'This big hi-tech thing' Gender and the internet at home in the 1990s

This article provides a snapshot of the relationship between the internet and gender in the early days of home internet connections in Australia. Based as it is on one of the first qualitative studies of home use of the internet and what appears to be the earliest Australian study of home use of the internet, it helps to fill a gap in the history of the internet in Australia. It draws from 76 in-depth interviews conducted in 1998 with members of nineteen household families who had a home internet connection. At the time of the research, there were a variety of stories in circulation regarding the relationship between the internet and gender The analysis presented in this article presents a more nuanced picture of this relationship in the early days of domestic internet connections. Rather than just comparing the different experiences of males and females, it looks at how gender was constituted in the meanings users invested in particular uses or non-uses of the internet at home, and in particular in the idea of technical mastery.