Race After the Internet - Paperback

by Lisa Nakamura (Editor), Peter Chow-White (Editor)

In Race After the Internet, Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White bring together a collection of interdisciplinary, forward-looking essays exploring the complex role that digital media technologies play in shaping our ideas about race. Contributors interrogate changing ideas of race within the context of an increasingly digitally mediatized cultural and informational landscape. Using social scientific, rhetorical, textual, and ethnographic approaches, these essays show how new and old styles of race as code, interaction, and image are played out within digital networks of power and privilege.

Race After the Internet includes essays on the shifting terrain of racial identity and its connections to social media technologies like Facebook and MySpace, popular online games like World of Warcraft, YouTube and viral video, WiFi infrastructure, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, genetic ancestry testing, and DNA databases in health and law enforcement. Contributors also investigate the ways in which racial profiling and a culture of racialized surveillance arise from the confluence of digital data and rapid developments in biotechnology. This collection aims to broaden the definition of the "digital divide" in order to convey a more nuanced understanding of access, usage, meaning, participation, and production of digital media technology in light of racial inequality.

Contributors: danah boyd, Peter Chow-White, Wendy Chun, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Troy Duster, Anna Everett, Rayvon Fouché, Alexander Galloway, Oscar Gandy, Eszter Hargittai, Jeong Won Hwang, Curtis Marez, Tara McPherson, Alondra Nelson, Christian Sandvig, Ernest Wilson

Author Biography

Lisa Nakamura is Associate Professor of Media and Cinema Studies and Director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet, coeditor, with Beth Kolko and Gilbert Rodman, of Race in Cyberspace, and co-editor, with Peter Chow-White, of Race After the Internet (Routledge, 2011).

Peter A. Chow-White is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. His work has appeared in Communication Theory, the International Journal of Communication, Media, Culture & Society, PLoS Medicine, and Science, Technology & Human Values.