representations in DDS.