My favourite programmes are, well not actually holiday programmes because they're too edited, but if there's a documentary on about India, or Africa, or

Russia, or wildlife, then it's the most favourite thing that I can think of watching. J: Why?

D: Because I suppose I'm very interested in the way that other people live, and exotic countries. You know. I'm a bit 'armchair' because I'm not, you know I don't do it, but it really interests me, watching tribal programmes or - there was something on the other night about a team of surgeons going out to Timor or somewhere like that to correct a whole host of people who have cleft palettes. It was just fascinating, I do really enjoy it.

And, you know, if there's an animal programme on, you know I don't mean

Your Cat or something, last week I was watching something on zebra, or about elephants, or about tigers, or about African Tribes then I just think it's wonderful - seeing how people live in strange cultures, strange lands.

(Dorian, session 3, emphasis added)

This is an especially rich passage, and it would be easy to construct a number of readings. One could, for example, concentrate on her predilection for documentaries, rather than the "too edited" travel programme and what this says about a wider understanding of contemporary travel. But most obvious is the way in which her account continues to draw a traditional set of distinctions between centre and margin, core and periphery, and connects these distinctions to a whole series of racialised oppositions.

The geographically distant, for example, is understood as historically under­ developed, constructing a familiar relationship between progress, science and geography (see chapter 2.1a). At a wider level of analysis these distant spaces are portrayed as lying outside of the civilised world of the Western metropolis. In the peripheral space of the African continent peoples and animals are conflated, and the disfigured inhabitants of Timor may only cure their afflictions with the aid of the visiting Western surgeons.

In part, then, the attraction of these programmes is that they allow the viewer to construct a geography of the world that moves around a traditional set of cultural

oppositions, and within which the viewer's own position is clearly located at the centre. But their attraction is also that they allow the distanced spectator to flirt with a world of difference without ever risking the dangers of embodied travel and the ambiguities of social interaction. Dorian may construct these readings because:

"The frame of a cinema or TV screen staves off the danger of spillage more effectively still than tourist hotels and fenced-off camping sites; the one-sidedness of communication further entrenches the Strangers on the screen as, essentially,

incommunicado"

(Bauman, 1988, quoted in Shields, 1992:193, his emphasis)

Thus, to an extent, these understandings are already framed by the production values of these programmes themselves and the effect of the television screen. But the distanced gaze that demarcates a wholly static Other, and onto which Dorian can project all sorts of desires (does she want to be the surgeon bringing relief to the silent natives?) is also a direct product of her wider social position. In the first place it may only be those at the centre of social power who can afford a television set (or at least the costs of making, and watching, these rather expensive programmes), and certainly it is only those in a position of some privilege who can so easily assume the position of spectator rather than spectacle.

Like George and Alex, then, Dorian constructs an image of a re-ordered global space that is built around a traditional set of binary closures. And this geography is constructed with the aid of a powerful technological gaze. Furthermore, rather than simply the determined result of these technologies, this gaze is a product of Dorian's class and ethnic empowerment. Far from the gaze being exclusively masculine, it w ould seem that these technologies are opening up the opportunity to gaze for groups w ho might previously have been the object of that gaze - though it is difficult to equate Dorian's perspective with any radical act of 'resistance' (cf hooks, 1992).

At the same time it is important to recognize that Dorian's attraction to these programmes is also a result of her unwillingness to traverse a social space that still holds a number of dangers for women, and not least the possibility of sexual attack. Unlike Alex, for whom, as w e shall see in chapter 6, the rigours of embodied travel hold few fears, Dorian's use of the 'imaginary space' of the documentary is in some ways defensive. She is a bit "armchair", less perhaps by choice, but because of the real (and imaginary) fears of moving through material space and this fear is only admitted to rather reluctantly - perhaps she feels she should be 'brave enough' to take these risks.

In this sense any gaze that she projects is always liable to be more ambiguous than that projected by the male respondents. Not least because it is a result of her desire to avoid her own objectification in the continued projection of a sexualized gaze and the

material consequences that gaze articulates. This ambiguity is a direct result of her wider social position, a position of some ethnic (and class) power in a patriarchal world, but it is one given voice by her use of the new ICTs.

In contrast Amanda uses these technologies quite differently. She is anxious to undermine a traditional set of binary oppositions and to use these technologies in ways that may promote relations of difference rather than exclusion. In this sense she differs not only from the male respondents, but also from Dorian. But these differences are complex. Though, like Dorian, she too accesses the 'imaginary space' of the new ICTs in order to avoid her own objectification, where Dorian celebrated this possibility Amanda is concerned that this access may raise questions about her own complicity in the objectifications of a technological gaze.

In Amanda's work in mental health care the new ICTs provide a valuable tool because, as well as allowing for the silencing of alternative subject positions, they may also be used in ways that promote communication between different groups. In a multi­ cultural environment the flexibility of the computer, for example, can allow for a more equitable distribution of information and, in the most literal sense, Amanda regularly uses the computer network to:

"... get translations, or ask it to write out things in different languages and things like that, which is incredibly useful in Hackney. Yeah, they're reaUy useful, a reaUy useful tool."

(Amanda, session 3)

These technologies also allow for more a fundamental challenge to the traditional relations of exclusion. Their use can offer the possibility of undercutting that relationship between science and rationality central to the mappings of both the male respondents and Dorian. In its work with the mentally ill, for example, Amanda's organisation uses computers in ways that simply invert this more familiar relationship:

"The [computersl also give our clients a lot more confidence. Because they're quite logical - 1 mean they sometimes don't feel logical (laughter), but in the end there's always a logic to them. A nd I think that gives the mental health thing a whole new light. Because people are so sort of stressful aren't they. But if you find people stressful you can always relate to a computer."

(Amanda, session 2, emphasis added)

Traditionally science has been understood as the logical and rational (Baudrillard, 1991). As such it must usually be positioned in opposition to the irrationality of the mentally ill, as mental health itself has come to be constructed through a series of oppositions around the 'ordered' and 'unordered' mind (Foucault, 1967). But here it is precisely the logic of the computer that marks out the possibility of its use by Amanda's

clients. This consumption processes acts to position the mentally ill with the rational, logical world of science, and the 'sane' with notions of stressful irrationality. As the two systems are laid together, so they move to invert each other.

So too Amanda accesses that 'imaginary space' produced by the new ICTs in ways quite different from the other respondents:

A: And there's a lot, again, a lot of our clients, w e spend a lot of our time trying