Race in for Cyberspace

Race in cyberspace plays a major role. Just as the other articles state, anyone can be on the Internet. When someone is on the Internet you are just a mind. To others online when they read information they do not think of a physical being. With this in mind, there are ways to show identity. Race and identity causes a person to think differently, I think.

As Nakamura writes in Race in for Cyberspace, different sites and chat rooms use things to create identity. For example, in the LambdaMOO site there are characters that can be created with gender. It has four different genders that can be picked from. They also have different images you can pick from to describe physical features or ethnicity.

I have seen this myself. I have been in a chat room once and you really don't know who these people are. You can think you are talking to a 25 year old girl going to college, but in reality its a 57 year old woman trying to relive your youth on the Internet. Why would someone do this? They do it because they can. They do it because online no one know who you are, what you look like, or how old you are. People only know as much as you tell them. So someone online can really be no one online.

Nakamura's Argument 9/8/08

Nakamura talks about a lot of things in her reading that I have never thought about. I never realized that the certain images in these ads meant so much. For example, when Nakamura talked about the ad with the image of the Indian on the camel. It does make the viewer think about that person being a "real" person of that place. It creates a sense of a non-spoiled culture.

In the McDonald's commercial I viewed on youtube.com, they show all the countries competing at Beijing against each other but they all come together to go eat at McDonald's. It also shows the viewer that if you eat McDonald's you to can be apart of the Olympics and be like the athletes.

Another example is this Coca Cola ad that showed Beijing as this glorious, fun place. It shows Coca Cola leading the way to the start of the Olympics. Another commercial I viewed was the Mummy 3 ad. This ad shows the images of china and its landscape, monuments and architecture. It pulls you into china's culture. As they show images of the summer Olympics they shoot into the movie previews to make a connection between the two. Once again creating the idea that the hero in the movie is feeling the same triumph and puts in the same hard work as the athletes in the Olympics.

All these commercials demonstrate notions of cybernetic tourism. They all give the viewer feelings of wanting to be apart of the Olympics. Wanting them to go to China and actually be apart of the Olympics, just like the rest of the world.

What is digital diversity?

I am not really sure what this class will be about. I think we will learn about different types of digital media and how it effects our culture. We will learn how things online impact issues and concerns in our culture.