Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet [Paperback]

Lisa Nakamura (Author)

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Product Details

Paperback: 250 pages
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (Dec 20 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0816646139
ISBN-13: 978-0816646135
Product Dimensions: 22.1 x 14.7 x 2.3 cm
Shipping Weight: 272 g
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #386,079 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

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.

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Amazon.com: 3.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars An important book for exploring Race and Internet cultures, April 22 2010

By Sanjay Sharma - Published on Amazon.com

This review is from: Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Paperback)

For those of you with a soft spot for the anthropomorphized cartoon dog surfing the Internet, Lisa Nakamura abolishes such nostalgia, and misunderstanding. Half way through Digitizing Race, she coolly declares `...nobody believes anymore that on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog...' (p.155).Interrogating the myth of online disembodiment, and the concomitant deceit of neoliberal colour-blindness is what essentially coheres this book. Contrary to the utopian readings of techno-culture, analyzing Internet space as a site of racial re-embodiment is at the heart of Nakamura's project. ...

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5 of 8 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Some analysis of uses of images, but unfocused, Nov 28 2009

By Andrew D. Oram - Published on Amazon.com

This review is from: Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Paperback)

An impressionistic and rambling review of several, barely related communities or Internet activities, this book says very little about Internet culture and its online representations. It is mostly a combination of studies done in the early to mid-2000 decade, and unfortunately does not have much to say about the enormous swelling of social networking sites that has occurred in just the past couple years. The book does have some intriguing and stimulating observations about the way unconventional Internet users (mostly women) see and reveal themselves on chat sites and on pregnancy forums. It is more comfortable showing how impressions and presentations of race in the larger culture are handled by online actors than analyzing those actors or the new media themselves.

› Go to Amazon.com to see both reviews 3.0 out of 5 stars