Anna Everett: considering race and ethnicity in digital media
11.13.06 | One of the most persistent and yet still difficult topics to engage honestly, clearly, empathetically, and with informed understanding, even in 21st century America remains race and ethnicity matters even in digital media, and particularly for youth communities.
With the popularity and pervasiveness visual and moving images in digital media produced by ubiquitous digital cameras, cell phone cams, webcams, streaming video, audio, etc., interacting in digital media environments and especially online has changed from a largely print-based and most-often racially and ethnically anonymous mode of engagement has changed.
Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, and the blogosphere and the UTube revolution, for example, have reinstated longstanding concerns about identity politics in the digital domain. So, to repurpose an old adage: on MySpace and on blogs, everyone now knows if you are a dog in cyberspace. And now it seems that the color of the dog matters once again! And what are we to make of a MySpace simulation called NiggaSpace.com that recently appeared online and is generating more than some raised eyebrows, and more than 50,000 Google hits?
While I certainly do not suggest going down that slippery slope of censorship to address such developments online, some deployment of critical media literacy skills is absolutely in order when taking in the plenititude of the digital public sphere. For here, after all, we encounter all manner of such racial dissimulations. And whereas NiggaSpace is a minor annoyance for some of us, it is more than countered by the likes of such digital spaces as Code Z, The Black Commentator, Chicken Bones, AfroGEEKS, Afrofuturism, to point to just a few sites of responsible racial discourse online!
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Michael Chui
11/14/06
4:45am
Note that the front page of NiggaSpace states this:
This site is in no way meant to be racist.
A common endearing term used by many black people is, “nigga” not to be confused with a different and offensive term, “nigger”.
While I do not agree with its usage, I have seen it used without rancor or intended malice, in particular between friends. Just pointing out, because I think it needs to be.
Dedria A. Humphries (Lansing Community College)
11/14/06
12:37pm
I am an black woman professor of writing who is experimenting with digital rhetoric in the classroom, hence my interest in this site. I read with interest the comments of Anna Everett and visited each site she mentioned. I didn’t find niggaspace. come so annoying as amusing, and throughly in the spirit of the genre of social web sites. A survey of the mentioned sites shows the diversity of African Americans in the 21st century and the use of the First Amendment to call themselves what they please. In the past such actions on the part of one segment of the black populations would reflect on us all and hence the cry for censorship (we cringed at crime reports that showed a nappy-headed, wild-eyed black guy). The thing is the type of people found on niggaspace.com are real people, young people, who may or may not have asperations to be a part of the mainstream, and who may or may not understand how they arrive at the point in time they are with the attitudes they have. They are not nice, but that’s ok. The other sites are predictable with politics and culture at the main, and that’s ok too.
aguimarin
12/13/06
11:09pm
What about golden retrievers who go online as pugs or cats?
I’m refering to situations where people create avatars, like those in Second Life, which represent different ethnicities, races, or genders than those which they embody offline. Tom Boellstorff is studying Second Life and how users learn to interact socially in that ‘virtual’ space. I wonder if we can learn something about race, ethnicity, and gender in the ‘real’ world by studying how these topics play out in ‘virtual’ worlds where such identities are open to manipulation.