Presenter: Lisa Nakamura
Abstract: ‘Visual Culture and the Internet’
Much of the foundational research in cyberculture studies dates from the early and mid nineties, and it is already sadly out of date (see Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen [1995], Allucquere Stone's The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age [1995], Scott Bukatman's Terminal Identity [1993], the work of Amy Bruckman and Susan Herring, and anthologies such as Steve Jones's Cybersociety [1995, 1998]). Much of it characterized by a utopian strain which celebrates the “cybersubject,” and their objects of study are text-based Internet applications such as MOO's and MUD's, IRC, and Usenet newsgroups, none of which are popular with users today (or were ever popular with really large numbers of people, even in the early nineties). While insights from now-defunct online communities such as LambdaMOO are still of historical interest, the terrain of cyberspace has changed immensely since then. Users are different (and much more diverse in terms of race and gender), widely adopted broadband technologies like DSL and cable modems have transformed the richness and speed of media transmission over the Internet, and online content and interfaces are much more complex. Most importantly, infrastructural enhancements have made the Internet, which started out as a textual space, into an irremediably graphical one. This demands a critical approach that takes visuality into account as a specific mode utilized in distinctive ways on the Internet.
Visual representations of identity have been examined quite exhaustively in reference to literature, film, and to a growing extent television; however, there are only a handful of scholarly texts that do so in reference to the Internet. Part of this has to do with the newness of the Internet, but as I argue in my first single authored book, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet ( New York : Routledge, 2002), another reason for this gap has to do with the utopian discourse surrounding the Internet. Now that this discourse of the Internet as a democratic public sphere and difference-free space has been strongly challenged, both in popular and academic forums, what is the status of visual identity in cyberspace? Now that we all know that difference does signify in this medium, how do we evaluate its presence in cyberspatial discourse? What kinds of analytical tools and methods are best suited to accomplishing this goal?
Bio
Dr Lisa Nakamura is Assistant Professor of Communication Arts and Visual Culture Studies at the University of Wisconsin , Madison . She is the author of Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002) and a co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000). She has published articles on cross-racial roleplaying in Internet chatspaces, race, embodiment, and virtuality in the film The Matrix , and political economies of race and cyberspace in publications such as the The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Women's Review of Books, Unspun: Key Terms for the World Wide Web, The Cybercultures Reader, Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture, Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices , and the Visual Culture Reader 2.0 . She is working on a new book entitled Visual Cultures of the Internet which is under advance contract with the University of Minnesota Press for inclusion in their Electronic Mediations book series.
Nakamura was hired as part of a faculty cluster in Visual Culture studies at the University of Wisconsin , Madison , in Fall 2002. Her interdisciplinary work at the intersections of new media theory, critical race studies, and theories of visuality led to her creating a new field: that of race and cyberspace studies. Cybertypes is required reading on syllabi at Columbia, Brown, University of California at Irvine, Santa Cruz, and Berkeley, the University of Washington, and the University of Illinois. Nakamura delivered a keynote address at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in 2001, and has delivered several keynote, plenary, and featured talks at major universities. Her work has been taught in departments of Communications, English, Ethnic Studies, Art and Art history, Music, and Visual Culture Studies. Visual Cultures of the Internet will be forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2005.