[Air-l] Talking Race and Cyberspace

[Art McGee]

NetTime

May 25, 2004

Talking Race and Cyberspace: Interview with Lisa Nakamura

By Geert Lovink

I met Internet scholar Lisa Nakamura at a conference in
Oslo, late 2001, where she showed how techno-utopian dreams
reproduced racist patterns. Her analysis was of a shocking
normality because it, once again, proved how 'the old' got
teleported into the new in such a friction-free manner.

Nakamura's material shows how the Internet, despite all its
alternative claims, is part of dominant visual culture. "No
one on the Internet knows you are a dog." It is this flirt
with fluid identities, so common in the roaring nineties,
that distracted Internet advocates from futher investigations.
That, of course, changed over the past years. A number of
conferences were held and studies done, and Lisa Nakamura's
work stands out within this context.

The following email interview was done after we both got
involved in a debate about the merits of 'Internet research'.

Full Interview:

http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0405/msg00057.html

-end-

Art McGee
Principal Consultant
Virtual Identity
Communications+Media+Technology
1-510-967-9381
artmcgee at cyberspace.org