First published in 2002. In Cybertypes, Lisa Nakamura turn sour assumption that the Net is color-blind on its head. Examining all facets of everyday web-life, she shows that racial and ethnic stereotypes, or 'cybertypes' are hardwired into our online interactions: Identity tourists masquerade in chat rooms as Asian_Geisha or Alatiniolover. Web directories sharply delimit racial categories. Anonymous computer users are assumed to be white. Lively, provocative, Cybertypes takes up computer relationship between race, ethnicity and technology and offers a candid and nuanced understanding of identity in the information age.
First published in 2002. In Cybertypes, Lisa Nakamura turn sour assumption that the Net is color-blind on its head. Examining all facets of everyday web-life, she shows that racial and ethnic stereotypes, or 'cybertypes' are hardwired into our online interactions: Identity tourists masquerade in chat rooms as Asian_Geisha or Alatiniolover. Web directories sharply delimit racial categories. Anonymous computer users are assumed to be white. Lively, provocative, Cybertypes takes up computer relationship between race, ethnicity and technology and offers a candid and nuanced understanding of identity in the information age.
Lisa Nakamura refers to case studies of popular yet rarely evaluated uses of the Internet, such as pregnancy websites, instant messaging, and online petitions and quizzes, to look at the emergence of race-, ethnic-, and gender-identified visual cultures.
Moving beyond traditional cyberculture studies paradigms in several key ways, this comprehensive collection marks the increasing convergence of cyberculture with other forms of media, and with all aspects of our lives in a digitized world. Includes essential readings for both the student and scholar of a diverse range of fields, including new and digital media, internet studies, digital arts and culture studies, network culture studies, and the information society Incorporates essays by both new and established scholars of digital cultures, including Andy Miah, Eugene Thacker, Lisa Nakamura, Chris Hables Gray, Sonia Livingstone and Espen Aarseth Created explicitly for the undergraduate student, with comprehensive introductions to each section that outline the main ideas of each essay Explores the many facets of cyberculture, and includes sections on race, politics, gender, theory, gaming, and space The perfect companion to Nayar's Introduction to New Media and Cyberculture
A treatise of Black women’s transformative influence in media and society, placing them front and center in a new chapter of mainstream resistance and political engagement In Reclaiming Our Space, social worker, activist, and cultural commentator Feminista Jones explores how Black women are changing culture, society, and the landscape of feminism by building digital communities and using social media as powerful platforms. As Jones reveals, some of the best-loved devices of our shared social media language are a result of Black women’s innovations, from well-known movement-building hashtags (#BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #BlackGirlMagic) to the now ubiquitous use of threaded tweets as a marketing and storytelling tool. For some, these online dialogues provide an introduction to the work of Black feminist icons like Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, bell hooks, and the women of the Combahee River Collective. For others, this discourse provides a platform for continuing their feminist activism and scholarship in a new, interactive way. Complex conversations around race, class, and gender that have been happening behind the closed doors of academia for decades are now becoming part of the wider cultural vernacular—one pithy tweet at a time. With these important online conversations, not only are Black women influencing popular culture and creating sociopolitical movements; they are also galvanizing a new generation to learn and engage in Black feminist thought and theory, and inspiring change in communities around them. Hard-hitting, intelligent, incisive, yet bursting with humor and pop-culture savvy, Reclaiming Our Space is a survey of Black feminism’s past, present, and future, and it explains why intersectional movement building will save us all.
This book examines Zoombombing, the racist harassment and hate speech on Zoom. While most accounts refer to Zoombombing as simply a new style or practice of online trolling and harassment in the wake of increased videoconferencing since the outbreak of COVID-19, this volume examines it as a specifically racialized and gendered phenomenon that targets Black people and communities with racialized and gendered harassment. Racist Zoombombing brings together histories of online racism and algorithmic warfare with in-depth interviews by Black users on their experiences. The book explains how Zoombombing is a form of racial violence, interrogates our ideas about online space and community, and challenges our notions of on and off line distinction between racial harassment of Black people and communities. A vital resource for media, culture, and communication students and scholars that are interested in race, gender, digital media, and digital culture.
Winner, 2021 Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, given by the Popular Culture Association Winner, 2021 Nancy Baym Annual Book Award, given by the Association of Internet Researchers An explanation of the digital practices of the black Internet From BlackPlanet to #BlackGirlMagic, Distributed Blackness places blackness at the very center of internet culture. André Brock Jr. claims issues of race and ethnicity as inextricable from and formative of contemporary digital culture in the United States. Distributed Blackness analyzes a host of platforms and practices (from Black Twitter to Instagram, YouTube, and app development) to trace how digital media have reconfigured the meanings and performances of African American identity. Brock moves beyond widely circulated deficit models of respectability, bringing together discourse analysis with a close reading of technological interfaces to develop nuanced arguments about how “blackness” gets worked out in various technological domains. As Brock demonstrates, there’s nothing niche or subcultural about expressions of blackness on social media: internet use and practice now set the terms for what constitutes normative participation. Drawing on critical race theory, linguistics, rhetoric, information studies, and science and technology studies, Brock tabs between black-dominated technologies, websites, and social media to build a set of black beliefs about technology. In explaining black relationships with and alongside technology, Brock centers the unique joy and sense of community in being black online now.
Cultural Production in Virtual and Imagined Worlds foregrounds how the two important fields of visual culture and Internet culture interact. This collection of essays explores the intersections, overlaps and disparities in terms of how the two discourses illuminate our everyday negotiations as we become increasingly dependent on the Internet and virtual/visual imaginings for constructing who we are. What is being examined here are the ways in which we use visual/virtual lenses to see the world both individually and collectively. This book represents a transnational effort that began as a series of conversations during the Mid Atlantic Popular/American Culture conferences from 2005–2009. The editors, a Canadian and an American, have included contributors across national and geographic contexts. Cultural Production is aimed at raising questions, crossing borders and presenting points of departure for future scholarship in the relatively new and very rapidly changing disciplines of visual and virtual cultures. Our critical approach to this study includes viewing Internet images as contested sites of cultural activity and also as sites that advance ideologies related to cultural transformation.
