Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Volume 23) (Electronic Mediations)

Nakamura, Lisa

ISBN 10: 0816646139 / ISBN 13: 9780816646135

Published by Univ Of Minnesota Press (edition 1), 2007

About this Item

It's a well-cared-for item that has seen limited use. The item may show minor signs of wear. All the text is legible, with all pages included. It may have slight markings and/or highlighting.

Seller Inventory # 0816646139-11-1

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Volume 23) (Electronic Mediations)
• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press (edition 1)
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816646139
• ISBN 13: 9780816646135
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: 1.
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

In the nineties, neoliberalism simultaneously provided the context for the Internet’s 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. Today’s 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 people’s 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 contrary—with examples ranging from Jennifer Lopez music videos; films including the Matrix trilogy, Gattaca, and Minority Report; and online joke sites—that 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.