I want to check my email. I type ‘www.hotmail.com’ into the search bar. But my middle finger skids across the 'T' button, and fails to push it down, so I’m redirected to the website ‘www.homail.com’. Guess what shows up on the screen now. If only Hugh Hefner was here to share the fun.

Does the democratisation of the internet put a spanner in the works being done to promote women’s wellbeing in public and private life? Emma Watson was lambasted for tweeting a pro-feminist soundbite by Alan Rickman hours after his death; Caroline Criardo-Perez was sent death threats for her internet campaign for Jane Austen to be featured on the new £10 bank note. Heck, Laurie Penny was forced to become a ‘troll’ herself, adopting a pseudonym and fake profile on Facebook in order to escape the death threats. Facebook promptly threw her out. Funny how they aren’t nearly so quick to take preventative action against the genuinely violent and hateful trolls out there. Call me a fatalist but I don’t think there’s much we can do to reverse this trend. Pornography won’t regulate itself, neither will the government take action – simply because it can’t. Technology is evolving faster than their methods of enforcement; the bright idea of tracking down the trolls using their IP address is now utterly yesteryear.

Negative tools of moral enforcement won’t get us very far. What we need is a positive, progressive force in the virtual world. We need cyberfeminism.

The term was coined by Sadie Plant in 1994, director of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick. The word sounds like something out of an Isaac Asimov story: alien, unnerving and intimidating. This is perhaps because technological innovation has always been seen as a masculine enterprise. Women have made crucial contributions to the advance of Computer Science – take Ada Lovelace, Jean Sammet (developer of the FORMAC programming language) and Erna Schneider (inventor of the computerised switching system for telephone traffic). But when we think of computers, mother boards and hard drives, it’s ‘The Social Network’ and a bunch of bespectacled lanky guys in Silicon Valley that comes to mind.

There is no getting around the fact that in many parts of the world, technology is overtly constructed around historically entrenched structures of power and authority. Last October, the High Court of Pakistan’s capital, Lahore, finally entertained the plea of a woman who accused her husband of installing a tracking device in her body. Over in Saudi Arabia, whenever a woamn leaves or arrives in the country, communications providers routinely notify their male relatives by text. 

But don’t think that the problem isn’t close to home as well. In December 2014, parliamentary answers to a Freedom of Information request by the Digital Trust revealed that police in the United Kingdom received over 10,000 reports of attacks on computers by spyware and malware that year. In parallel, domestic violence experts have demonstrated that the use of specialist technology to enable abusers to track their victims’ movements in the cybersphere is growing at an alarming rate.

That’s the reason why cyberfeminism needs to be powerful and forceful - because it is going to require a lot of force to redress the balance. Simply using technology as a medium to express our daily woes on platforms such as ‘Everyday Sexism’ and ‘mumsnet.com’ isn’t enough to rectify gendered dominance of the cyberspace and beyond. Using technology is one thing – changing it is another.

We need to know how to code, programme and manipulate software – not to start an insurrection or anything like that. Cyberfeminism at its most basic level is simply about equipping women with the skills that they need in the information age. And the only reason it might be perceived as radical or extremist is because we have become accustomed to women perennially lacking in these skills.  

I have applied for a data journalism internship this summer. I highly doubt I will be accepted onto the scheme, but it’s worth a shot. I prefer reading books and scribbling on paper to staring at the screen, but the screen has now superseded the pen in its might, in the same way that the pen had once superseded the sword.

As for all the vices of new technology, we have to remember just how fortunate we are to have the screen in our lives. The sword was crafted and wielded for a man. For centuries the pen was beyond the reach of the vast majority of the female population: it was only during the decades of the Industrial Revolution that some parity between the genders in literacy rate was achieved. But now we have a real chance to construct a social space on the screen, and it can be one of belonging, mutual respect and egalitarianism. Regardless of ‘homail’, I’m still going to hold onto my last shred of hope for the future, at least for a bit longer.