I had recent experiences of men telling me what to
think - even in today's world with strong female leaders such as Angela Merkel
and Hilary Clinton - and I have to wonder why so many men feel they need to
tell experienced women what to think even in todays's world of supposed
equality? I heard that women still earn 80% of what men do on average - which
means for the rest of the year women work for free.?
In Walter Isaacson's recent book The Innovators;
How a group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks created the Digital Revolution he
mentions the Countess of Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron and a mathematician and
writer who in 1842 wrote about a new calculating machine designed by Charles
Babbage. She wrote forecasting the
digital age, "In enabling a mechanism to combine together general symbols,
in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established
between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes."
Babbage's machine was the first to produce
abstractions from matter. Lovelace
foresaw the laptop and the smartphone. After this oddly for a hundred years
nothing much happened, and then everything happened at once.
The idea of networking computers took a while to
take hold at first - finally Tim Berners
world wide web came along and showed the computer was really a gateway to the global
information system that would become known as the internet. Berners championed the freedom of the net but
may have made a mistake. The link system when you click on a link takes you to
another page - was one way and did not send a signal back. If it had, it would have been a simple matter
to impose a system of micro payments, a fraction of a penny per click and the
devastation of the music, publishing, newspaper and countless other industries
need never have happened.
The question then remains do the big internet
companies need restriction set on them?
Some young women writers at Edinburgh below.
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| Leigh Bardugo and Maureen Johnson |
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| Rhiannon Cosslett |
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| Holly Baxter |
