Digitizing race: visual cultures of the Internet

TLDR

In the 1990s neoliberalism spurred the Internet’s rapid uptake while discouraging public discussion of racial politics, and scholars praised text‑driven interfaces as a solution to racial intolerance, today visual media increasingly reveal and showcase racial, ethnic, and gender identities. The study investigates the emergence of race‑, ethnicity‑, and gender‑identified visual cultures on the Internet through case studies of pregnancy websites, instant messaging, online petitions, and quizzes. The author analyzes these phenomena through case studies of pregnancy websites, instant messaging, online petitions, and quizzes. Nakamura finds that users of color and women actively produce and articulate virtual communities, avatar bodies, and racial politics, countering Hollywood’s portrayal of nonwhite nonmales as passive consumers.

Abstract

In the nineties, neoliberalism simultaneously provided the context for the Internets 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. Todays 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 peoples 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 contrarywith examples ranging from Jennifer Lopez music videos; films including the Matrix trilogy, Gattaca, and Minority Report; and online joke sitesthat 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 Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet and coeditor, with Beth Kolko and Gilbert Rodman, of Race in Cyberspace.