Cybertypes

Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet

Lisa Nakamura

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135222055
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios étnicos

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.

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CYBERTYPING AND THE WORK OF RACE IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL REPRODUCTION

Software engineers and academics have something in common: they both like to make up new words. And despite the popular press's glee in mocking both computer-geek and academic jargon, there are several good arguments to be made for the creation of useful neologisms, especially in cases where one of these fields of study is brought to bear on the other. The Internet has spawned a whole new set of vocabulary and specialized terminology because it is a new tool for communicating that has enabled a genuinely new discursive field, a way of generating and consuming language and signs that is distinctively different from other, older media. It is an example of what is dubbed “the new media” (a term refreshingly different from the all-purpose post- prefix so familiar to critical theorists, but destined to date just as badly). Terms such as cybersex, online, file compression, hypertext link, and downloading are now part of the Internet user's everyday vocabulary since they describe practices or virtual objects that lack analogues in either offline life or other media. The new modes of discourse enabled by the Internet require new descriptive terminologies and conceptual frameworks.

Just as engineers and programmers routinely come up with neologisms to describe new technologies, so too do academics and cultural theorists coin new phrases and terms to describe concepts they wish to introduce to the critical conversation. While these attempts are not always well advised, and certainly do contribute at times to the impenetrable and unnecessarily confusing nature of high theory's rhetoric, there are some compelling reasons that this move seems peculiarly appropriate in the case of academic studies of the Internet. Lev Manovich and Espen Aarseth both make a persuasive case for the creation and deployment of a distinctively new set of terminologies to describe the new media, in particular the Internet. In The Language of New Media Manovich asserts that “comparing new media to print, photography, or television will never tell us the whole story” and that “to understand the logic of new media we need to turn to computer science. It is there that we may expect to find the new terms, categories, and operations which characterize media which became programmable. From media studies, we move to something which can be called software studies; from media theory—to software theory” (65). This statement calls for a radical shift in focus from traditional ways of envisioning media to a new method that takes the indispensability of the computer-machine into account. It truly does call for a reconceptualization of media studies, and constitutes a call for new terms more appropriate to “software studies” to best convey the distinctive features of new media, in particular the use of the computer.

Manovich identifies two “layers” to new media: the cultural layer, which is roughly analogous to “content,” and the computer layer, or infrastructure, interface, or other machine-based forms that structure the computer environment. His argument that the computer layer can be expected to have a “significant influence on the cultural logic of media” (63) is in some sense not original; the notion that form influences content (and vice versa) has been around since the early days of literary criticism. It has been conceded for some time now that certain forms allow or disallow the articulation of certain ideas. However, what is original about this argument is its claim that our culture is becoming “computerized” in a wholesale and presumably irrevocable fashion. This is a distinctively different proposition from asserting the importance of, say, electronic literacy, a paradigm that is still anchored by its terminology in the world of a very old medium: writing. Manovich calls for a new terminology, native to the computer: he goes on to write that

in new media lingo, to “transcode” something is to translate it into another format. The computerization of culture gradually accomplishes similar transcoding in relation to all cultural categories and concepts. That is, cultural categories and concepts are substituted, on the level of meaning and/or language, by new ones which derive from the computer's ontology, epistemology, pragmatics. New media thus acts as a forerunner of this more general process of cultural re-conceptualization. (64)

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.” While this statement has far-reaching implications, at the least it can be seen as an 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. This would be a transcoded kind of terminology, one that borrows from the language of the computer itself rather than from the language of critical theory or old media studies. In his article “The Field of Humanistic Informatics and its Relation to the Humanities,” Espen Aarseth argues that the study of new media needs to be a “separate, autonomous field, where the historical, aesthetic, cultural and discursive aspects of the digitalization of our society may be examined […]. We cannot leave this new development to existing fields, because they will always privilege their traditional methods, which are based on their own empirical objects” (n.p.).

In an attempt to transcode the language of race and racialism that I observed online, I coined the term cybertype to describe the distinctive ways that the Internet propagates, disseminates, and commodifies images of race and racism. The study of racial cyber-types brings together the cultural layer and the computer layer; that is to say, cybertyping is the process by which computer/human interfaces, the dynamics and economics of access, and the means by which users are able to express themselves online interacts with the “cultural layer” or ideologies regarding race that they bring with them into cyberspace. Manovich is correct in asserting that we must take into account the ways that the computer determines how ideological constructs such as race get articulated in this new medium.

Critical theory itself is a technology or machine that produces a particular kind of discourse, and I'd like to conduct a discursive experiment by poaching a term from nineteenth-century print technology. That term is stereotype.

The word stereotype is itself an example of machine language, albeit a precomputer machine language; the first stereotype was a mechanical device that could reproduce images relatively cheaply, quickly, and in mass quantities. Now that computer-enabled image-reproducing technology like the Internet is faster, cheaper, and more efficient than ever before, how does that machine language translate into critical terms? Might we call new formulations of machine-linked identity cybertypes? This is a clunky term; in hacker-speak it would be called a “kludge” or “hack” because it's an improvised, spontaneous, seat-of-the-pants way of getting something done. (Critical theory, like the software industry, is a machine that is good at manufacturing linguistic kludges and hacks). I'd like to introduce it, however, because it acknowledges that identity online is still typed, still mired in oppressive roles even if the body has been left behind or bracketed.¹ I pose it as a corrective to the disturbingly utopian strain I see embodied in most commercial representations of the Internet in general. Chosen identities enabled by technology, such as online avatars, cosmetic and transgender surgery and body modifications, and other cyberprostheses are not breaking the mold of unitary identity but rather shifting identity into the realm of the “virtual,” a place not without its own laws and hierarchies. Supposedly “fluid” selves are no less subject to cultural hegemonies, rules of conduct, and regulating cultural norms than are “solid.”

While telecommunications and medical technologies can challenge some gender and racial stereotypes, they can produce and reflect them as well. Cybertypes of the biotechnologically enhanced or perfected woman and of the Internet's invisible minorities, who can log on to the Net and be taken for “white,” participate in an ideology of liberation from marginalized and devalued bodies. This kind of technology's greatest promise to us is to eradicate otherness—to create a kind of better living through chemistry, so to speak. Images of science freeing women from their aging bodies, which make it more difficult to conceive children and ward off cellulite, freeing men from the curse of hair loss, and freeing minorities online from the stigma of their race (since no one can see them), reinforce a “postbody” ideology that reproduces the assumptions of the old one. In an example of linguistic retrofitting, I've termed this phenomenon an example of the “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” product line). In other words, machines that offer identity prostheses to redress the burdens of physical “handicaps” such as age, gender, and race produce cybertypes that look remarkably like racial and gender stereotypes. My research on cross-racial impersonation in an online community, described in chapter 2, reveals that when users are free to choose their own race, all were assumed to be white. And many of those who adopted nonwhite personae turned out to be white male users masquerading as exotic samurai and horny geishas.

Of course, this kind of vertiginous identity play, which produces and reveals cybertyping, is not the fault of or even primarily an effect of technology. Microsoft's advertising slogan, “Where do you want to go today?” is another example of the discourse of technological liberation, and it situates the agency directly where it belongs: with the user. Though computer memory modules double in speed every couple of years, users are still running operating systems that reflect phantasmatic visions of race and gender. Moore's Law, which states that computer processing speeds double every eighteen months, does not obtain in the “cultural layer.” In the end, despite academic and commercial discourses, to the contrary it does come down to bodies—bodies with or without access to the Internet, telecommunications, and computers and the cultural capital necessary to use them; bodies with or without access to basic healthcare, let alone high-tech pharmaceuticals or expensive forms of elective surgery.

Cybertypes are more than just racial stereotypes “ported” to a new medium. Because the Internet is interactive and collectively authored, cybertypes are created in a peculiarly collaborative way; they reflect the ways that machine-enabled interactivity gives rise to images of race that both stem from a common cultural logic and seek to redress anxieties about the ways that computer-enabled communication can challenge these old logics. They perform a crucial role in the signifying practice of cyberspace; they stabilize a sense of a white self and identity that is threatened by the radical fluidity and disconnect between mind and body that is celebrated in so much cyberpunk fiction. Bodies get tricky in cyberspace; that sense of disembodiment that is both freeing and disorienting creates a profound malaise in the user that stable images of race work to fix in place.

Cybertypes are the images of race that arise when the fears, anxieties, and desires of privileged Western users (the majority of Internet users and content producers are still from the Western nations) are scripted into a textual/graphical environment that is in constant flux and revision. As Rey Chow writes in “Where Have All the Natives Gone?” images of raced others become necessary symptoms of the postcolonial condition. She writes that “the production of the native is in part the production of our postcolonial modernity” (30), and that “we see that in our fascination with the ‘authentic native’ we are actually engaged in a search for the aura even while our search processes themselves take us farther and farther from that ‘original’ point of identification” (46). The Internet is certainly a postcolonial discursive practice, originating as it does from both scientific discourses of progress and the Western global capitalistic project. When Chow attributes our need for stabilizing images of the “authentic native” to the “search for the aura,” or original and authentic object, she is transcoding Walter Benjamin's formulation from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” into a new paradigm. In a subsection to her essay entitled “The Native in the Age of Discursive Reproduction,” Chow clarifies her use of Benjamin to talk about postcolonialism and the function of the “native.” While Benjamin maintained that technology had radically changed the nature of art by making it possible to reproduce infinite copies of it—thus devaluing the “aura” of the original—Chow envisions the “native” himself as the original, with his own aura. When natives stop acting like natives—that is to say, when they deviate from the stereotypes that have been set up to signify their identities—their “aura” is lost: they are no longer “authentic.” Thus, a rationale for the existence of racial cybertypes becomes clear: in a virtual environment like the Internet where everything is a copy, so to speak, and nothing has an aura since all cyberimages exist as pure pixellated information, the desire to search for an original is thwarted from the very beginning. Hence the need for images of cybertyped “real natives” to assuage that desire. Chow poses a series of questions in this section:

Why are we so fascinated with “history” and with the “native” in “modern” times? What do we gain from our labor on these “endangered authenticities” which are presumed to be from a different time and a different place? What can be said about the juxtaposition of “us” (our discourse) and “them”? What kind of surplus value is created by this juxtaposition? (42)

The surplus value created by this juxtaposition (between the Western user and the discourses of race and racism in cyberspace) lies precisely within the need for the native in modern times. As machine-induced speed enters our lives—the speed of transmission of images and texts, of proliferating information, of dizzying arrays of decision trees and menus—all of these symptoms of modernity create a sense of unease that is remedied by comforting and familiar images of a “history” and a “native” that seems frozen in “a different time and a different place.”

This is the paradox: In order to think rigorously, humanely, and imaginatively about virtuality and the “posthuman,” it is absolutely necessary to ground critique in the lived realities of the human, in all their particularity and specificity. The nuanced realities of virtuality—racial, gendered, othered—live in the body, and though science is producing and encouraging different readings and revisions of the body, it is premature to throw it away just yet, particularly since so much postcolonial, political, and feminist critique stems from it.

The vexed position of women's bodies and raced bodies in feminist and postcolonial theory has been a subject of intense debate for at least the past twenty years. While feminism and postcolonial studies must, to some extent, buy into the notion of there being such a thing as a “woman” or a “person of color” in order to be coherent, there are also ways in which “essentialism is a trap,” (89) to quote Gayatri Spivak. Since definitions of what counts as a woman or a person of color can be shifting and contingent upon hegemonic forces, essentialism can prove to be untenable. Indeed, modern body technologies are partly responsible for this: gender reassignment surgery and cosmetic surgery can make these definitions all the blurrier. In addition, attributing essential qualities to women and people of color can reproduce a kind of totalizing of identity that reproduces the old sexist and racist ideologies. However, Donna Haraway, who radically questions the critical gains to be gotten from conceptualizing woman as anchored to the body, takes great pains to emphasize that she does not “know of any time in history when there was greater need for political unity to confront effectively the dominations of ‘race,’ ‘gender,’ ‘sexuality,’ and ‘class’“ (157). Though she replaces the formerly essential concept of “woman” with that of the “cyborg,” a hybrid of machine and human, she also acknowledges that feminist politics must continue “through coalition—affinity, not identity” (155). Both she and Spivak write extensively about the kinds of strategic affinities that can and must be built between and among “women” (albeit in quotation marks), racial and other minorities, and other marginalized and oppressed groups.

Is it a coincidence that just as feminist and subaltern politics— built around affinities as well as identities—are acquiring some legitimacy and power in the academy (note the increasing numbers of courses labeled “multicultural,” “ethnic,” “feminist,” “postcolonial” in university course schedules) MCI Worldcom, and other teletechnology corporations are staking out their positions as forces that will free us from race and gender? Barbara Christian, in her 1989 essay “‘The Race for Theory’: Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism,” sees a similar kind of “coincidence” in regard to the increasing dominance of literary theory as a required and validated activity for American academics. She asserts that the technology of literary theory was made deliberately mystifying and dense to exclude minority participation; this exclusionary language “surfaced, interestingly enough, just when the literature of peoples of color, of black women, of Latin Americans, of Africans, began to move ‘to the center’” (278). The user-unfriendly language of literary theory, with its poorly designed interfaces, overly elaborate systems, and other difficulties of access happened to arise during the historical moment in which the most vital and vibrant literary work was being produced by formerly “peripheral” minority writers.

Perhaps I am like Christian, who calls herself “slightly paranoid” in this essay (it has been well documen...