CYBERTYPES

CYBERTYPES- Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet
In this article, Lisa Nakamura writes how cybernetic tourism, the internet and transnationality com in play with issues of race, ethnicity and identity. She starts by quoting the television commercial “Anthem” which “claims that on the internet, there are no infirmities, no gender, no age- only minds” (87). Such a form of communication she calls “utopia, a place uninfluenced by the rest of it” (87). In this commercial, the word race is written on the chalkboard and crossed out by an Indian girl. But Nakamura argues that the ‘rest of it’ cannot be easily crossed out as the word race is crossed on the chalkboard. In the rest of this chapter, Nakamura focuses on pointing out how “the rest of it, the spectator of racial and ethnic difference and its visual and textual representation in print and television advertisements that appeared in 1997 for Compaq, IBM, and Origin, has not been easily erased but rather reinforced by these advertisements. These ads she says, “Sell networking and communications technologies that depict racial differences, ‘the rest of it’ as a visual marker. The spectacles of race in these advertising images are designed to stabilize contemporary anxieties that networking technology and access to cyberspace may break down ethnic and racial differences” (87). In these adverts, the viewer is placed in the position of a tourist, and sketch out a future in which difference is either elided or put in its proper place. Some advertisements like that of MCI for instance, not only sell internet services but also a particular kind of content: the idea that getting online and becoming part of a global network will liberate the user from the body with its inconvenient and limiting attributes such as race, gender, disability, and age” (88). At this point, Nakamura states that the aspect of the body and identity come into play with telecommunication. Telecommunication however, claims to change the nature of identity (88). Further, Nakamura states that this advertisement claims to produce a radical form of democracy that refers to and extends an American model of social equality and equal access. To the visual images of diversity, the advertisement claims that the ‘MCI products will reduce the different bodies that we see to just minds. Nakamura’s