Why There's a
Male Mystique about Modems
by Judith Broadhurst

Preface to The Woman's Guide to Online Services
Published by McGraw-Hill, 1995

Please see the rave reviews, too.

"The relationships online are much more where the power is than in the information." Lisa Kimball, The Meta Network, 1995

Your first reaction to the idea of a book called The Woman's Guide to Online Services may be the same as mine was: With so many online guides already, why do women need a special one? Let me assure you right off that this is not a dumbed-down book nor one solely about women's sections online or lipstick and lace, home and hearth disguised as "women's issues."

Nor is this a technobabble treatise on technology or another list of lists. The key word in computer network is network, not computer. So this is a book about how to work the networks, rather than how to make the networks work.

It's also about ways to use online services that are relevant to real-life, day-to-day concerns, and how to make your life richer, easier and more fun. Computers are designed to save you time, so it's about how to do that too. It also answers the three basic questions that the hundreds of women I've interviewed for this book and for articles about online services for Executive Female, Glamour, Home Office Computing, Mobile Office, Online Access, Self, Working Woman and other magazines have told me they want to know:

• What's there, once I get online?
• What can I do with online services that's truly worthwhile?
• What are the fastest, easiest, most fun ways to do those things?

Throughout this book, women (and men) tell you, in their words, how they've used online services to make significant, meaningful differences in their personal, family, community and work lives. From their stories, you'll get a feel for what it's like online from the human side and see that, as Lisa Kimball of The Meta Network says, "The relationships online are much more where the power is than in the information."

Then each chapter shows you how to find and use the resources related to that particular topic. Directories at the end of most chapters highlight related sections on America Online, CompuServe, Delphi, eWorld, GEnie, Interchange, the Internet, Microsoft Network, Prodigy, Women's Wire and the World Wide Web, plus smaller networks such as Echo and The WELL. That gives you more specific information about more services than any other online guide, all from a woman's perspective, but all useful to men too.

But I didn't write this book just to convince you that online networks have more to offer than casual conversation and information, although that's certainly one thing I hope it accomplishes. I wrote it because the ratio of men-to-women online worries me. A lot.

As we go to press, in early 1995, the ratio of men-to-women with their own accounts on CompuServe is 8:1. The rough estimate of the population of women on the Internet is 10-15 percent, and most of those women are in the high-tech industry or academia, including students, with free accounts. Prodigy, the most family-oriented service, claims that almost 40 percent of its members are women. Industry experts doubt that, because Prodigy always waffles when you ask how they came up with that number. Even giving them the benefit of the doubt, they apparently count everyone in a household who has access, which assumes that women actually use the service too. Maybe, maybe not.

Women's Wire, at 90 percent, and Echo, with 38 percent, are the two services covered in this book that are most likely to really have the high proportion of women that they claim, because they are both owned by women who have intentionally created places where women feel welcome and comfortable. This disparity in the ratio of men to women online worries me because I'm old enough to remember when women fought so hard, so long to gain what often seemed like so little. Now I see us losing ground because of sensationalized media hype, stereotypes, and perhaps the plain stubbornness and short-sightedness of women themselves.

I'm absolutely, thoroughly convinced that the continued reluctance or resistance that so many women clearly have about going online is already to our detriment, and likely to have more serious, negative ramifications long-term. It's not merely a matter of career consequences, or even the growing distance between the haves and the have-nots.

Ultimately, it comes down to power. Michael Korda warned us 20 years ago when he wrote Power: How to Get It, How to Use It. "The person who controls the computer is thus in a singular position of power," he said, and went on to describe how that person gains power over not just information, but people. Korda's book was published in 1975, just three years after the first public demonstration of what we now call the Internet and four years before the oldest commercial service, CompuServe, existed.

Today, it's even more important that we heed his words. Because I'm a journalist by profession and by nature and, like many other journalists, wanted to be one so I could do something modest like change the world, I always remembered what Korda said about the power that comes with controlling information. So Korda's book has remained on my bookshelf all these years, even when I recycled many others at used bookstores.

Since going online myself in 1990, I have often wondered why computers have come to be considered such "a male thing" and why online services are such a male domain. But I never made the connection until I read Neuromancer, the 1984 futuristic fantasy by William Gibson, who coined the term cyberspace.

Gibson's hero thought of himself as a "computer cowboy," and used his computer to catapult into the nebulous realm of cyberspace to fight the bad guys. He called the process of using his computer to transport himself into cyberspace "jacking in." The moment I read those words, I understood. If you'll pardon the allusion, men get off on the power that truly skillful use of all the computer's capabilities gives them.

Jacking in to cyberspace — a term now commonly used on the Internet — makes them feel powerful and adventurous, like cowboys on the new frontier. It's no surprise, then, that when a cadre of high-powered cyberspace gurus (all men) created an organization in 1990 to defend the independence and traditions of the Internet, they named it the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Cyberspace is still a frontier, which is good. That means there is still time for women to be pioneers too, and help build this new territory. This is the Global Village that media critic Marshall McLuhan wrote about, more so than anything we've ever experienced before.

That may sound grandiose or fanatical, but what happens online has already had an impact on the real world and will affect what goes on hereafter in many ways in our homes, schools, communities and countries, worldwide. If you doubt that now, I hope this book will help you see some of the possibilities and what they mean for you and your family, for better or for worse.

Because this cyberspace world is one where we're all going to be affected by hereafter, whether we're online or not, it behooves us to help guide its development into the kind of place we want to be involved in as we grow old, and for our children to be a part of now and after we're gone. You may not care about having influence or power, per se — no one but Donald Trump ever admits they do — but you do care about your education, jobs, the environment and world peace, right? All of these will be profoundly affected in the years to come by people communicating and exchanging information online. If you want to have some say in what happens, you need to be where it's happening and connected to the people who are making it happen.

If, as some studies say, women are more verbal than men and communicate better, then it's our kind of world, because communication is the essence of what being online is all about. Until more women stop thinking of computers either as mere machines or too complicated and start using them as the powerful communication tools that they are, we're not only relegating ourselves to the techno era equivalent of the typing pool, we're missing an important opportunity to help shape the future.

Men have repeatedly helped me learn my way around online, so I am not saying they are in any way hindering us. We're the only ones holding ourselves and each other back. So it's up to us to put aside our own skepticism, wariness and yes-but attitudes and move forward. That's why this book is called The Woman's Guide to Online Services, in the singular. Because the way to keep cyberspace from being the latest good ol' boys' network is for more women to get online and get active, not just lurk or observe, until we all truly understand it, feel good about it and feel like we belong there.

And the way to do that is one woman at a time.

Copyright © 1995 by Judith Broadhurst. All rights reserved.

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