In Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of digital Reproduction, Nakamura used a very large portion discussing the stereotypes (white/ American?) people have toward other races. And that she pointed out that this kind of separation caused the damages in the relationships among minorities, which I do not really get from my own everyday experience.
In the earlier part of the article, she also stated that the internet is constraining the minority cultures even though it is trying to save it. This is a particular interesting topic for me to see because of where I grew up. As a child, there used to be cartoons with distinctive Chinese traits. Then with the regulation changes, children in Taiwan got to watch cartoons from mainly Japan and America. But back then, because the U.S. was still dominating the market with its technologies, most of the Japanese cartoons carried clear hints of mimicking the American ones in terms of drawing styles. Ten years later when my family came to the U.S., I saw that Japanese cartoons started to take over the market here. Then recently, I saw American kids who like comics draw, of course in Japanese style. In a way, internet did saved some cultures from disappearing. People nowadays can learn other cultures without spending the time or money to actually travel there. But on the other hand, internet also brought competition among cultures. Now the cultures with financial disadvantages are facing the problem that their young people all look up to the well-developed cultures. They like those foreign shows better maybe because they are more fun, maybe because they are more realistic. Chinese culture is going through this exact process. Taiwanese already went through it and, unfortunately, in my opinion, lost the battle. All the fuss about “love your culture, know your background” have all become political slogans. I am holding my breath while I watch China go through this and hope that since they saw what happened in Taiwan, they’d do a better job preserving Chinese culture. But this whole thing is very interesting to watch. I wonder how the world will be like 50 years from now.
I found it striking to compare Foucault and Nakamura. In general, Foucault describes how power wants to regulate and partition individuals so that they will be easier to control. “The formation of the disciplinary society” and the technique of panopticism provide a method of control. Nakamura carries (or “ports”) that theory into cyberspace. The practice she calls “cybertyping” is the same practice Foucault describes as the development of disciplines at the end of the 18th century. Discipline can solve problems like irregularity and heterogeneity because it can “reduce what, in a multiplicity, makes it much less manageable than a unity… it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways” (Foucault 480). The panopticon works because of partitioning, hierarchy of control, and divisions between people. With all its advantages, Foucault exposes the trade-off’s detrimental consequences. In Nakamura’s example of the ad that shows an African woman carrying a TV on her head instead of a basket, the audience is disturbed by an image of someone who has escaped from the Western ideal of the “timeless primitive” (Nakamura 325). The ad shows someone who is “unpredictable,” to use Foucault’s word. The key development in cybertyping, according to Nakamura, is remastering, which she gives a dual meaning as metaphor (to remaster data and convert it from analog to digital format) and also as the literal re-MASTERing of minority groups. Even though many American minorities are legal citizens, the process of remastering is a way to make minorities into an “Other” group by depicting them as “images of ‘exotic’ non-American racial minorities using technology, not American minorities” (Nakamura 325). In this way, remastering is a sinister form of remediation. She writes, “Old media provide the foundation for the ‘new’ and its means of putting race to ‘work’ in the service of particular ideologies are re-invoked, with a twist” (324). This tenet is very similar to the way that the panopticon was more than architecture and more than “the solution of a technical problem,” as Foucault says. “Through [the panopticon], a whole type of society emerges” (478). Both writers observe how technology is much more than a tool; it is a way of controlling people so that those in power have an opposite side of the binary structure to rule over. The world doesn’t seem so open and digital when the same old analog binaries of “us=American” vs. “them=minority” are reinforced in cyberspace.
I’d be curious to hear about how Foucault’s theory is relevant to Marx and the distribution of power. It seems there are clear connections between the theories, but I can’t quite wrap my head around it.
It seems like Nakamura puts in quite a bit of emphasis on the race issue. To me, racial stereotype does not imply at all in the world of internet. My opinion may be biased since I am looking at it from the “minority” perspective, but whether it be forums, blogs, or online gaming, I have never once thought what kind of person might be on the other end of the conversation. I could really careless what age, sex, race, and kind of cultural background that person has. If that person has the information I am looking for, should any of the things that Nakamura mentioned really matter?
Also, not to ignite any flames… but just for the sake of discussion, Shi-Jen mentioned on the earlier post that Taiwanese had lost the battle. I wish for her to elaborate a little more on this point and tell us what battle they had lost, and what battle the Chinese are up against this moment. Also, the style of animation, life styles, and etc, I believe that the more developed the country, the more they are willing to exchange and accept ideas from different culture. This form of free trade of cultural elements, I believe is quite healthy for our society. Both economically, and culturally, our history shows that those countries unwilling to open up to others are the ones that gets left behind the rest of the world. It may appear in the beginning that certain country is being brain washed by the other country’s cultures, but maybe it’s the process of and willingness to accept and embrace the new culture to learn from and ultimately evolving their own. In our super speed information generation, we all must learn to adapt our culture with the other’s, to take that as a mere compromise or a lost cause, would make it very difficult for that country to survive.
Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction introduced many new and interesting concepts to me. On the author talks about new terms being coined due to the invention of the internet and most people probably take terms like “download”, “online” and “cybersex” for granted not thinking about when or who coined these terms. I do think that online identities are “typed”. For instance, if a person’s avatar online is of a black male, another person may see the avatar and assume the person behind the avatar is also a black male. That person may then make judgments about the person behind the avatar according to their own values and experiences in real life. I don’t’ necessarily think the internet will somehow help alleviate our fears and anxieties about other races but I do believe the internet reflects changes in people’s behavior and thinking in real life.
Regarding Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault, I found this reading very difficult. Since the pages we read were only part of Michel Foucault’s book I believe reading the entire book may have helped me to understand his points better. I also felt that because the book was translated, I wondered if that was one of the reasons I found this reading difficult. I would like additional information to better understand why the author is discussing Bentham’s Panopticon as an image of discipline and its effects.
After reading the title of Nakamura’s Cybertyping and the work of race in the Age of digital Reproduction, I thought of Marshall McLuhan’s Playboy interview where he talked about the Negros and Indians having an advantage in a transitional age because of there tribal roots. Nakamura did not talk about the tribal nature of the web or the global village.
My confusion was compounded when she talked about Nakamura’s need to use other methods to describe cultural and social layers of new media. (p.318) Nakamura does not continue with the description of Espen Aarseth’s idea of a new field to support her view of the alternative field. What should an alternative field of study be based on? What would a study of computer technology include to satisfy everyone?
I enjoyed Foucault’s idea of micro power to describe the interplay of power and knowledge. While reading Foucault, I got the impression he did not agree with Karl Marx. (p465) Foucault describes certain characteristics of Marx’s base and supper structure to prove his idea of micro power.
Power plays and important role in his theory of the Panopticon as a way of arranging power focusing on the economics. Panopticon institution seems to have similarities to what web based computer technologies provide? Also, could the principles of the Panopticon and micro power be applied to the web to discipline the predators on the web?
There’s a notion given by Nakamura that the internet privileges those that are white. I think there’s something to be about the ratio of whites to non-white that use the internet, and that the internet (in situations where racism is possible, like with Second Life or avatars) is simply a reflection of those who use it. Is it the “internet’s” fault that those who use it are predominantly white? Wouldn’t it simply be playing into the ratio? Those who advertise on the Oxygen channel or in Elle magazine are not accused of being sexist because they cater to those who are access their information. They are simply playing to the ratio of male to female, and advertising and designing accordingly. The idea of racism seems to be something that can be shoehorned into any subject, because it is a consistent underlying current. My issue with her statements is the tone seems incredibly assaulting. I’d guess one could argue that the internet has a prejudice to those that are blind because it is primarily a visual medium as well. Maybe I’ve lived as a half white, half Mexican long enough to be able to embrace that while racism maybe indeed be an underlying entity, it is only present because of the ratio of those that present. “Mexican” neighborhoods are deemed as much because that is where the Mexican culture has decided to raise their families. Nakamura says, “Cybertyping keeps race ‘real’ using the discourse of the virtual” (330) but, the internet is a reflection of its users, and the cultural discrepancies are prevalent because of numbers, not because of an attitude. Under representation is not racism.
Foucault says “Power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the ‘privilege,’ acquired or preserved, of the dominate class, but the overall effect of its strategic position of those who are dominated” (465) I believe, while some could see it as a compliment to Nakamura’s argument, that this is furthering the idea of ratios. The “power” being exercised is because of the underrepresented ratio. Those who are in the “position of being dominated” are thus because of the lack of numbers. While one could argue that the strategic position of those in power would be to solidify those with less influence, I feel this could be alleviated if the ratio of white to non-white was different.
Nakamura discusses how the Internet shapes our perceptions of race and identity in “Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction”. While she makes an interesting argument that racism is prevalent on the Internet, I find it difficult to agree with her.
Nakamura seems to contradict herself when describing the representation of minorities on the Internet. She suggests that minorities are underrepresented in media, particularly on the Internet when she states, “Where is the multiculturalism in multimedia…Where is race in new media?” (324) She then leads to the argument that minorities are indeed represented in new media, but that they are in fact misrepresented, as illustrated with her example of the _New York Times_ ad featuring the African woman carrying a television on her head. While the issue of whether or not this ad is politically correct is debatable, I would not go so far as to extrapolate this depiction of minorities to racism in global media. In my opinion, the exclusion of minorities in media altogether would certainly be racist, but I feel that minorities are in fact neutrally represented in new media. It seems that Nakamura is over-generalizing the instances of false portrayal of minorities on the Internet.
In my opinion, the Internet is immune to racism because there is no way to discern the race or culture of the viewer. There are no racial or cultural barriers to accessing the Internet; no particular race is denied the privilege of going online. A person’s race/ethnicity is unknown and irrelevant when viewing a webpage or entering a chat room. Perhaps I do not fully understand Nakamura’s argument, but I feel that her condemnation of the Internet as racist is a little too aggressive and unsupported by compelling examples.
Of the two camps cited by Lisa Nakamura at the end of ‘Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction,’ it seems that the second is the more useful camp. By useful I mean there is something to be done as a result of adopting the view. The first camp appears headed for a dead end, leading the minority with no choice but to start anew in some sense. This is not to say that the second camp, as characterized by Nakamura, is clear and straightforward.
While “people of color can only bring about ‘genuine change’” by simply “getting online” is certainly a good first step, there should be much more to it than that (332). As noted by Nakamura: “No sane person would contend that once everyone has cable, television will become a truly democratic and racially diverse medium, for we can see that this has not come to pass” (330). Minorities just watching television does not necessarily change what is on television, but it is a step in the right direction. The obvious next step would be taking part in the creation and production of content.
Nakamura cites an example from the film Bamboozled as proof that “the presence of black writers or content producers…fails to guarantee programming” that represents a minority in an authentic, dignified way (330). This may be true in a limited capacity, but it ultimately falls short. If television shows, for example, do not get high enough ratings, they are cancelled despite their content. This is not to say that the content was not good enough, but enough people failed to watch, pointing back to the first step mentioned earlier. Surely, if there is to be content in any form that is authentic to a particular minority group, it would be produced by someone of that same minority group. Otherwise, it seems that in many cases minorities depicted by white content creators would be missing something. The content creators unknowingly project parts of themselves, filling in the gaps. It is not necessarily intentional, but it is inevitable in most cases because of the real-world separation in knowledge and experience.
This viewpoint may seem simplistic, but for a medium to become racially diverse, it seems the most effective path is the same that led it to become white-centric in the first place: people of a certain kind creating things, and in-turn consuming them. But both sides of the equation must be adequately represented. Creation without consumption or consumption without creation leaves us where we already were. Authentic representation cannot be coerced or cajoled by manipulation of the majority, unfortunately.
There is a south park episode about the whole 9/11 conspiracy theory stuff and it ends with somebody saying the US government owns and operates all of the 9/11 conspiracy theory websites, and “the 9/11 conspiracy is a government conspiracy. For a government to have power they must appear to have complete control. What better way to make people fear them than to convince them that they’re capable of the most elaborate plan on earth.” That seems to fit in with the concept of panopticism. I mention this as it seems the internet supplies the government with the perfect architectural apparatus to sustain a supervisor/prisoner relation.
The people of the world are ‘enclosed’ in the digital space (email/phones/etc/etc) and when operating within it we fear the eye of the supervisor could peer at our personal goings-on. This creates a culture of people relating to each other in a fashion lawfully acceptable. This panoptic, subservient public mindset is furthered by the media reporting on NSA’s warrantless surveillance of US citizens. This is also true for RIAA’s almost free-rain on ISP-user information, and Google refusing to hand over search information to the government after three other companies already had.
I really don’t see a way out of this panoptic relationship to our digital selves. Even if the government wasn’t an issue, many people still refuse to use their credit cards online due to a fear of hackers. This ‘we can’t see them, but they are there’ concept is troubling. It completely embodies the concept of the panopticon. I also feel like this mindset was adopted US citizens before its physical form; those tall mech-robot looking police things you see in the parking lots of wal-mart in some towns: http://grandprairiereporter.com/images/2008-04-01_0028_PolicePlatform.jpg (the thing in the background, I couldn’t find a better picture).
Nakaguma, unlike shirky, shifts the attention to other less utopian aspects of the web and focuses on the issues of race and racial stereotypes in cyberspace. She uses the term “cybertype” to explain the ways Internet enables new forms of racism. To her, cybertypes are more than just racial stereotypes “ported” to a new medium, they are images of otherness and racial identities created and played by privileged western users online (e.g. identity tourists in chat communities). (318)
She argues that although online avatars/profiles allow users to claim fluid identities, from Geisha’s to Samurais, yet, race plays an important role in cyberspace communication. Rather than honoring diversity, online users tend to use race and gender as things that could be disposed without consequences. (323) In cyber environments such as second life, identity tourists treat otherness as Halloween costumes: exoticness to enhance whiteness. Nakamura calls this phenomenon a symptom of postcolonial condition and cultural imperialism.
Internet’s “post-body” ideology and post-racial democracy is only a desire for cosmopolitanism, and in reality cannot eliminate racism. Studies have shown that interactions on cyber environments (e.g. second life, games) follow the same biases as in the physical environments because Internet mirrors the social systems of the societies that develop it. Nakamura is skeptical about the promise of Internet to bring multiculturalism. Internet functions as a tourism machine that creates “cosmetic multiculturalism,” but pushes for homogeny and “monoculture of the mind” and it destroys diversity. (324). If Benjamin finds the “aura” of a work of art destroyed by mechanical reproduction, Nakamura finds race real, but “native” destroyed by digital reproduction technology/internet. (330)
While Internet ports the physical social norms into the digital, it also offers means of surveillance, control, and hierarchy. According to Foucault’s 18th century Panopticon prison structure, social systems separate humans to homogenize them into groups with single identities, while the structure make them obedient, conscious and uncertain of the surveillance even when they are not being watched. Foucault depicts our Internet environment where tracking, mapping and vast collection of personal data happens daily. With every single click being observed and categorized online, database marketing groups consumers by location, class, income, age, etc. for personalized target advertising. Even private web entries, comments, or blogs are actually stored in the cloud, easily accessed and monitored. This much control, surveillance, classifications, threatens identity and individuality and reinforces the notion of separated public self from private self.
In Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of digital Reproduction, Nakamura used a very large portion discussing the stereotypes (white/ American?) people have toward other races. And that she pointed out that this kind of separation caused the damages in the relationships among minorities, which I do not really get from my own everyday experience.
In the earlier part of the article, she also stated that the internet is constraining the minority cultures even though it is trying to save it. This is a particular interesting topic for me to see because of where I grew up. As a child, there used to be cartoons with distinctive Chinese traits. Then with the regulation changes, children in Taiwan got to watch cartoons from mainly Japan and America. But back then, because the U.S. was still dominating the market with its technologies, most of the Japanese cartoons carried clear hints of mimicking the American ones in terms of drawing styles. Ten years later when my family came to the U.S., I saw that Japanese cartoons started to take over the market here. Then recently, I saw American kids who like comics draw, of course in Japanese style. In a way, internet did saved some cultures from disappearing. People nowadays can learn other cultures without spending the time or money to actually travel there. But on the other hand, internet also brought competition among cultures. Now the cultures with financial disadvantages are facing the problem that their young people all look up to the well-developed cultures. They like those foreign shows better maybe because they are more fun, maybe because they are more realistic. Chinese culture is going through this exact process. Taiwanese already went through it and, unfortunately, in my opinion, lost the battle. All the fuss about “love your culture, know your background” have all become political slogans. I am holding my breath while I watch China go through this and hope that since they saw what happened in Taiwan, they’d do a better job preserving Chinese culture. But this whole thing is very interesting to watch. I wonder how the world will be like 50 years from now.
I found it striking to compare Foucault and Nakamura. In general, Foucault describes how power wants to regulate and partition individuals so that they will be easier to control. “The formation of the disciplinary society” and the technique of panopticism provide a method of control. Nakamura carries (or “ports”) that theory into cyberspace. The practice she calls “cybertyping” is the same practice Foucault describes as the development of disciplines at the end of the 18th century. Discipline can solve problems like irregularity and heterogeneity because it can “reduce what, in a multiplicity, makes it much less manageable than a unity… it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways” (Foucault 480). The panopticon works because of partitioning, hierarchy of control, and divisions between people. With all its advantages, Foucault exposes the trade-off’s detrimental consequences. In Nakamura’s example of the ad that shows an African woman carrying a TV on her head instead of a basket, the audience is disturbed by an image of someone who has escaped from the Western ideal of the “timeless primitive” (Nakamura 325). The ad shows someone who is “unpredictable,” to use Foucault’s word. The key development in cybertyping, according to Nakamura, is remastering, which she gives a dual meaning as metaphor (to remaster data and convert it from analog to digital format) and also as the literal re-MASTERing of minority groups. Even though many American minorities are legal citizens, the process of remastering is a way to make minorities into an “Other” group by depicting them as “images of ‘exotic’ non-American racial minorities using technology, not American minorities” (Nakamura 325). In this way, remastering is a sinister form of remediation. She writes, “Old media provide the foundation for the ‘new’ and its means of putting race to ‘work’ in the service of particular ideologies are re-invoked, with a twist” (324). This tenet is very similar to the way that the panopticon was more than architecture and more than “the solution of a technical problem,” as Foucault says. “Through [the panopticon], a whole type of society emerges” (478). Both writers observe how technology is much more than a tool; it is a way of controlling people so that those in power have an opposite side of the binary structure to rule over. The world doesn’t seem so open and digital when the same old analog binaries of “us=American” vs. “them=minority” are reinforced in cyberspace.
I’d be curious to hear about how Foucault’s theory is relevant to Marx and the distribution of power. It seems there are clear connections between the theories, but I can’t quite wrap my head around it.
It seems like Nakamura puts in quite a bit of emphasis on the race issue. To me, racial stereotype does not imply at all in the world of internet. My opinion may be biased since I am looking at it from the “minority” perspective, but whether it be forums, blogs, or online gaming, I have never once thought what kind of person might be on the other end of the conversation. I could really careless what age, sex, race, and kind of cultural background that person has. If that person has the information I am looking for, should any of the things that Nakamura mentioned really matter?
Also, not to ignite any flames… but just for the sake of discussion, Shi-Jen mentioned on the earlier post that Taiwanese had lost the battle. I wish for her to elaborate a little more on this point and tell us what battle they had lost, and what battle the Chinese are up against this moment. Also, the style of animation, life styles, and etc, I believe that the more developed the country, the more they are willing to exchange and accept ideas from different culture. This form of free trade of cultural elements, I believe is quite healthy for our society. Both economically, and culturally, our history shows that those countries unwilling to open up to others are the ones that gets left behind the rest of the world. It may appear in the beginning that certain country is being brain washed by the other country’s cultures, but maybe it’s the process of and willingness to accept and embrace the new culture to learn from and ultimately evolving their own. In our super speed information generation, we all must learn to adapt our culture with the other’s, to take that as a mere compromise or a lost cause, would make it very difficult for that country to survive.
Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction introduced many new and interesting concepts to me. On the author talks about new terms being coined due to the invention of the internet and most people probably take terms like “download”, “online” and “cybersex” for granted not thinking about when or who coined these terms. I do think that online identities are “typed”. For instance, if a person’s avatar online is of a black male, another person may see the avatar and assume the person behind the avatar is also a black male. That person may then make judgments about the person behind the avatar according to their own values and experiences in real life. I don’t’ necessarily think the internet will somehow help alleviate our fears and anxieties about other races but I do believe the internet reflects changes in people’s behavior and thinking in real life.
Regarding Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault, I found this reading very difficult. Since the pages we read were only part of Michel Foucault’s book I believe reading the entire book may have helped me to understand his points better. I also felt that because the book was translated, I wondered if that was one of the reasons I found this reading difficult. I would like additional information to better understand why the author is discussing Bentham’s Panopticon as an image of discipline and its effects.
After reading the title of Nakamura’s Cybertyping and the work of race in the Age of digital Reproduction, I thought of Marshall McLuhan’s Playboy interview where he talked about the Negros and Indians having an advantage in a transitional age because of there tribal roots. Nakamura did not talk about the tribal nature of the web or the global village.
My confusion was compounded when she talked about Nakamura’s need to use other methods to describe cultural and social layers of new media. (p.318) Nakamura does not continue with the description of Espen Aarseth’s idea of a new field to support her view of the alternative field. What should an alternative field of study be based on? What would a study of computer technology include to satisfy everyone?
I enjoyed Foucault’s idea of micro power to describe the interplay of power and knowledge. While reading Foucault, I got the impression he did not agree with Karl Marx. (p465) Foucault describes certain characteristics of Marx’s base and supper structure to prove his idea of micro power.
Power plays and important role in his theory of the Panopticon as a way of arranging power focusing on the economics. Panopticon institution seems to have similarities to what web based computer technologies provide? Also, could the principles of the Panopticon and micro power be applied to the web to discipline the predators on the web?
There’s a notion given by Nakamura that the internet privileges those that are white. I think there’s something to be about the ratio of whites to non-white that use the internet, and that the internet (in situations where racism is possible, like with Second Life or avatars) is simply a reflection of those who use it. Is it the “internet’s” fault that those who use it are predominantly white? Wouldn’t it simply be playing into the ratio? Those who advertise on the Oxygen channel or in Elle magazine are not accused of being sexist because they cater to those who are access their information. They are simply playing to the ratio of male to female, and advertising and designing accordingly. The idea of racism seems to be something that can be shoehorned into any subject, because it is a consistent underlying current. My issue with her statements is the tone seems incredibly assaulting. I’d guess one could argue that the internet has a prejudice to those that are blind because it is primarily a visual medium as well. Maybe I’ve lived as a half white, half Mexican long enough to be able to embrace that while racism maybe indeed be an underlying entity, it is only present because of the ratio of those that present. “Mexican” neighborhoods are deemed as much because that is where the Mexican culture has decided to raise their families. Nakamura says, “Cybertyping keeps race ‘real’ using the discourse of the virtual” (330) but, the internet is a reflection of its users, and the cultural discrepancies are prevalent because of numbers, not because of an attitude. Under representation is not racism.
Foucault says “Power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the ‘privilege,’ acquired or preserved, of the dominate class, but the overall effect of its strategic position of those who are dominated” (465) I believe, while some could see it as a compliment to Nakamura’s argument, that this is furthering the idea of ratios. The “power” being exercised is because of the underrepresented ratio. Those who are in the “position of being dominated” are thus because of the lack of numbers. While one could argue that the strategic position of those in power would be to solidify those with less influence, I feel this could be alleviated if the ratio of white to non-white was different.
Nakamura discusses how the Internet shapes our perceptions of race and identity in “Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction”. While she makes an interesting argument that racism is prevalent on the Internet, I find it difficult to agree with her.
Nakamura seems to contradict herself when describing the representation of minorities on the Internet. She suggests that minorities are underrepresented in media, particularly on the Internet when she states, “Where is the multiculturalism in multimedia…Where is race in new media?” (324) She then leads to the argument that minorities are indeed represented in new media, but that they are in fact misrepresented, as illustrated with her example of the _New York Times_ ad featuring the African woman carrying a television on her head. While the issue of whether or not this ad is politically correct is debatable, I would not go so far as to extrapolate this depiction of minorities to racism in global media. In my opinion, the exclusion of minorities in media altogether would certainly be racist, but I feel that minorities are in fact neutrally represented in new media. It seems that Nakamura is over-generalizing the instances of false portrayal of minorities on the Internet.
In my opinion, the Internet is immune to racism because there is no way to discern the race or culture of the viewer. There are no racial or cultural barriers to accessing the Internet; no particular race is denied the privilege of going online. A person’s race/ethnicity is unknown and irrelevant when viewing a webpage or entering a chat room. Perhaps I do not fully understand Nakamura’s argument, but I feel that her condemnation of the Internet as racist is a little too aggressive and unsupported by compelling examples.
Of the two camps cited by Lisa Nakamura at the end of ‘Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction,’ it seems that the second is the more useful camp. By useful I mean there is something to be done as a result of adopting the view. The first camp appears headed for a dead end, leading the minority with no choice but to start anew in some sense. This is not to say that the second camp, as characterized by Nakamura, is clear and straightforward.
While “people of color can only bring about ‘genuine change’” by simply “getting online” is certainly a good first step, there should be much more to it than that (332). As noted by Nakamura: “No sane person would contend that once everyone has cable, television will become a truly democratic and racially diverse medium, for we can see that this has not come to pass” (330). Minorities just watching television does not necessarily change what is on television, but it is a step in the right direction. The obvious next step would be taking part in the creation and production of content.
Nakamura cites an example from the film Bamboozled as proof that “the presence of black writers or content producers…fails to guarantee programming” that represents a minority in an authentic, dignified way (330). This may be true in a limited capacity, but it ultimately falls short. If television shows, for example, do not get high enough ratings, they are cancelled despite their content. This is not to say that the content was not good enough, but enough people failed to watch, pointing back to the first step mentioned earlier. Surely, if there is to be content in any form that is authentic to a particular minority group, it would be produced by someone of that same minority group. Otherwise, it seems that in many cases minorities depicted by white content creators would be missing something. The content creators unknowingly project parts of themselves, filling in the gaps. It is not necessarily intentional, but it is inevitable in most cases because of the real-world separation in knowledge and experience.
This viewpoint may seem simplistic, but for a medium to become racially diverse, it seems the most effective path is the same that led it to become white-centric in the first place: people of a certain kind creating things, and in-turn consuming them. But both sides of the equation must be adequately represented. Creation without consumption or consumption without creation leaves us where we already were. Authentic representation cannot be coerced or cajoled by manipulation of the majority, unfortunately.
There is a south park episode about the whole 9/11 conspiracy theory stuff and it ends with somebody saying the US government owns and operates all of the 9/11 conspiracy theory websites, and “the 9/11 conspiracy is a government conspiracy. For a government to have power they must appear to have complete control. What better way to make people fear them than to convince them that they’re capable of the most elaborate plan on earth.” That seems to fit in with the concept of panopticism. I mention this as it seems the internet supplies the government with the perfect architectural apparatus to sustain a supervisor/prisoner relation.
The people of the world are ‘enclosed’ in the digital space (email/phones/etc/etc) and when operating within it we fear the eye of the supervisor could peer at our personal goings-on. This creates a culture of people relating to each other in a fashion lawfully acceptable. This panoptic, subservient public mindset is furthered by the media reporting on NSA’s warrantless surveillance of US citizens. This is also true for RIAA’s almost free-rain on ISP-user information, and Google refusing to hand over search information to the government after three other companies already had.
I really don’t see a way out of this panoptic relationship to our digital selves. Even if the government wasn’t an issue, many people still refuse to use their credit cards online due to a fear of hackers. This ‘we can’t see them, but they are there’ concept is troubling. It completely embodies the concept of the panopticon. I also feel like this mindset was adopted US citizens before its physical form; those tall mech-robot looking police things you see in the parking lots of wal-mart in some towns: http://grandprairiereporter.com/images/2008-04-01_0028_PolicePlatform.jpg (the thing in the background, I couldn’t find a better picture).
Nakaguma, unlike shirky, shifts the attention to other less utopian aspects of the web and focuses on the issues of race and racial stereotypes in cyberspace. She uses the term “cybertype” to explain the ways Internet enables new forms of racism. To her, cybertypes are more than just racial stereotypes “ported” to a new medium, they are images of otherness and racial identities created and played by privileged western users online (e.g. identity tourists in chat communities). (318)
She argues that although online avatars/profiles allow users to claim fluid identities, from Geisha’s to Samurais, yet, race plays an important role in cyberspace communication. Rather than honoring diversity, online users tend to use race and gender as things that could be disposed without consequences. (323) In cyber environments such as second life, identity tourists treat otherness as Halloween costumes: exoticness to enhance whiteness. Nakamura calls this phenomenon a symptom of postcolonial condition and cultural imperialism.
Internet’s “post-body” ideology and post-racial democracy is only a desire for cosmopolitanism, and in reality cannot eliminate racism. Studies have shown that interactions on cyber environments (e.g. second life, games) follow the same biases as in the physical environments because Internet mirrors the social systems of the societies that develop it. Nakamura is skeptical about the promise of Internet to bring multiculturalism. Internet functions as a tourism machine that creates “cosmetic multiculturalism,” but pushes for homogeny and “monoculture of the mind” and it destroys diversity. (324). If Benjamin finds the “aura” of a work of art destroyed by mechanical reproduction, Nakamura finds race real, but “native” destroyed by digital reproduction technology/internet. (330)
While Internet ports the physical social norms into the digital, it also offers means of surveillance, control, and hierarchy. According to Foucault’s 18th century Panopticon prison structure, social systems separate humans to homogenize them into groups with single identities, while the structure make them obedient, conscious and uncertain of the surveillance even when they are not being watched. Foucault depicts our Internet environment where tracking, mapping and vast collection of personal data happens daily. With every single click being observed and categorized online, database marketing groups consumers by location, class, income, age, etc. for personalized target advertising. Even private web entries, comments, or blogs are actually stored in the cloud, easily accessed and monitored. This much control, surveillance, classifications, threatens identity and individuality and reinforces the notion of separated public self from private self.