Blog Post #3

Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet

The most important issue in this book is the one that encourages exploiting the potential of the Internet to be a site of subverting the dominant paradigms of oppression and discrimination (146).

Since the Internet has failed to live up to the Utopian predictions of what is possible in a disembodied space (107), it is time to get real and recognize that the Internet is just another institution governed by hegemonic forces and those forces can only be mitigated by conscious, active resistance.  This is vital relative to race, since that is the most dire issue facing this country (and really the whole world).

Beyond that critical call to action, this text really struck some dissonant chords for me.  Most notably, I noticed a disturbing lack of continuity in language usage as the author switched back and forth between endowing technology with human agency and then holding humans accountable for the way we use our tools.
 
Quoting Lev Manovich's call for new terminology and introducing what is meant by "transcoding," Nakamura writes, "If we follow this proposition, we can see that our culture is in the process of being "transcoded" by the computer's "ontology, epistemology, pragmatics" (3).

Nakamura uses this statement to make the argument  for "a new openness in new media studies toward the adoption of a terminology that at least acknowledges the indispensable nature of the computer in the study of new media" (3).

 I agree with the need for the computer to be a central star in new media studies, and I also acknowledge the need for more precise or expansive terminology for the "computerization of culture" (and I agree that academics should be at the helm of it since we "like to make up new words" (1)). I am concerned, however, that in the interim, the unconscious use some of our "old" terms  are creating a problem in our conception of digital tools and their agency.

Referring back to the Manovich quote on the computer's "ontology, epistemology, pragmatics" (and Nakamura's emphasis by re-stating it):  I suggest that computers can't have an ontology. Computers might reflect an ontology, but that is a very different thing from having one.  If we endow computers with the power to have an ideology of being, we endow them with a humanity they do not and should not have.  No matter how excited we are about digital doodads and revolutionary robotics, things constructed of metals and plastics still constitute inanimate and inorganic inventions. The only purpose it might serve to anthropomorphize them might be to scapegoat them with the blame we are too arrogant to accept for ourselves.

Phrases like "the computer determines" (3) or "the Internet propagates, disseminates, and codifies" (3) or "the Utopian ideal of the Internet" (10) or "the Internet causes depression" (28) suggest (subliminally if not overtly) that the tool--or the space--is what is calling the ideological shots.  This is in direct opposition to other statements or phrases in the text that are more conscious of agency--like the nod to the discourse of technological liberation and how it "situates the agency directly where it belongs: with the user" (5) and Nakamura's reminder of the import "of claiming the right agency in our ways of seeing--of being a subject rather than an object of technology" (12).

How we manage this rhetoric of agency is central to our responsible use of technology.  In my experience, we humans have a remarkable tendency for creating ontological and teleological constructs that absolve us from responsibility and accountability for our own actions.  A powerful example of this is in this excerpt from Sophie's Choice: 

 “Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.

The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?"

And the answer: "Where was man?” 

 ― William Styron, Sophie's Choice

Blaming computers when things go wrong or praising computers when things go right is like blaming God or praising God for things that humans have the agency to control.  Human beings have unbelievable creative and destructive energies; we need to own up to that and be willing to take responsibility for what we create and what we destroy.  (Yes, Virginia, there is a Frankenstein.)

What does this have to do with Cybertypes, Race, Ethnicity and identity? Well, it mostly has to do with my concern that legitimized academic conversation insinuates the ability of technology to remaster race or create harmony in bricolaged spaces when it is human beings in human bodies who have to do that first.  The Internet doesn't create a monoculture anymore than my neighbor's tractor does, and my prosthetic hip doesn't go anywhere without me. (Even though I can't go anywhere without it, it is not what drives this body.)   Even though our technologies might be analogized to a runaway train, it was not the train that decided to run away.

As Robert J. Oppenheimer said: "When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you've had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb."

That part of this is simple.

What is not so simple is the subject of space or spaces and what humans see fit to put or to do in the spaces we create.   Structures determine the way energy flows (Starhawk).  But one thing that hasn't changed, no matter how much space we create or colonize, is that never has there been a space populated by human bodies or human thoughts or human intentions (based on any historical records of which I am aware) that has been Utopic for more than a month or two. Yes, we should keep trying to make a better world, but we can not expect our tools to do something for us that we have not clearly intended for ourselves. 

Can the master's tools be used to dismantle the master's house?  I think so.  This belief is what motivates me to teach writing.  Writing and rhetoric are most certainly central to the master's tool belt.  But it is not the writing or the rhetoric that dismantles the house.  It is the purposefulness of the carpenter.

Nakamura says, "There is no ignoring that the Internet can and does enable new and insidious forms of racism" (30).   But the Internet is not the problem.  What there is no ignoring is that the world has no shortage of assholes and fear-mongers who believe that more for others means less for them.  This is a myth of scarcity that was not created by the Internet.  In fact, the Internet, as a space imagined out of the ether (in a world of over-crowded cities and grid-locked interstates), is a glaring testimony to the falsity of such limited imagination. 

I am concerned that the disembodied spaces of the Internet have the potential to derail critical cultural conversations about race by creating a diversion of hope that spaces rather than humans will solve this problem.  When the entire continent of Africa has pretty much been left off the digital map (Digitized Lives), when a disease like Ebola is decimating an area of the globe inhabited mostly by black people,  there is no human liberation in cyber-touring someone else's panty-less Geisha identity (43); it is just more titilating conquest; it is just more conspicuous consumption.  It is just more drone-distant distraction.

All culture(s) needs to be under the scrutiny of critical race studies, and any space or place or institution claiming to have found a Kings X from human selfishness and cruelty is lying.  Also, anyone claiming that we are post anything (post-racial, post-colonial, post-human) is similarly deluded.

Nakamura's book Cyber-types brings to light the continued racializing of American (and world) culture, but too much of the argument is buried in a be-labored and often contradictory lament about the failure of the Internet to be realized as a liberatory space for all identities.  The real crux of the matter is this truth Nakamura tells: "Conversations about how the web can "wipe out" race may obscure the fact that users do indeed possess bodies that are raced--bodies that are denied housing and discriminated against in job interviews and that suffer institutionalized racism offline" (107).

What the conversations about the web also obscure is who is responsible.

 It is not the web that will wipe out anything.

 It will be the people using it.

Or not.