Book review: Digitizing Race
Mar. 27th, 2014 14:53![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Main Argument: In this work, Namakura "locate[s] the Internet as a privileged and extremely rich site for the creation and distribution of hegemonic and counter hegemonic visual images of radicalized bodies" (13). Moreover, now that the internet's audiences are much more diverse, "women and people of color are both subjects and objects of interactivity; they participate in digital racial formation via acts of technological appropriation, yet are subjected to it as well" (16). Nakamura argues that this process, and the mediation of these identities, is "regulated and conditioned by the types of interfaces used to classify, frame, and link them" (27); "the premise of this book is that women and racial and ethnic minorities create visual cultures on the popular Internet that speak to and against existing graphical environments and interfaces online" (172).
Historiographical Engagement: Wendy Chun, Alexander Galloway, Henry Jenkins, many others
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Nakamura argues that "studies of digital visual culture have yet to discuss networking, social spaces, or power relations in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender, but have done a superb job at parting the history of digitality's address to the eye. Studies from a communications perspective have discussed the dynamics of online interaction quite exhaustively but fail to integrate their findings into readings of what the sites do visually" (10). In sum, she concludes, "there has yet to be a visually oriented critique of new media networked communications on the most popular network to date--the Internet--which considers these issues of raced and gendered bodies, both virtual and real," and in this book, she attempts to supply it (11). The young, text-based internet whose demise was heralded in 1995 by the introduction of Netscape Navigator is now irreversibly visual and no longer a niche platform, making a study of how the internet functions as such a site above imperative. The internet is now a mass-media form with a popular audience. For Nakamura, adding the question of the interface to questions about "interactivity" is crucial, because "interfaces are an indispensable part of the media experiences of both online and offline visual cultures. They are also inextricably tied to the contemporary racial project of producing volitional racial mobility in the service of new forms of capitalism" (30). Finally, Nakamura argues that "the graphical Internet demands a type of interpretive modality that goes beyond the textual, one that replaces the nation of 'reading' or even 'viewing' with a transcoded model of parsing. The mode and type of iteration, the order and positioning of symbols, and the codes by which it is red determine the way that a new media object interacts with its user" (35).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at AIM avatars and argues that "in creating and using these very personal and amateur digital signatures of identity, IM users literally build themselves as subjects of interactivity" (38). Nakamura argues that building a theory of taste on the internet is an essential for new media because
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the case of Navajo codetalkers via the John Woo film Windtalkers (2002) and at Alan Turing and his test:
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at, among other things, the pregnant avatars and the visual taste culture that pregnant and TTC women create on pregnancy websites, arguing that "the pregnant avatars that pregnant women create for parenting Web sites accomplish the opposite from those deployed in digital gaming culture; they bring the 'real female body' into the digital in a central way rather than leaving them behind. Instead, these avatars turn out to be far less hyperreal and exaggerated than their owners' real pregnant bodies; most women seem to want avatars that are built exactly like their unpregnant bodies, only 'with a belly,' an offline impossibility, as anyone who has experienced pregnancy knows" (136). It also looks at the evolution of taste culture, and how taste is gendered as feminine and design as masculine, and how in postwar advertising cultures women were constructed as shoppers rather than consumers; it also looks at reborn and American Girl dolls, and how these are constructed as objects for "collectors," another class-laden term. These pregnancy avatars challenge normative bodies; they are "vernacular" assemblages "created by subaltern users…impossible bodies that critique normative ones but without an overt artistic or political intent" (161). The women creating them also challenge their gendered relation to the internet, as they upload tons of visual content to it, and the digital signatures they create from this content "are evidence of eclectic digital production that reflects the reality of reproductive labor and its attendant losses" (170). This production "not only re-embodies themselves as pregnant subjects but also visualizes holistic visions of family that embody the paradox of pregnant women's empowerment and invisibility. … The gendered and classed nature of their signatures, as well as their mode of arrangement and visual ranking…shows the development of a digital vernacular modernism. Pregnant women represent themselves exuberantly in the form of their digital avatars, and this energy and joy in self-representation take on all the more significance in a dataveillant society that continues to regulate pregnancy through imaging technologies" (ibid). The signatures and attendant visual media publicize bodies and lives that were "previously unrepresented by the women living them" (ibid).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter discusses "the ways that users of color are framed as interacted and interactors, subjects and objects, of interactivity" (176). Looking at the ways Asians and Asian Americans are represented in relation to technology and the Internet, Nakamura notes the resurgence of visual and racial thinking that the medium has enabled: "visual representations of race and racism work paradoxically: they are both irresistible spectacles and social problems. Racial difference and radicalized bodies are mediagenic in ways that appeal to all viewers. And since the nature of digital media is to be transcodable, instantly transmittable, and infinitely reproducible, racial imagery flows in torrents up and down the networks that many people use every day" (194). And indeed, the "irresistibility" of this imagery "is part of the complex of investments in the proliferation of radicalized imagery, not only in spite of multiculturalism, but indeed as an integral part of it" (195). The question, then, "here and in much visual representation of labor, consumption, technology, and race" is "who is 'technological' in a threatening, protesting, queer way, and who is technological in a useful, helpful, and completely offshore way" (197-99)? Thus, Nakamura argues, it is crucial "that future demographic studies of the Internet and race explore production as well," rather than just figuring minorities as consumers a la television (which in the decade since has come back and is more interactive as well): "it is imperative that we devise rigorous methodologies to help us understand what constitutes meaningful participation online, participation that opens and broadens the kind of discourse that can be articulated there. It is not enough merely to be 'there': the image of the online 'lurker' invokes the passivity and ghostliness of those who watch from the sidelines of online life" (200-01).
Epilogue: Argument, Sources, Examples
Critical assessment: This is another great new media book that I wish hadn't been written ten years or more ago; although it was published in 2006, most of the material is from 2003-05, and it shows, not in that what Nakamura says here is wrong, but in that I really would like to know what she thinks of the developments in race, Web 2.0, interactivity, and all the other subjects she discusses here in the decade since. I've heard her speak, and she's a great scholar as well as a very nice person, and I really just want more of her thoughts than this book, fixed in time and print as it is, can provide.
Further reading: Windtalkers; Gibson, Neuromancer; Blade Runner; Dirty Pretty Things; Galloway, The Exploit; Tina Takemoto; Hayles, How We Became Posthuman
Meta notes: "It's all connected."
Main Argument: In this work, Namakura "locate[s] the Internet as a privileged and extremely rich site for the creation and distribution of hegemonic and counter hegemonic visual images of radicalized bodies" (13). Moreover, now that the internet's audiences are much more diverse, "women and people of color are both subjects and objects of interactivity; they participate in digital racial formation via acts of technological appropriation, yet are subjected to it as well" (16). Nakamura argues that this process, and the mediation of these identities, is "regulated and conditioned by the types of interfaces used to classify, frame, and link them" (27); "the premise of this book is that women and racial and ethnic minorities create visual cultures on the popular Internet that speak to and against existing graphical environments and interfaces online" (172).
Historiographical Engagement: Wendy Chun, Alexander Galloway, Henry Jenkins, many others
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Nakamura argues that "studies of digital visual culture have yet to discuss networking, social spaces, or power relations in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender, but have done a superb job at parting the history of digitality's address to the eye. Studies from a communications perspective have discussed the dynamics of online interaction quite exhaustively but fail to integrate their findings into readings of what the sites do visually" (10). In sum, she concludes, "there has yet to be a visually oriented critique of new media networked communications on the most popular network to date--the Internet--which considers these issues of raced and gendered bodies, both virtual and real," and in this book, she attempts to supply it (11). The young, text-based internet whose demise was heralded in 1995 by the introduction of Netscape Navigator is now irreversibly visual and no longer a niche platform, making a study of how the internet functions as such a site above imperative. The internet is now a mass-media form with a popular audience. For Nakamura, adding the question of the interface to questions about "interactivity" is crucial, because "interfaces are an indispensable part of the media experiences of both online and offline visual cultures. They are also inextricably tied to the contemporary racial project of producing volitional racial mobility in the service of new forms of capitalism" (30). Finally, Nakamura argues that "the graphical Internet demands a type of interpretive modality that goes beyond the textual, one that replaces the nation of 'reading' or even 'viewing' with a transcoded model of parsing. The mode and type of iteration, the order and positioning of symbols, and the codes by which it is red determine the way that a new media object interacts with its user" (35).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at AIM avatars and argues that "in creating and using these very personal and amateur digital signatures of identity, IM users literally build themselves as subjects of interactivity" (38). Nakamura argues that building a theory of taste on the internet is an essential for new media because
…as the Internet's user base changes, and changes in software make it a more enriched graphical space that enables youth in particular to express their taste cultures, which are often imported from other media, the "profiles" and avatars they create to literally embody themselves in disembodied spaces become less about performing a cross-gender or cross-racial alternative or "passing" self to deploy in public communities and more about expressing diasporic, ambivalent, intersectional selves to use within closed communities. (47)These buddy icons are fixed within a small space that is "permanently supplementary to the performance of 'live' conversation," but they are also evidence of "a thriving, as yet relatively uncommodified visual culture of digital body representation" (69). The visual culture these users have created in a platform that is presumed not to have one can "express identities that are resistant to normatively and presented alternatively to commercially produced images of the networked body" (i.e. player characters in video games) (ibid). At the same time, however, the limited cinematic motion of the buddy icon tends to participate in the most stereotypical forms of femininity.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the case of Navajo codetalkers via the John Woo film Windtalkers (2002) and at Alan Turing and his test:
Like the codetalkers, Turing as well can be seen as ultimately an object of interactivity, rather than a subject; his disempowered status as a social subject despite his importance to the military industrial complex constitutes an early paradigmatic example of an intolerably and ultimately disposable queer body that is tolerated provisionally because of its ability to produce machine code. The dream of a secure communication network that could work in real time that was temporarily realized by Navajo codetalkers was partly fulfilled by Turing's early work in machine cryptography, which has since led to secure digital information systems. … If the computer that passes the Turing Test constitutes a potentially post human consciousness, Navajo codetalkers and indeed Turing himself occupied the other end of the spectrum, possessing abject and reviled bodies that could not be assimilated into modern society, even ultimately in moments of national emergency. (73-74)By way of Neuromancer and the website alllooksame.com, which uses the Internet as a Turing Test to deconstruct the notion of race as a visual (and decodable) code, Nakamura argues that these expose the false notion of race "as transcending any individual, national, or cultural differences" (74). But, drawing on Gibson, she also highlights the way in which alllooksame.com teaches what he called "pattern recognition, "or visual literacy regarding the digitally mediated visual image," in a later book is the new most valued form of literacy (94). The Internet has been constructed as equivalent, not to television, but to literacy, and has been presumed to be educational as no other new medium has, but it has also been a ground for restating the debates for postcolonial theory: operating on the assumption that the Internet is inherently Western, cultural critics on both sides of the postcolonial Internet debate have argued that "uneven encounters between 'pure' non-Western cultural forms and 'gained' electronic media must necessarily result in a muddled, deracinated mediascape" on the one hand and that "multimedia may give them [the opportunity] to produce new cultural forms which are hybrid, multicultural, and by implication multiracial" on the other (92). But the internet is in fact driving the hybridization of almost every previously separate form of media, with the result that "regimes of governmentality, classification, the law, and the interface overlap to form a hybrid experience of media" (93). But the fan cultures that Henry Jenkins has highlighted as being enabled by the internet in fact recall an older paradigm: "oral cultures in which narratives were produced collaboratively in dialogue with audiences" (ibid). Nakamura concludes that "If, indeed, it is an important goal to preserve the spirit of indigenous cultural media, the Internet's ability to approximate preliterate narrative forms while also permitting access to a transcoded signboard or film culture may make it the most appropriate medium to achieve these goals" (93-94).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples
The Matrix trilogy and the 2002 film Minority Report racialize digital information access and production by depicting scenes of white and male users experiencing "direct" or immediate relations with computer interfaces, while users of color are relegated to the background, depicted with truncated and relatively distant, highly technologically mediated relationships to their hardware and software. These users are visible reminders of the necessity of human objects to support and underwrite others' sublime experience of "transparent" and direct interactions with digital technology; they supply the marginal blackness in the Matrix films and Minority Report against which whiteness stands in sharp relief. And in both films, Asians and Asian Americans function as the material base for technologies of digitized vision and surveillance. […] It is difficult if not impossible for the poor, socially disenfranchised, and raced individual to own one's own body in the best of times, but the terms have changed since the seventies; in a dataveillant society based in informational or late capitalism, ownership or at least partial control over one's digital or databody is essential. […] The racio-visual logic of race in these and other science fiction films that depict interface use sets up distinct roles for particular races, and distinct ways of conceptualizing the radicalized body as informational property for use in dataveillant state apparatuses. As might be expected, white users enjoy a privileged relationship with digital networked interfaces, either eschewing the use of the interface altogether or interacting with it sans keyboard, mouse, and other hardware devices and instead using gestural computing. In contrast, black users are depicted as witnesses and support staff to these feats of interface use. (96-97)As Nakamura concludes, "Information machines are the sole means of vision in digital visual culture, but as the body itself becomes socially defined and handled as information, there is even more at stake in paying attention to the incursions of machines in everyday life and the forms of resistance available to us" (130).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at, among other things, the pregnant avatars and the visual taste culture that pregnant and TTC women create on pregnancy websites, arguing that "the pregnant avatars that pregnant women create for parenting Web sites accomplish the opposite from those deployed in digital gaming culture; they bring the 'real female body' into the digital in a central way rather than leaving them behind. Instead, these avatars turn out to be far less hyperreal and exaggerated than their owners' real pregnant bodies; most women seem to want avatars that are built exactly like their unpregnant bodies, only 'with a belly,' an offline impossibility, as anyone who has experienced pregnancy knows" (136). It also looks at the evolution of taste culture, and how taste is gendered as feminine and design as masculine, and how in postwar advertising cultures women were constructed as shoppers rather than consumers; it also looks at reborn and American Girl dolls, and how these are constructed as objects for "collectors," another class-laden term. These pregnancy avatars challenge normative bodies; they are "vernacular" assemblages "created by subaltern users…impossible bodies that critique normative ones but without an overt artistic or political intent" (161). The women creating them also challenge their gendered relation to the internet, as they upload tons of visual content to it, and the digital signatures they create from this content "are evidence of eclectic digital production that reflects the reality of reproductive labor and its attendant losses" (170). This production "not only re-embodies themselves as pregnant subjects but also visualizes holistic visions of family that embody the paradox of pregnant women's empowerment and invisibility. … The gendered and classed nature of their signatures, as well as their mode of arrangement and visual ranking…shows the development of a digital vernacular modernism. Pregnant women represent themselves exuberantly in the form of their digital avatars, and this energy and joy in self-representation take on all the more significance in a dataveillant society that continues to regulate pregnancy through imaging technologies" (ibid). The signatures and attendant visual media publicize bodies and lives that were "previously unrepresented by the women living them" (ibid).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter discusses "the ways that users of color are framed as interacted and interactors, subjects and objects, of interactivity" (176). Looking at the ways Asians and Asian Americans are represented in relation to technology and the Internet, Nakamura notes the resurgence of visual and racial thinking that the medium has enabled: "visual representations of race and racism work paradoxically: they are both irresistible spectacles and social problems. Racial difference and radicalized bodies are mediagenic in ways that appeal to all viewers. And since the nature of digital media is to be transcodable, instantly transmittable, and infinitely reproducible, racial imagery flows in torrents up and down the networks that many people use every day" (194). And indeed, the "irresistibility" of this imagery "is part of the complex of investments in the proliferation of radicalized imagery, not only in spite of multiculturalism, but indeed as an integral part of it" (195). The question, then, "here and in much visual representation of labor, consumption, technology, and race" is "who is 'technological' in a threatening, protesting, queer way, and who is technological in a useful, helpful, and completely offshore way" (197-99)? Thus, Nakamura argues, it is crucial "that future demographic studies of the Internet and race explore production as well," rather than just figuring minorities as consumers a la television (which in the decade since has come back and is more interactive as well): "it is imperative that we devise rigorous methodologies to help us understand what constitutes meaningful participation online, participation that opens and broadens the kind of discourse that can be articulated there. It is not enough merely to be 'there': the image of the online 'lurker' invokes the passivity and ghostliness of those who watch from the sidelines of online life" (200-01).
Epilogue: Argument, Sources, Examples
This book seeks to rematerialize the Internet, a form of digital representation seen as being resistant to grounded forms of critique by art historians because of its insubstantial and ephemeral nature, by locating its material base in specifically embodied users and producers, its use as a communicative technology as well as a form of media, and its engagement with other offline and online popular, medical, and technological visual cultures. […] However, a key difference between the Internet and other media forms is the production of a visual culture expressive of racial and ethnic identity that is potentially available to a much broader group of people. […] The time during which the Internet could reasonably be viewed as a possible alternative space where egalitarian utopias might be constructed by plucky resistance fighters of any age or gender is long over. In its place we have a situation that is much more complicated, yet far from disheartening. The instances where users refuse to cover, the spaces and bodies that they claim, modify, and disseminate on the Internet, display a racio-visual logic of new media identity. … In short, despite its numbers shortcomings, the Internet allows "common" users to represent their bodies and deploy these bodies in social, visual, and aesthetic traditions. This is not the case in film culture, literary culture, or art culture; indeed, the influence of the Internet on these media forms has changed them permanently, creating a new culture of shared participation and popular collaboration, one that continues to profoundly transfigure the way that media industries work. (203, 204, 208-09)This is not the whole story; the logics of neoliberalism, scientism, and bioinformatics continue to encode race into culture, politics, and the world at the same time as they insist that it doesn't actually matter. But the Internet and its visual cultures offer a place where everyday users can defy this public discourse, and do.
Critical assessment: This is another great new media book that I wish hadn't been written ten years or more ago; although it was published in 2006, most of the material is from 2003-05, and it shows, not in that what Nakamura says here is wrong, but in that I really would like to know what she thinks of the developments in race, Web 2.0, interactivity, and all the other subjects she discusses here in the decade since. I've heard her speak, and she's a great scholar as well as a very nice person, and I really just want more of her thoughts than this book, fixed in time and print as it is, can provide.
Further reading: Windtalkers; Gibson, Neuromancer; Blade Runner; Dirty Pretty Things; Galloway, The Exploit; Tina Takemoto; Hayles, How We Became Posthuman
Meta notes: "It's all connected."