Nakamura, Lisa - Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet

[oyceter]

I may get parts of this book (2002) confused with Digitizing Race (2008, also by Nakamura) or Race in Cyberspace (2000, co-edited by Nakamura), as I read all of them together.

From my vague impressions of scholarship on race and online communities, Nakamura's one of the first people who really started writing about race and the Internet. Prior to this and to Nakamura's other work, I think there was a fair amount about gender and the Internet, in terms of how the Internet impacted gender identification, acting out gender online, and etc, but not much on race.

Nakamura comes from a background in visual studies, and this book is less ethnographic and far more culture-focused. She analyzes the portrayal of race in works that affect how we think about the Internet, such as the fun times of Asian landscapes and languages without the actual people in Gibson's Neuromancer and Bladerunner and how later on, we get more mixed-race Asian protagonists (Matrix, Snow Crash). I very much liked her reading of the Matrix, particularly of Agent Smith as white male kyriarchy, but can't comment much on the others, as I only vaguely remember the Gibson and Bladerunner and have never read Stephenson.

She also dissects some of the early ads for Internet access, starting from MCI's apparently famous "Anthem" ad, which claims the Internet as a space free of those pesky things like gender and race. I am sure you all laugh bitterly at this. She notes that there's a great deal of what she calls cybertourism involved in many of them, in which the ads posit that the viewer is white, middle-class, and American and contrast that audience to the people in the ads, who are frequently POC from countries in the Global South dressed in their "traditional" wear and often posed next to animals like elephants and camels and etc.

Kali Tal (link below) notes that Nakamura is much better with Asian stuff than she is with Black stuff, and I dearly want to read a book by someone well-versed in cyberculture and African-American studies and how the latter applies to the former, as mentioned in the review.

I vaguely remember that I disagreed with some things in the book, but final papers took up my mind and I forgot. It was also kind of funny reading it, because I felt like constantly saying, "Dude, people on my reading list could tell you that" when she left media analysis and started talking about online spaces.

Interesting groundwork for the field, rather dated, and not broad enough in terms of coverage (as noted, she's good with Asian. Anything other than that tends to get the shaft).

Links:
- Kali Tal has a way better review than I do

Comments

[nojojojo]

She also dissects some of the early ads for Internet access, starting from MCI's apparently famous "Anthem" ad, which claims the Internet as a space free of those pesky things like gender and race. I am sure you all laugh bitterly at this.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... ::bitter sigh::

[oyceter]

I KNOW! Oh, I know!

[damned_colonial]

I'd never seen the MCI ad before (I wasn't in the US at the time) so here it is online: http://www.vimeo.com/2445340

[oyceter]

Ohhh, thanks for the link! I've never seen it either, so that is good to have.

[oracne]

This sounds really interesting--as you said, I don't mind reading "dated" books because they lay the groundwork for the later stuff.

Was the book primarily about fandom, or was that just part of a larger focus on race on the internet?

[oyceter]

It actually wasn't about fandom at all, even though it touched on SF books and movies and how they influence the ideas about the Internet.

I'm still waiting for a nice fat book on fandom and race...

[glass_icarus]

thanks for the link; it was fabulous. :)

[oyceter]

Isn't it just? I love her other pieces as well.

[lady_ganesh]

Mmmmmmm, Hiro Protagonist. But I read that years ago and I was never as sensitive to positive fetishization as to the negative stuff.

I cannot for the life of me remember anything particularly Asian in Neuromancer, but I'm also realizing I remember almost nothing about the book at all. If anyone reading these comments does remember and wants to throw me a bone, I would love them forever.

[oyceter]

I have no idea either! I don't remember the book at all, and now I don't even remember what Nakamura said about the book. I think Molly (the girl with the weird glasses?) is Asian maybe?

[lady_ganesh]

I think maybe, yes. And I remember being SO, SO THRILLED that the lead was not only non-white, but mixed-race, that it may have blinded me. :D