Nakamura:
“The
study of racial cybertypes bring 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…” (3).
To
put this into my own words, cybertypes are the ways in which people of color
are viewed online, access issues that accompany the Internet, and how well
people of color are able to show their identities online (this can be with
regard to avatars, representation/non-representation in video games, or stereotypes
of people of color-to name a few).
“I propose that a starting place for reseeing the
mixedblood in contemporary terms is to look online to the spaces where users
are asserting their identities in ways that illustrate not only the existence
and persistence of the mixedblood, but whose visual, aural, and textual choices
illustrate the complexities of this category and the embodied nature of the
online self” (217).
Again, in my own words I rephrase this as: Let’s
look at how people are rhetorically constructing their identities online, and
how they chose to race or not race themselves based on their choices. I find
this to be more compelling than Nakamura’s cybertyping in, although it’s only
12 years old- way young in human years, it’s already passé for online studies
(not in its entirety, but some of the online spaces Nakamura looked at aren’t
in vogue anymore). So now we have online communities such as Facebook, where
folks can make certain choices about how they want to represent themselves. The
Arola article got me thinking about my own: if a person was just creeping on my
facebook page, and didn’t know me from Adam, what would they assume about me? I
don’t use an actual photo of myself (it’s the panting of Girl with a Pearl Earring only instead of the girl in question,
it’s a bulldog’s face). I do have my gender on there for all to see, but I
don’t let the public see much more than that. So, what race would they guess I
am?
So, whereas Nakamura is suggesting to shift the
paradigm of how people of color are represented in online spaces “is to use its
own metaphors against itself” (48), Arola makes the call to see how, in this
case, mixbloods are representing themselves online, and to look rhetorically on
the choices they are making to think through issues of race and identity.
Arola:
“This
“un-seeing” of Indians exists in part by the denial or brushing over of
America’s bloody past and also through the belief that “real” Indians only
exist in the stereotypes of what an Indian should look like, act like, and
believe in. This act of unseeing comes with a host of problems for full-blooded
Indians, including an unseeing by those in power of the political, economic,
and social issues relevant to today’s Native American” (215).
Nakamura: “The idea of a nonstereotyped Asian male
identity is so seldom enacted in LambdaMOO that its absence can only be read as
a symptom of suppression” (39).
What I like about these two closely-related quotes
is how stereotyped people of color are within popular culture. Riffing of off
Arola’s thought, I too have notice that you never see an American Indian
represented in street clothes, but rather always in full regalia; the spectacle
of the Other, as Nakamura talks about throughout her book. This is much like
how Asians are played onscreen: from Bruce Lee to Bai Ling, there’s a certain
look Asian actors are supposed to have. It really is “a trap that fetishizes
what it means to be American Indian” (216).
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