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.