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Electronic Mediations
Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Volume 23)
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.
250 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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298 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 4, 2008
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.
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.
June 2, 2010
In Digitizing Race (2008), Lisa Nakamura explores gender and race identity formation in various digital media, employing visual culture studies. As Nakamura explains it, visual culture studies analyses have all too often simplified digital communication because they employ a human-computer interaction (HCI) model rather than a computer-mediated communication (CMC) model of digital spaces (9), so they have often ignored networking and power, whereas communication studies have often ignored what websites do visually (10).
Chapter 1 explores buddy icons on instant messenger services, which all too often get discussed as verbal-only. Nakamura sees these buddy icons as sophisticated ways to present identities online. One interesting aspect of options for buddy icons on some websites is the neoliberal notion of colorblindness, where race is effaced and represented instead through the category of "nation" (57).
Chapter 2 analyzes the website Alllooksame? (a website that asks viewers to guess whether pictures are of Chinese, Korean, or Japanese ethnicity) to explain how the website is used by Asians to resist the reification of race as visually identifiable and readable (78). Nakamura uses this analysis to question postcolonial fears that the Internet might be a homogenizing technology that might erase endangered cultures or languages (78, 91-92).
Chapter 3 analyzes the racial visualization in the Matrix films, Minority Report, and Apple advertisements, especially exploring the ways that Black authenticity is deployed in the films. Whiteness in the Matrix series is portrayed as inhuman, replicable, and machine-like, whereas Blackness is presented as "natural" and "authentic" (100) and "the source of human agency in this techo-future" (103). However, Nakamura argues that this "authenticity" and "singularity" are serviceable to white audiences: "blackness is singularity, but never for the black subject, always for the white subject" (116).
Chapter 4 explores the visual self-representation of pregnant women in online communities, showing how they bring bodies into websites that offer alternatives to the hyper-exaggerated feminine bodies that are often seen as the "norm" on the Internet (136). These images also show resistance to the ways in which institutions (such as medicine) have tried to manage identities (170).
Chapter 5 explores the limitations of discussions of the "digital divide," arguing that much of these studies fail to take into account digital production, which means they are not telling the whole story and might even deepen a digital divide because they inform policy (172). Nakamura argues that these studies need to take into account production, especially production that questions hegemonic norms of race.
Chapter 1 explores buddy icons on instant messenger services, which all too often get discussed as verbal-only. Nakamura sees these buddy icons as sophisticated ways to present identities online. One interesting aspect of options for buddy icons on some websites is the neoliberal notion of colorblindness, where race is effaced and represented instead through the category of "nation" (57).
Chapter 2 analyzes the website Alllooksame? (a website that asks viewers to guess whether pictures are of Chinese, Korean, or Japanese ethnicity) to explain how the website is used by Asians to resist the reification of race as visually identifiable and readable (78). Nakamura uses this analysis to question postcolonial fears that the Internet might be a homogenizing technology that might erase endangered cultures or languages (78, 91-92).
Chapter 3 analyzes the racial visualization in the Matrix films, Minority Report, and Apple advertisements, especially exploring the ways that Black authenticity is deployed in the films. Whiteness in the Matrix series is portrayed as inhuman, replicable, and machine-like, whereas Blackness is presented as "natural" and "authentic" (100) and "the source of human agency in this techo-future" (103). However, Nakamura argues that this "authenticity" and "singularity" are serviceable to white audiences: "blackness is singularity, but never for the black subject, always for the white subject" (116).
Chapter 4 explores the visual self-representation of pregnant women in online communities, showing how they bring bodies into websites that offer alternatives to the hyper-exaggerated feminine bodies that are often seen as the "norm" on the Internet (136). These images also show resistance to the ways in which institutions (such as medicine) have tried to manage identities (170).
Chapter 5 explores the limitations of discussions of the "digital divide," arguing that much of these studies fail to take into account digital production, which means they are not telling the whole story and might even deepen a digital divide because they inform policy (172). Nakamura argues that these studies need to take into account production, especially production that questions hegemonic norms of race.
April 11, 2021
A little outdated now, but good snapshot of early internet days.
December 17, 2023
An interesting exploration of how representation has progressed on the Internet and the importance of understanding how the Internet is both active and passive.
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February 6, 2024Clever and incredibly prescient -- hard to believe it was written in 2008
November 28, 2009
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.
Want to read
May 19, 2009note caveats:
June 23, 2019
👩🏻💻🌐🕹💻🖼� the intro was really great! also re: alllooksame.com ...intense part of my racial identity formation that i forgot about..
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