Talking Race and Cyberspace: An Interview with Lisa Nakamura

I met Internet scholar Lisa Nakamura at a conference held in Oslo in late 2001, where she showed how techno-utopian dreams reproduced racist patterns. Her analysis was shockingly normal because it once again proved how "the old" gets teleported into the new in a friction-free manner. Nakamura's work shows how the Internet, despite all its claims to the alternative, remains a part of dominant visual culture. This flirting with fluid identities, so common in the roaring nineties, distracted Internet advocates from further investigations, a pattern that has, of course, changed over the past years. A number of conferences have been held, studies have been written and published, and Lisa Nakamura's work stands out within the emerging field of new media studies. I conducted the following e-mail interview after Lisa and I got involved in a debate about the merits of "Internet research."

Geert Lovink: Let's start our dialogue with a thesis. If the Internet, in terms of acceptance and user cultures, has reached its phase of "normalization," the logical consequence is that the Net is as racist as the society it stems from. Is there any evidence that this is the case? What do you think of such a "mirror" theory? In your book Cybertypes, you speak of a cyberspace that needs to examine its roots in society.

Lisa Nakamura: Certainly the Net is as racist as the societies that it stems from. How could this not be true? Is it not true of all other media forms, including literature, film, and television?

Why should the Internet be different? I do, however, think that the Internet does more than "mirror" ideology from the culture at large; distinctive aspects of the Internet as a communication technology are lacking in other media, and its interfaces do as much to create particular kinds of identities as the Internet does to reflect them.

I don't think that Cybertypes was the first book to say that cyberspace needs to examine its roots in society. The second wave of post-utopian backlash, like Sandy Stone's work, did that. I think that it tried to say that the Internet's interfaces made some identity choices unavailable, some unavoidable, and otherwise served to police and limit the kinds of ways that people could define themselves. The Internet hails its audiences in the same ways that texts have intended readers, that films and television shows have intended audiences, and that made environments are intended for particular users. And in its earlier stages the Internet was not hailing people of color; it assumed a normative white user and in fact often still does.

GL: Could you tell us where Internet "race" research stands at the moment? I remember that at some point two large U.S. conferences took place. However, as you previously noted, "digital divide" statistics are changing, both within the United States and elsewhere. Asian-Americans can perhaps no longer be classified as disadvantaged. Without much notice, the Chinese have become the second biggest user group, after the Americans. The majority of content on the Net is no longer in English. Nevertheless, certain power relations remain and new inequalities are created.

LN: The two events that you refer to are the "Race in Digital Space" conferences, which are cosponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southern California. These conferences are fantastic, but they are not yet established in the way that other discipline-oriented conferences are. I agree with you about certain power relations—such as institutionalized racism—remaining and new inequalities being created. I think that two of the most striking new inequalities are the division between broadband and dial-up users and the way that some people, such as Asian Americans, who seem to be privileged users of the Internet, are being targeted as markets for Web-based commerce rather than as communities who can organize themselves to get things done. So being on the Internet is not in and of itself an unmitigated good.

GL: How do groups like the Association for Internet Research...