Identity, Race & Ethnicity in Cyberspace

Responsibility & Ethnicity• In face to face culture we represent

ourselves• In media culture we represent others• Ethical Responsibility to provide fair

and accurate representations• Example of using photography in

publicity material• Stock photography libraries

Identity as subject matter

• History of representation of identity• Velasquez’s rockeby venus• Ana Voog• Women making art documenting

their relationship to disability, health, and their bodies

• Jo Spence

Identity online• Examples of communities where

identity is played out under various constraints

• http://www.habbohotel.com/habbo/en/

• http://www.lambdamoo.info/

Ethnicity & The Network Society

• Ethnicity is probably more of an economic issue than in the pre-network society (Manuel Castells)

• Paranoia about the dilution of white western values and identity

• Association of this dilution with technology and globalisation

• Conflation of AI, Aliens, Cyborgs and Ethnic aliens

Lisa Nakamura’s Cybertypes

• The Internet IS a socially transformative force but the question is:– what does it transform? And– what is the specific nature of the transformation?

• Because the internet is above all a rhetorical and discursive space - in order to assess its potential to be socially transformative in terms of race - it is necessary not just to:– examine the conditions for communication online

but also to – trace the process by which cyberspace engenders

'cybertypes'

Race in Cyberspace• Questions the idea that cyberspace is

a race (and therefore racism) free zone• Notes the absence of race identifers in

most MUD environments• Witnesses the refusal to address issues

of Race and ethnicity in many online environments

• Problematises the idea of the disembodied self online

Themes from Race in Cyberspace

• The connection between identity, language and race especially in text based environments

• Online Nationalism• Language online and cyber-english• Connections between access to

technology and funding for education• Black Characters as mediators between

the real and the virtual in popular film• Beth E Kolko’s Race-aware MOO

Race, Cyberspace and Film - David Crane:

• Hollywood has tried to mediate between filmic conventions and narratives and those of cyberspace

• Cyberspace can be seen as being another incarnation of the idea of the “other” - that is space other than real space

• Racial otherness has been used consistently in hollywood film in conjunction with the otherness of cyberspace

Street as metaphor• The street is identified as the place

where the conjunction of real and virtual space can be understood and mediated

• Mystical comparisons made (e.g. voodoo in Gibson)

• Ethnicity - and mixed ethnicity as metaphors for human relationship to technology

Black Characters:• identified with the street• bridge the divide between real

and virtual space• Mediate between virtual and real

space• find the ‘real’ in virtual space• Negotiate between film language

and computer language

Films cited by Crane

• Hackers• Jumpin’ Jack Flash• Virtuosity• Strange Days• Johnny Nmemonic

Themes in Nakamura

How Race gets coded for different kinds of work

• e.g. foreign workers: good information workers - African Americans: digital outsiders

• and we can see that racial minority is used to code for 'good information worker' and may in the process obscure the more complex picture of a digital divide

• racial difference is thus represented as decorative, exotic and distant

in user to user interaction• racial passing and identity tourism

– "users ... perpetuate old mythologies about racial difference”

– in the context of the fluidity of postmodern identity, Nakamura suggests that "...only too often does one person's liberation constitute another's recontainment within the realm of racialised discourse”

– "... people of colour have always been postmodern ... if postmodernism is ... that way of seeing subjectivity as decentered, fragmented, and marginalised" while "popular figuration as the primitive ... positions them ... in the nostalgic world of the premodern.”

– "being raced in cyberspace is doubly disorientating”

Representations of cyberspace in television and print advertising

• western computer user as tourist• quasi anthropological visual language in

the style of national geographic • references colonial discourse and the

priviledged western gaze.

Menu driven identities

• user to interface relations• web site registration that insists on limited descriptions of

ethnic origin• denies mestiza consciousness• serves a racist ideology which benefits from solid and

simplistic notions of race.• Cybertyping corporate interfaces are juxtaposed with

ethnic identity email jokes where users share a more fluid sense of racial identity

• "America is not the only place where 'digital divides' separate the 'roadkill' from the digerati'

Cyberspace narratives

• popular and master narratives about cyberspace as evidenced in muds and moos are traced back to cyberpunk narratives including: blade runner, neuromancer, snow crash & the matrix

• from techno orientalism to racial hybridity• Blade runner, neuromancer + snow crash

evoke a culture that looks asian and specifically japanese.they dipict a multi-cultural pan-asian future

Cyberspace narratives…• paradoxically antique + futuristic• scrambled racial landscape gets unscrambled in

cyberspace fictions.• white heros as american underdogs - keep racial

boundaries intact.• Asian characters supply the props but stay hidden.

in identity switching in neuromancer gender is explored but not race

• Nakamura suggests that this is because questioning race would be too disorientatng and would undermine many of early cyberpunk's coding of orientalism as technological and futuristic.

Blade Runner• In Blade Runner the androids are enslaved

yet also idealised and white• Asian imagery used to cyberfy

Snow Crash

• Snow Crash on the other hand– is pan asian and

parodies gibson's use of japanese stye– In Hiro he creates both a post racial identity +

and retains the Japanese reference– Nations disappear and re-emerge as ethnic

groups operated by franchise - Franchise Organised Quasi National Identity

Matrix• morpheus to neo as tonto to lone ranger• nebuchadnezzers crew as ideal community• Keanu Reeves as ‘stealth’ minority• Neo envisages world without boundaries• the one rather than community• the lone white hacker• Oracle - a sign that black women can’t be fitted into the new

vision - oracle as mammie• the characters change their class but not their race - this is read

as evidence of residual self image - what users want - rather than who they are - is possible - but race seems to be seen as an essential part of the self whereas class is not.

• why does the film not address this when the characters can change any part of themselves - and when race is not a fixed construct

• when barriers between mind and body blur - race is used as something constant

Questions • can whites continue to be master in the face of

globalisation and racial/cultural hybridity• will machines win by making us their agents• can the notion of lone hero be replaced by community +

consensus• Are the real ways in which cyberspace can be

transformative through social action to address digital divides?

• Paradox: Many people think that in the future race will disappear and yet we seem to increasingly feel that ethnic identity should be valued and celebrated not ignored and neglected.