Race And Ethnicity In Digital Culture

In this unprecedented study, leading scholars and emerging voices from around the world consider how race and ethnicity continue to shape our everyday lives, even as digital technology seems to promise a release from our "real" social identities. How do people use the new expressive features of digital technologies to experience, represent, discuss, and debate racial and ethnic identity? How have digital technologies or digital spaces become racialized? How have the existing vernacular traditions, or folklore, surrounding identity been reshaped in digital spaces? And how have new traditions emerged? This interdisciplinary volume of essays explores the role of traditional culture in the evolving expressions, practices, and images of race and ethnicity in the digital age. The work examines cultural forms in exclusively digital environments as well as in the hybrid environments created by mobile technologies, where real life becomes overlaid with digital content. Insights from academics across disciplines—including anthropology, communications, folkloristics, art, and sociology—consider the interplay between race/ethnicity, everyday vernacular culture, and digital technologies. Six sections explore traditional cultural affordances of technology, folklore and digital applications, visual cultures of race and ethnicity, racism and exclusion online, political activism and race, and concluding observations. The book covers technologies such as vlogs, video games, digital photography, messaging applications, social media sites, and the Internet.

In this unprecedented study, leading scholars and emerging voices from around the world consider how race and ethnicity continue to shape our everyday lives, even as digital technology seems to promise a release from our "real" social identities. How do people use the new expressive features of digital technologies to experience, represent, discuss, and debate racial and ethnic identity? How have digital technologies or digital spaces become racialized? How have the existing vernacular traditions, or folklore, surrounding identity been reshaped in digital spaces? And how have new traditions emerged? This interdisciplinary volume of essays explores the role of traditional culture in the evolving expressions, practices, and images of race and ethnicity in the digital age. The work examines cultural forms in exclusively digital environments as well as in the hybrid environments created by mobile technologies, where real life becomes overlaid with digital content. Insights from academics across disciplines—including anthropology, communications, folkloristics, art, and sociology—consider the interplay between race/ethnicity, everyday vernacular culture, and digital technologies. Six sections explore traditional cultural affordances of technology, folklore and digital applications, visual cultures of race and ethnicity, racism and exclusion online, political activism and race, and concluding observations. The book covers technologies such as vlogs, video games, digital photography, messaging applications, social media sites, and the Internet.

Being equipped to confront issues related to racial and ethnic diversity is a crucial skill for Canadians. This new edition of Seeing Ourselves uses a collection of personal comments and essays, written by students from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds, to examine what it means to participate in the cultural and ethnic "mosaic" that comprises Canada today. Carl James creates a dialogue with students and readers that probes the meaning of ethnicity, race and culture, both in terms of the meanings individuals bring to these concepts and how they are understood in Canadian society as a whole. The varied perspectives, detailed analyses and careful reflections will be invaluable to anyone seeking to understand the meaning and implications of ethnic diversity in Canadian society today. To facilitate classroom discussion, this edition also includes background information and new, up-to-date statistics on the Canadian population - immigration trends, ethnic composition, religious affiliation and other characteristics of Canadians.

Lisa Nakamura refers to case studies of popular yet rarely evaluated uses of the Internet, such as pregnancy websites, instant messaging, and online petitions and quizzes, to look at the emergence of race-, ethnic-, and gender-identified visual cultures.

An explanation of the digital practices of the black Internet From BlackPlanet to #BlackGirlMagic, Distributed Blackness places blackness at the very center of internet culture. André Brock Jr. claims issues of race and ethnicity as inextricable from and formative of contemporary digital culture in the United States. Distributed Blackness analyzes a host of platforms and practices (from Black Twitter to Instagram, YouTube, and app development) to trace how digital media have reconfigured the meanings and performances of African American identity. Brock moves beyond widely circulated deficit models of respectability, bringing together discourse analysis with a close reading of technological interfaces to develop nuanced arguments about how “blackness” gets worked out in various technological domains. As Brock demonstrates, there’s nothing niche or subcultural about expressions of blackness on social media: internet use and practice now set the terms for what constitutes normative participation. Drawing on critical race theory, linguistics, rhetoric, information studies, and science and technology studies, Brock tabs between black-dominated technologies, websites, and social media to build a set of black beliefs about technology. In explaining black relationships with and alongside technology, Brock centers the unique joy and sense of community in being black online now.

Announcing presidential decisions, debating social issues, disputing the latest developments in television shows, and sharing funny memes—Twitter has become a space where ordinary citizens and world-leaders alike share their thoughts and ideas. As a result, some argue Twitter has leveled the playing field, while others reject this view as too optimistic. This has led to an ongoing debate about the platform’s democratizing potential and whether activity on Twitter engenders change or merely magnifies existing voices. Constructing Digital Cultures explores these issues and more through an in-depth examination of how Twitter users collaborate to create cultural understandings. Looking closely at how user-generated narratives renegotiate dominant ideas about gender and race, it provides insight into the nature of digital culture produced on Twitter and the platform’s potential as a virtual public sphere. This volume investigates arenas of discussion often seen on Twitter—from entertainment and popular culture to politics, social justice issues, and advertising—and looks into how members of ethnic minority groups use and relate to the platform. Through an in-depth examination of individual expressions, the different kinds of dialogue that characterize the platform, and various ways in which people connect, Constructing Digital Cultures provides a critical, empirically based consideration of Twitter’s potential as an inclusive, egalitarian public sphere for the modern age.

How do media ‘make’ race? How do legacies of empire shape our understandings of race and media? How does racism structure the media industries? Is the internet an inherently white space? Understanding the relationship between race, culture and media has never been more important. From the demonisation of Muslims to rampant new forms of racism on digital platforms, media are central to understanding how race is both constructed and experienced in everyday life. Yet media are key to resisting racism, too. While they can silence and stereotype us, they can also enable us to cut across difference, to contest and mobilise, and to create genuine community. Race, Culture and Media is a critical, impassioned and accessible exploration of this complex relationship. Anamik Saha outlines the theories, concepts and research you need to know in order to make sense of race, culture and media today - challenging you to move beyond simplistic notions of ‘diversity’ to really engage with issues of both power and participation. It is essential reading for students and researchers across media, communication and cultural studies. Dr Anamik Saha is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he convenes the MA Race, Media and Social Justice.