Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture [Hardcover]

Sadie Plant (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 1997

Not since The Female Eunuch has there been a book so radical in its scope, so persuasive in its detail, so exhilarating in its polemical energy.  Beginning with Ada Lovelace and her unheralded contributions to Charles Babbage and his development of the Difference Engine, Sadie Plant traces the critical contributions women have made to the progress of computing.  Shattering the myth that women are victims of technological change, Zeros + Ones shows how women and women's work in particular--weaving and typing, computing and telecommunicating--have been tending the machinery of the digital age for generations, the very technologies that are now revolutionizing the Western world.

In this bold manifesto on the relationship between women and machines, Sadie Plant explores the networks and connections implicit in nonlinear systems and digital machines.  Steering a course beyond the old feminist dichotomies, Zeros + Ones is populated by a diverse chorus of voices--Anna Freud, Mary Shelley, Alan Turing--conceived as exploratory bundles of intelligent matter, emergent entities hacking through the constraints of their old programming and envisioning a postpatriarchal future.

Astonishing, inspiring, witty, and perverse, Zeros + Ones is a love song to Ada, a soundtrack for the next millennium, a radical revision of our technoculture that will forever change the way we perceive our digital world.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Meet Ada Lovelace, daughter of mathematician Annabella Byron and poet Lord Byron, and a major contributor to Charles Babbage's famous Analytic Engine. Lovelace is in many ways the patron saint of Sadie Plant's exploration of women's roles in the creation of modern technology. The book begins with Lovelace's story, and elements of her writings appear throughout the book--sometimes to emphasize points but often to exemplify attitude. They also serve to anchor Plant's dynamic, almost stream-of-conscious approach as we travel to 19th-century Europe to meet the nameless women who laid the foundation of modern technology with the development of weaving, survey the major female technological innovators of today, and even explore female figures in technology-based fiction.

Plant's "cyberfeminist rant," as William Gibson calls it, attempts to demonstrate that women have always used technology. You won't find victims here, rather women who were empowered by the technological innovations in their lives. What emerges is a very nontraditional feminist picture, one in which women are neither bystanders nor victims but are in many ways the unsung heroes of technical innovation. The author also points to a future where, within zeros and ones of cyberspace many such dichotomies of life/machine, let alone male/female, may blur in unexpected ways.

From Library Journal

William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer (1984), calls this book "a brilliant and terrifically sustained cyberfeminist rant." Certainly it is a feminist rant, and it does deal with women's contributions to computing and its mechanical predecessors, weaving and typing. But Plant (The Most Radical Gesture, Routledge, 1992) is arguing on so many levels?social, philosophical, sexual, etc.?that it is difficult to grasp her position. It also is not clear whether the book's prodigious use of sf quotes is meant to bolster her argument or provide a lead from which to argue a new position. While the author demonstrates a great deal of energy with her historical, biological, psychological, and sociopolitical asides, her vision of the future is derived from interpretations many of us would either question or not understand. Perhaps she is just too far ahead of her time. For larger women's studies collections.?Hilary Burton, Lawrence Livermore National Lab., Livermore, Cal.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (September 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385482604
• ISBN-13: 978-0385482608
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,160,854 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Plant does not motivate social changes., March 21, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (Hardcover)

The label of "cyber-feminist" should not give readers the illusion of Plant's
ability to mobilize women readers.
She affirms the role of women as the pursuers of technology,
as being part of the machine.
Her words become as mysterious as the ghost in the machine
because they are only a description of where we are in these times,
and I was left without a sense of direction.
Her throws to Ada Lovelace were numbing at some point,
and I wondered if there were other women we could also look at.
Possibly specific Asian women would have been a relief to hear about
instead of her tendency to speak generally about women
in Japanese and Taiwanese business slowly taking control.

Her saving grace was her beautiful analogies of technology with textiles
and of binary language with the roles of women and men.