Response to Kristin Arola’s “It’s My Revolution: Learning to See the Mixedblood.”

I chose to respond to the Arola piece this week because it allowed me to situate myself in a research interest I’ve had for over a year. The close reading of the three mixedblood individuals’ MySpace profiles was certainly an update from the readings of primarily textual representations of individuals in Nakamura’s Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the internet.

Still, there were many issues that Arola raised that were similar to Nakamura. When Arola writes that “being seen as mixed-blood Indian…is often an even messier, if not impossible endeavor” (214), she is echoing Nakamura. Nakamura writes “Nowhere is there a box for ‘hyphenated’ identities” (121) and earlier, that “This limits the ways that race can happen in cyberspace and also denies the possibility of a mestizo consciousness on these sites” (102). Occupying multiple ethnicities is messy because it can not only limit, but eliminate identity. I’m curious as to in what capacity digital platform participation, invisibly and quietly, works to erase parts of our identity. In what ways are we conscious of this day to day? In what ways do we actively challenge this like Erica in the Arola piece?

I want to keep making connections between the Arola and the Nakamura, but I want to state my research interest now so that whoever happens to read this can understand the things that I may be indirectly implying as I make the connections. Quite a while back I began to think about how sexuality is represented on Facebook. Queer culture is extremely concerned with gesture and visual representation. Further, heteronormativity is extremely concerned with gesture and visual representation. I want to talk to LGBT undergraduate or graduate students about how they represent their sexuality graphically and textually on Facebook. I want to know whether they see that space as a “safe space” or a “closet.” This is important work because as we integrate technology and social media more and more into our classrooms, it is important to see how students, population to population, view those spaces. Engaging as many perspectives as possible is necessary to understand the implication of integrating such spaces into the classroom space.

Arola writes that on MySpace, “[t]here is no option for checking more than one race” (220). I wonder if the identity tourism that Nakamura speaks of is something that we may actually have to take part in for ourselves in order to occupy “more than one race.” Further, I wonder if some spaces are safer for mixedbloods than others. I wonder if some spaces are safer for one blood, other spaces for other blood. I wonder if we may take part in multiple social media spaces because that is the only means of representing ourselves as mixedblood, as occupying those spaces in-between. Perhaps we are more one part of ourselves than another in particular spaces because for one part of us that space is “safe” and for the other it is the silent “closet.”

As I mentioned earlier, Nakamura focuses a lot on chatroom spaces, touring identity through largely text generating platforms. Arola updates our lens on race and cyberspace by looking at a platform that uses graphics. “I assert that the materiality inferred in concepts of regalia are important for understanding online representations of self, representations encouraged by the various social-networking platforms with which we engage” (214). Arola focuses a lot on the visual in examining the three individuals on MySpace. She writes that “to look at mixedbloods online expressions through regalia is to examine the material complexities of identifying as mixedblood both on and offline” (214) and further, that “[r]egalia firmly positions one within a shifting continuum of embodied identities. The act of identification continues to change, just as some powwow dancers change their regalia…” (219). Arola proposes that identity in online space can be seen as regalia. “To understand online identity as regalia is to understand it as an embodied visible act that evolves and changes, and that represents one’s history, one’s community, and one’s self within that particular moment” (218). I liked how Arola discusses the changes that she saw in Jamie’s MySpace as well as how Erica has negotiatied representing herself as mixedblood as she generates graphic and textual representations.

When Nakamura discusses the email about the Japanese-American, she discusses how it actually proves the utopic claim that the internet would detach race from the body. Because platforms such as MySpace, Instagram, Facebook, and increasingly, Twitter are so reliant on the generation of graphic representation, it becomes more impossible to detach the body. The body becomes race. “Body-related identities such as race and gender are not yet as fluid and thus disposable as much cybertheory and commercial discourse would like to see them” (Nakamura 10). Nakamura’s claim that we need to “scrutinize the deployment of race online as well as the ways that Internet use can figure as a racialized practice” (30) is especially valid beyond creating an avatar and occupying chatrooms. Let’s consider the everyday social media spaces. What kinds of regalia, what kinds of visual acts on these spaces are being performed and evolving for not only marginalized mixedbloods, races, and genders, but for queer minorities as well?

Book Summary for Nakamura

Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.

Main Takeaway:  The internet and the “real world” are not separate. The internet affects the formation and molding of identities (race, gender, etc) just as these identities inform the internet.

Direct Citations:

“Nonetheless, it is precisely because cyberspace studies have, in the short lifespan of five years, consistently overlooked, elided, and just plain ignored race and racialism that they bear examining today” (137).

“Race is under construction in cyberspace” (134).

“…users bring stereotyped notions of racial identity into cyberspaces with them when they construct online personae” (61).

Summary:

Lisa Nakamura, in her introduction, explains that her book will look at what happened to race when race went online and especially how our ideas about “race, ethnicity, and identity continue to be shaped and reshaped every time we log on” (xi). Nakamura is curious, like other scholars, as to whether the internet can propogate new and nonracist spaces or whether the Net is a reflection of our culture at large. She states that she will examine how rhetorical conditions create particular situations on the Net and especially how these situations create cybertypes. Racial cybertyping operations in different rhetorical spaces are the focus of each chapter.

In her first chapter, Nakamura asks us to consider the conceptual framework and terminology that will aid us in the exploration of cybertyping. There are two layers to new media: cultural and computer. The terminology we must use must borrow from the language of computer. She describes her coining of the term “cybertype to describe the distinctive ways that the Internet propogates, disseminates and commodifies images of race and racism” (3). Cybertypes stabilize the white identity that is threatened by the separation of mind and body on the internet. Nakamura says that body-related identities are not as fluid and more disposable. Digital reproduction enables new iterations of race and racism (15). “The weblike media complex of images of the racialized other as primitive, exotic, irremediably different and fixed in time is an old song, one that the Internet has remastered or retrofit in digitally reproducible ways” (18). Nakamura believes we have been ignoring critical examination of cybertyping. She explores the fact that in tech spaces we get a false sense that we are working in diverse workspaces because so many people are hired from other countries. She also explains that access does not mean equality is reached.

In Chapter 2, Nakamura explores identity tourism and racial passing in online spaces, specifically in chat spaces. Many utopians claim that race, gender, age, and ability are erased in online spaces, but Nakamura shows that these are all very much apparent through avatars, usernames and other information users elicit. She discusses that chat spaces allow our wishes to come true, from who/what we want to be to what we decide to reveal, even in as simple as a username (33). At first there seemed to be a default whiteness, unless one decided to inscribe something other. But then the web became more graphic and avatars became more popular: we could customize a graphic representation. Internet users perform their bodies as text and image; we can represent ourselves as a different gender, age, race, or sexual orientation. Whether race is an option or not in online spaces, it is still “written,” as Nakamura explains. Identity, in many spaces, is what is created/established first. Even though players in LambdaMOO don’t mention race they technically assert it in other things they reveal. Some appropriate a different racial identity which is identity tourism. Nakamura’s “Prosthetic Borders” section was interesting and I think, publically relevant. The battle over borders are over encryption, the right of a private individual to transmit and receive information freely, and the right of government to monitor dangerous material. Nakmura also explores default whiteness in online spaces and how skin color can limit someone. In her section on graphic chat, Nakamura discusses her experiences with Chat Connect and how many people were preferring lighter skin. She discusses how race has become more of an elective in cyberspaces. She finishes her chapter by discussing identity tourism again. Tourists occupy two positions: native and tourist.  They can never, however, actually know the other through tourism. Identity tourism widens the gap between the other and the one performing other. Tourism solidifies the fact that the tourists are better off being themselves.

Chapter 3 explores how multiculturalism is approached in cyberfictions. Nakamura begins the chapter by discussing how we bring stereotyped notions of racial identity into cyberspaces. When we read cyberpunk, we are given a false sense of postracialism.  Nakamura spends the majority of the chapter exploring a few cyberpunk texts. She discusses how a lot of texts will use Asian imagery in order to “cyberfy” themselves. Future is often cybertyped with traditional signifiers of the oriental. The lack of nonwhite characters, especially protaganists, in texts that seem to be multicultural shows the limitations of cyberpunk as a genre when it comes to representing ethnic and racial diversity in meaningful ways (65). Nakamura says that race and cyberspace are consensual hallucinations. First generation cyberpunk texts cybertypes extensively, but second generation texts acknowledge a racial hybridity while still relying on a system of racial cybertyping. Second generation at least allow othered characters to be more than extras or minor characters. An extensive analysis of how this is done in The Matrix follows.

In chapter 4, Nakamura discusses ads, which stabilize anxieties technology and cyberspace breaks down ethnic and racial difference. The ads selling internet promote the idea that getting online will liberate one from one’s body. Sights associated with tourism are used in which third world and first world differences are illuminated in order to affirm the Western user’s identity; the foreignness of the other is exploited so that we can “retain our positions as privileged tourists and users” (95). The advertising is dependent upon the other in order to sell the product.

Nakamura then focuses on how interfaces force race online. She discusses mestiza consciousness and assertion, how lists where one checks one’s identity sets identities up as “discrete and separate from each other…[asking us] to choose ‘what’ they are, and allows only one choice at a time” (104), and how whiteness is very much a default option. Race cannot be wiped out of the web. She discusses the underrepresentation of blacks online as users and builders, causing interfaces to offer choices tailored to whites. Nakamura says that the web “boils down to the need for expanded minority access and representation…critical reexamination of…the factors that make the web as it exists today an inhospitable place for minorities” (116). She then discusses how if something cannot be clicked then that part of someone’s identity does not exist. She lastly analyzes a chain email of what it means to participate in a “you know you’re ____ if…” In Nakamura’s conclusion she considers reasons as to why issues of race have not been explored in cyberspace studies and other related disciplines: cyberspace has been whitinized, cyberspace has been around for only 5 or 6 years, and people of color are underrepresented in higher education. Even those people of color who are in higher ed are expected to do other things related to race that would not allow them to explore these issues. Nakamura finishes her conclusion by stating that it is essential for us to realize that offline life and life in cyberspace are rooted in one another and that our histories are conditioned by them.

Issues:

Tourism: Nakamura says that “Being another for a short while convinces the vacationers that they are really better off being themselves. The authenticity and integrity of their real identities are never called into question; rather they are solidified and reinforced by their forays into roleplaying” (58). I think that Nakamura makes a lot of generalized assumptions about what it means to tour or role-play. I’ve actually seen a lot of growth in student writing by asking them to do something similar in writing. I’ve seen changes in their writing by doing this…seen their craft make changes I did not lecture on or point out in published writing. The issue is that aside from the Internet, or a course in which the curriculum asks a student to write from, or live from, an othered perspective, there really aren’t any safe spaces to do this. It actually does challenge the integrity of their real identities, challenges the authenticity of self. By role-playing, I think we can actually learn about ourselves.

Burden of Representativity: “When scholars of color are hired, they are often expected to bear the burden of ‘representativity’—to represent their race in the teaching of minority literatures and culture” (140). Victor Villanueva and I got on this topic the other day about LGBT and other minority instructors, how we make assumptions that they want to teach within the scope of what we can either physically identify on their bodies or know of them as being a part of their identities. There is something to be said about what is physical. We are constantly looking for markers that signal a category we can place people into. We assume that sole marker we can see (or know) is precisely who they are, as if it in and of itself is that person. I think that the internet has enabled this profiling. As the internet has become more visual/graphic, it is easier for bodily markers to become more important in profiling.

Reed's Digitized Lives Summary Part 2

Summary:

In Reed’s sixth chapter of Digitized Lives, he focuses on the impact of digital culture on politics. He opens by asking, really, whether people are more involved in politics because of digital spaces like the Internet. Reed discusses that the are positive and negative implications with the intersection of the Internet and politics, highlighting electronic voting and fraud, first and then digital campaigning. An interesting study he cited was that of Cass Sunstein’s, who “argues that most people using the Web to follow politics do not seek out a variety of perspectives, but instead seek out information and opinion sources that match their existing ideological biases” (123). Regardless of whether the web does or does not help citizens gain political awareness, Reed believes that “it is a dangerous disservice to democracy to fail to use the opportunities provided by the Web” (124). The dispute remains as to how much political information on the Internet impacts people. Reed then discusses that digital technology can affect the government in tremendous ways, discussing the bringing down of authoritarian regimes and using the Web to spy on and track down dissenters. He notes the Arab Spring Revolutions, the Occupy movement, and countries such as Iran, China, and Eastern Europe that have used the Web to their advantage (125-126). Reed then examines social movements affected by the Web.  He discusses Wiki-leaking, live streaming, and slacktivism that is made possible. “Digital social movement activity includes both new ways to accomplish older forms of organizing, and truly new forms only possible in the Internet era” (129). Reed cautions that despite the fact that positive possibilities gained from the Internet, it has also created space for “white supremacist, anti-immigrant, Islamo-phobic, sexist and homophobic groups” (131). He also discusses activist movements/platforms made possible such as OccupyWallStreet and HarassMap. Reed distinguishes between three terms (hactivism, wiki-leaking, and cyberterrorism), hactivism including electronic or digital civic disobedience. The Wall-The World was also

discussed at the end of the chapter, which seemed really interesting.

            In Chapter Seven, Reed explores the impact of digital games on culture. One interesting theory he discussed at the beginning of this chapter was assemblage theory, that “game characters are both pixels and bits of us, not people in little virtual worlds separated from us, but human creations that recreate us as we become in some sense absorbed, cyborg-like, into game worlds (142). He discusses different types of digital gaming and mentions that women actually represent a larger population within the demographic of gamers than do teenage boys. Reed discusses how games are teaching devices and then launches into whether games make people more violent, especially in light of the fact that sometimes the “real” world and the game world aren’t always super distinguishable. He says that there still isn’t enough evidence/correlation/research that gaming has a positive or negative effect on the brain. Reed discusses the links between the military and gaming and how both have affected each other.  He noted something that I noted when the war in Iraq began, that reporters were reporting in the trenches and literally “embedded,” giving the viewer an entirely different position, which renders the concept of war as playful (148). Interestingly, virtual reality and video war games are being sued to treat PTSD veterans and soldiers. Reed then discusses the racism, sexism, xenophobia and homophobia in games. He discusses health issues wrought from playing, the lack of female leads, misrepresentation, race and issues with Lara Croft. “[I]t is a reflection of political timidity that we have game ratings for violence and harsh language, but no ratings for racism, sexism or homophobia” (157). Reed discusses issues with new races really just perpetuating current issues with racism. He concludes his chapter by stating that there are a lot of possibilities for social transformation with games (160).

            In Chapter Eight, Reed discusses how technology affects our children and their learning. In the beginning he makes a good point that just because we can access information much quicker, it does not make that information knowledge and that knowledge, likewise, is not wisdom (164). I was impressed with the section on digital learning where Reed laid out the fact that over 90% of the time students are spending online is with their same friends/people they do offline. I was also impressed with the amount of time children spend online. He explains that computers allow teachers to spend more time in face-to-face and personal interaction with students. Computers can also make teaching to the test more engaging. Reed then discusses how digital technology can help us cater to different learning needs and modes of learning. One interesting thing Reed said was that “Standardization is taking place not because of computers, but computers facilitate or provide a rationale for this kind of unimaginative pedagogy” (171) and I think there is a lot of truth to this…it allows us to measure and graph in unimaginable ways…we get instant results. While Reed does say that online teaching has brought us to think more about pedagogy (172), I don’t necessarily agree. The rest of the chapter is dedicating to thinking about MOOCs, the “business” of education, and financial implications in digitizing education.

            Chapter Nine presented some fascinating statistics on access to the internet. As 70% of the world’s population have no engagement with digital culture, Reed says there are three broad lacks that shape this stat: lack of economic resources, lack of information relavant to cultural groups, and lack of computer literacy skills (180). Reed explains that the digital divide, focusing a lot on access, is not just one thing, but divides within its divide. That English still dominates the Net, Andrew Carver’s believe that the digital divide is the human rights issue of this century, and access dominate the first section of this chapter.  Warschauer’s chart is discussed, which shows four levels that are key to the digital inclusion project: physical resources (focus on getting required hardware and software), digital resources (content addressed particularly for that particular set of users), human resources (people who can provide proper training in techno literacies), and social resources (model users and support networks to break reticence) (185-187). Reed explains that sustained access, high-speed internet, funding, government support, and community members with vision are necessary for inclusion. Digital inclusion matters because “[d]igital technologies and the nearly instantaneous transnational communication links they enable have been almost universally cited as a key factor in the economic, political and cultural processes that make up contemporary ‘globalization’” (193). At the end of the book, Reed states that the benefits of digital media can only be realized when we take responsibility for digital divides.

Main Argument:

The digital divide is multifaceted and complex, divides persisting even within the divide itself, and we must do our part to ensure those divides do not take a life of their own, as they perpetuate stigma, othering, and cultural norms that can be forever in/visible.

Three Quotes:

“Continuing elements of sexism, racism, homophobia and other socially destructive elements of contemporary games will not go away automatically, any more than they will go away automatically in the wider social world” (159).

“More generally, is militainment making it more difficult for the general citizenry to sort out justifications for war and blurring the line between civilian and military roles?” (150).

“Why does digital inclusion matter so much? Digital technoloiges and the nearly instantaneous transnational communication links they enable have been almost universally cited as a key factor in the economic, political and cultural processes that make up contemporary ‘globalization’” (193).

Two Compelling Arguments:

When Reed discusses education and computers I felt that he did make some interesting points.  He explains that computers allow teachers to spend more time face-to-face, to pay close attention to individual students, and to find new means of teaching to the test.  He also discusses how online teaching asks teachers to think “more carefully” about their pedagogy. I disagree with a lot of these points. Foremost, I think that in this section Reed focuses a lot on the term “computers” as opposed to the digital pedagogies that teachers utilize. He mentions multi-modal outcomes but doesn’t spend a great deal explaining what he means. It seemed like the idea of teachers spending more time face-to-face was to say that teachers use computers to keep other students busy while they focus on individual issues, which is fair, but I’ve seen a lot of instructors use computers to make their classrooms less interactive. And the idea of online teachers rethinking their pedagogy more carefully is a major issue. So many instructors, grad student or not, are thrown into teaching online without any training whatsoever. A lot of thought and care needs to go into designing a course like that, and actually, a lot more time than one would think.  But, all too often, instructors essentially create self-directed courses with little to no interaction that turn into a space for students to essentially memorize and regurgitate information by a particular date in order to pass.

When Reed stated that in the US children 8 to 18 spend on average nearly 8 hours online, I was shocked.  I remember this figure being quite high when I was beginning college but I had no idea that it had risen to nearly 8 hours. When I see children in elementary school with cell phones and laptops, and perhaps it is because of when and where I grew up, I feel a rock in my stomach. Whatever happened to physical play and to learning actually physically with others through conversation and interaction? I’m curious as to if others in class would agree that Reed doesn’t answer one of his initial questions at the start of Chapter 8: “[A]re [our students] a generation of informed, active learners with different, but, perhaps, better ways of gaining and making knowledge?” (163). I’m curious because the youth in my family are quite digitally apt. By the age of 2, all of my cousins’ children (and there are 5 of them), are quite proficient in operating an iPhone or iPad while having a conversation about something entirely unrelated to the game they are playing better. What makes their interaction and their learning better? Is it?