13 research outputs found

    Race and racism in Internet Studies: A review and critique

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    Race and racism persist online in ways that are both new and unique to the Internet, alongside vestiges of centuries-old forms that reverberate significantly both offline and on. As we mark 15 years into the field of Internet studies, it becomes necessary to assess what the extant research tells us about race and racism. This paper provides an analysis of the literature on race and racism in Internet studies in the broad areas of (1) race and the structure of the Internet, (2) race and racism matters in what we do online, and (3) race, social control and Internet law. Then, drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, including Hall’s spectacle of the Other and DuBois’s view of white culture, the paper offers an analysis and critique of the field, in particular the use of racial formation theory. Finally, the paper points to the need for a critical understanding of whiteness in Internet studies

    The Trouble with White Feminism: Whiteness, Digital Feminism and the Intersectional Internet

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    In August, 2013 Mikki Kendall, writer and pop culture analyst, started the hashtag #SolidarityisforWhiteWomen as a form of cyberfeminist activism directed at the predominantly white feminist activists and bloggers at sites like Feministing, Jezebel and Pandagon who failed to acknowledge the racist, sexist behavior of one their frequent contributors. Kendall’s hashtag activism quickly began trending and reignited a discussion about the trouble with white feminism. A number of journalists have excoriated Kendall specifically, and women of color more generally, for contributing to a “toxic” form of feminism. Yet what remains unquestioned in these journalistic accounts and in the scholarship to date, is the dominance of white women as architects and defenders of a framework of white feminism – not just in the second wave but today, in the digital era.. In this chapter, I offer a critique of white feminism as it plays out on the intersectional Internet. To do this, I critically examine three examples of white women’s feminist activism: Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and “Ban Bossy” campaigns, Eve Ensler’s One Billion Rising, and The Future of Online Feminism report. I end with a discussion about the difficulty of challenging white feminism, how necessary it is to move forward, and how crucial the Internet is for sustaining such a critique

    African American Ethnic and Class-Based Identities on the World Wide Web: Moderating the Effects of Self-Perceived Information Seeking/Finding and Web Self-Efficacy

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    The web is a potentially powerful tool for communicating information to diverse audiences. Unfortunately, all groups are not equally represented on the web, and this may have implications for online information seeking. This study investigated the role of class- and ethnic-based identity in self-perceived web-based information seeking/finding and self-efficacy. A questionnaire is administered, asking African Americans about their class and ethnic identities and web use to test a conceptual model predicting that these identities are positively related to web-based information seeking and web self-efficacy, which are then positively related to web-based information finding. Gender and previous web experience are expected to moderate the relationships. Structural equations modeling of these data support most of the predictions and indicate that these identities influence perceptions of online information seeking

    “My Brain Database Doesn’t See Skin Color” Color-Blind Racism in the Technology Industry and in Theorizing the Web

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    In this article, I examine three interconnected notions about color-blind racism and the Internet. The first is the fantasy that the Internet as a technology is color-blind with regard to race; the second is the reality that color-blind racism operates in the tech industry. The third notion is the way color-blind racism shapes Internet studies of race and racism, in which race is contained as a “variable” or as an “identity” that inhere exclusively in people of color, but that leaves the way race is embedded in structures, industry, and the very idea of the Internet unexamined. To explore these facets of color-blind racism, the article offers a theoretical meta-analysis of scholarly literature, the cultural artifacts of technoculture, and popular accounts of the tech industry

    African Americans and mobile video: exploring Black cultural practice on Vine

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    This study explores Black cultural practice on the mobile video platform Vine, a six-second micro-video editing mobile application. The purpose of this research is to critically examine how African Americans embraced social video through Vine and how Black cultural practice is enacted within the political economy of the mobile video landscape. This dissertation employs the use of Qualitative Content Analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) as a means of systematic yet adaptive exploration of the cultural phenomena transpiring in Vine videos, and Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (Brock, 2018) to establish context and meanings of the descriptions that emerge through the content analysis. The analysis demonstrates Vine videos produced by Black users were important to Vine’s success. Videos fall into the following categories: everyday life, celebrity cameo, content remix, Black boy joy, comedy & jokes “the dozens”, music & dance, tech-speak, and socio-cultural commentary. Black content creators leveraged punchy storytelling to compel the world’s internet users to watch and adopt Vine. This practice is defined as Black digital efficacy in the study, the process by which technology is given direction, labor, and Black aesthetics to propel it forward

    Forms and Fragments: Enactment of Cultural Identification in an Online Community of Chinese Living Overseas

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    This research is an interpretive study of the dynamics of cultural identification as enacted by Chinese individuals living overseas who participate in a virtual online community known as Wenxuecity.com. The study draws on intercultural communication theories of identity proposed by Carbaugh, Collier, and Hecht, as well as on my own integrative framework for the analysis of cultural identity, to explore the self-other interaction in identity enactment, the multidimensionality of identity, and the centrality of communication in processes of identification. Through the application of a qualitative analysis of online discourse, I found three primary forms of cultural identification-- perceptual, strategic, and positional cultural identification -- that reveal how online commentators make sense of their individual and group identities. Through online discussion of a variety of topics -- from China\u27s history, East-West tensions, to academic power structures and racial hierarchies in host cultures or media stereotyping and global hegemonic relations -- and using communicative strategies like self-other comparison, advice, and ideological debate, commentators enact both a sense of group cohesiveness as well as their internal, conflictive heterogeneity. Their discourse allows for the exploration of how multiple dimensions of identity -- individuality, sociality, materiality, and spirituality -- intersect to shape the fragmentary character of cultural identification. In the particular case of the group under study, the dominant trends observed reveal that cultural identification is a process characterized by the enactment of a sense of marginalization in host societies, heightened individuality, strategic attachment to or distancing from Chinese cultural membership, and ideological divisions
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