Having read her bestseller Man Made Language, I expected the Australian academic and veteran feminist to tear into cyber-hype like a pitbull with a reserved spot in the dogma pound.

Retry.

Spender wants us to experiment on the Net so confidently that indulging in crazy conversations with faceless companions feels as legitimate as using the computer to calculate the mortgage. As a self-confessed “computer convert,” she’s having fun. You will too.

And “you” means more than women. Spender’s feminism is a refreshing humanism. “This is not a book about computers,” she declares up front. “It is a book about people,” including aboriginals and the poor.

Linking popular use of the Internet to the achievement of full citizenship, Spender warns women and others not to be excluded the “way that illiterate people have been disenfranchised in a print world.”

Caveat accepted, I then want her thoughts on how to get the timid on-line. Trouble is, she makes me wait too long (180 print-packed pages) and wade through too much (among other things, a history of reading, an analysis of libraries, and an exercise in deconstructing the Oxford English Dictionary).

I want to press fast forward. I want to clutch a mouse and scroll down. With each flippin’ page, I’m less inclined to believe Spender’s boosterism about life in the fast lane. By the time I reach Chapter 7 – her first real focus on women’s fear of the computer – I’m suspicious.

Her solutions don’t dampen my suspicions. Spender rightly acknowledges that countering women’s apprehension of the computer “is not as simple as giving encouragement to girls.”

But then she suggests that the computer be promoted as a household appliance, not unlike the telephone that we gals supposedly love to gab on.

Is she being pragmatic or reinforcing stereotypes?

Spender’s bouncy optimism produces a final paradox. The cornerstone of feminism is choice. Spender, though, seems so enamoured of the Net that she writes as if women should want no alternative but to become clicking chicks.

Optimism is a novel feature of any feminist look ahead. And Nattering leaves me wondering about the future, all right – the future of questioning wired wisdom.