Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Volume 23)

Electronic Mediations

by Lisa Nakamura

In the nineties, neoliberalism simultaneously provided the context for the Internet’s rapid uptake in the United States and discouraged public conversations about racial politics. At the same time many scholars lauded the widespread use of text-driven interfaces as a solution to the problem of racial intolerance. Today’s online world is witnessing text-driven interfaces such as e-mail and instant messaging giving way to far more visually intensive and commercially driven media forms that not only reveal but showcase people’s racial, ethnic, and gender identity. Lisa Nakamura, a leading scholar in the examination of race in digital media, uses case studies of popular yet rarely examined uses of the Internet such as pregnancy Web sites, instant messaging, and online petitions and quizzes to look at the emergence of race-, ethnic-, and gender-identified visual cultures. While popular media such as Hollywood cinema continue to depict nonwhite nonmales as passive audiences or consumers of digital media rather than as producers, Nakamura argues the contrary—with examples ranging from Jennifer Lopez music videos; films including the Matrix trilogy, Gattaca, and Minority Report; and online joke sites—that users of color and women use the Internet to vigorously articulate their own types of virtual community, avatar bodies, and racial politics. Lisa Nakamura is associate professor of speech communication and Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet and coeditor, with Beth Kolko and Gilbert Rodman, of Race in Cyberspace.

Genres: Race, Nonfiction, Technology, Academic, Internet, Politics, Research

250 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Jolivette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nakamura offers a method for analyzing new media as a "matrix of lived cultural practices, identities, geopolitics, and postcolonial, racial, and political positions" (204). This method seems to be close reading and discourse analysis of case studies. She offers several case studies in this book of what she calls digital racial formation, and specifically how women and people of color are both subjects and objects of online interactivity.

The range of texts he writes about is wide, from Jennifer Lopez videos, to The Matrix films, to pregnancy websites, with an emphasis on Asian American racial formations through a cultural studies lens. Her central argument seems to be that the historical period of late 20th century in the US is one marked by a neo-liberal approach to race relations - one I suppose that seeks to address inequalities through less explicit discussions of race and more emphasis on technology and capital. I could be wrong on that reading but that what i got from her intro. By her conclusion it seems that the internet, and particularly Web 2.0 of early 21st c. offers access to a much larger group of people to technology and forum for expressing racial and ethnic identity. This can be celebrated for the embodiment and self-actualization of many different identities, and the threat of media conglomerates capitlizing on such users as an online market.

Of her cases she writes that emerging groups of people use the internet to "visualize" themselves, performing cultural work at a post-neoliberal age when it is actively "dangerous to signify race or ethnicity in the public sphere" (206).
She also writes:
"Though Internet use by racial minorities is indeed increasing, this is not in itself reason to be optimistic about the mediums' ability to enfranchise minorities in a realm of friction-free digital production and self-expresion. IN the true spirit of neoliberalism, being permitted to exist is not the same as equal representation" (206).

Critique: As I stated earlier, Nakamura gives a purely textual reading. While I am not critiquing this as a cultural studies/humantities approach, other types of data or approaches to substantiate her claims would have ben helpful, especially since she argues that her method examines "lived cultural practices" - in other words, interviews (for example) with some of the site users of her case studies may have bolstered this research.

[Shaimaa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little outdated now, but good snapshot of early internet days.

[Sean Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting exploration of how representation has progressed on the Internet and the importance of understanding how the Internet is both active and passive.

[easy]

Clever and incredibly prescient -- hard to believe it was written in 2008

[Andy Oram · Rating 2 out of 5]

An impressionistic and rambling review of several, barely related communities or Internet activities, this book says very little about Internet culture and its online representations. It is mostly a combination of studies done in the early to mid-2000 decade, and unfortunately does not have much to say about the enormous swelling of social networking sites that has occurred in just the past couple years. The book does have some intriguing and stimulating observations about the way unconventional Internet users (mostly women) see and reveal themselves on chat sites and on pregnancy forums. It is more comfortable showing how impressions and presentations of race in the larger culture are handled by online actors than analyzing those actors or the new media themselves.

[Elizabeth]

note caveats: http://oyceter.livejournal.com/843685...

[Kristine · Rating 3 out of 5]

👩🏻‍💻🌐🕹💻🖼🤔 the intro was really great! also re: alllooksame.com ...intense part of my racial identity formation that i forgot about..