Digitizing Race


Book Description

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.




Race and Ethnicity in Digital Culture


Book Description

In this unprecedented study, leading scholars and emerging voices from around the world consider how race and ethnicity continue to shape our everyday lives, even as digital technology seems to promise a release from our "real" social identities. How do people use the new expressive features of digital technologies to experience, represent, discuss, and debate racial and ethnic identity? How have digital technologies or digital spaces become racialized? How have the existing vernacular traditions, or folklore, surrounding identity been reshaped in digital spaces? And how have new traditions emerged? This interdisciplinary volume of essays explores the role of traditional culture in the evolving expressions, practices, and images of race and ethnicity in the digital age. The work examines cultural forms in exclusively digital environments as well as in the hybrid environments created by mobile technologies, where real life becomes overlaid with digital content. Insights from academics across disciplines—including anthropology, communications, folkloristics, art, and sociology—consider the interplay between race/ethnicity, everyday vernacular culture, and digital technologies. Six sections explore traditional cultural affordances of technology, folklore and digital applications, visual cultures of race and ethnicity, racism and exclusion online, political activism and race, and concluding observations. The book covers technologies such as vlogs, video games, digital photography, messaging applications, social media sites, and the Internet.




Race, Culture and Media


Book Description

Anamik Saha has taken an integrative approach, combining both cultural studies and political economy perspectives in a cutting-edge book that covers representation and beyond. A wide-ranging exploration of both theory and research, Saha broadens the scope out to also cover postcolonialism, audiences, policy, production and digital race studies.




Distributed Blackness


Book Description

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.




Cybertypes


Book Description

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.




Race, Ethnicity, and Consumption


Book Description

Race, Ethnicity, and Consumption: A Sociological View looks at the central concerns of consumer culture through the lens of race and ethnicity. Each chapter illustrates the connections between race, ethnicity, and consumption by focusing on a specific theme: identity, crossing cultures, marketing and advertising, neighborhoods, discrimination, and social activism. By exploring issues such as multicultural marketing, cultural appropriation, consumer racial profiling, urban food deserts, and racialized political consumerism, students, scholars, and other curious readers will gain insight on the ways that racial and ethnic boundaries shape, and are shaped by, consumption. This book goes beyond the typical treatments of race and ethnicity in introductory texts on consumption by not only providing a comprehensive overview of the major theories and concepts that sociologists use to make sense of consumption, race, and ethnicity, but also by examining these themes within distinctly contemporary contexts such as digital platforms and activism. Documenting the complexities and contradictions within consumer culture, Race, Ethnicity, and Consumption is an excellent text for sociology courses on consumers and consumption, race and ethnicity, the economy, and inequality. It will also be an informative resource for courses on consumer culture in the broader social sciences, marketing, and the humanities.




Race After Technology


Book Description

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture. Visit the book's free Discussion Guide: www.dropbox.com




Race and the Cultural Industries


Book Description

Studies of race and media are dominated by textual approaches that explore the politics of representation. But there is little understanding of how and why representations of race in the media take the shape that they do. How, one might ask, is race created by cultural industries? In this important new book, Anamik Saha encourages readers to focus on the production of representations of racial and ethnic minorities in film, television, music and the arts. His interdisciplinary approach combines critical media studies and media industries research with postcolonial studies and critical race perspectives to reveal how political economic forces and legacies of empire shape industrial cultural production and, in turn, media discourses around race. Race and the Cultural Industries is required reading for students and scholars of media and cultural studies, as well as anyone interested in why historical representations of 'the Other' persist in the media and how they are to be challenged.







Defining Identity and the Changing Scope of Culture in the Digital Age


Book Description

Since the popularization of Internet technologies in the mid-1990s, human identity and collective culture has been dramatically shaped by our continued use of digital communication platforms and engagement with the digital world. Despite a plethora of scholarship on digital technology, questions remain regarding how these technologies impact personal identity and perceptions of global culture. Defining Identity and the Changing Scope of Culture in the Digital Age explores a multitude of topics pertaining to self-hood, self-expression, human interaction, and perceptions of civilization and culture in an age where technology has become integrated into every facet of our everyday lives. Highlighting issues of race, ethnicity, and gender in digital culture, interpersonal and computer-mediated communication, pop culture, social media, and the digitization of knowledge, this pivotal reference publication is designed for use by scholars, psychologists, sociologists, and graduate-level students interested in the fluid and rapidly evolving norms of identity and culture through digital media.