Presentation on Tutorial Reading

Rumination on Cyber-Race by Jerry Kang

This reading is talk about the Race problem in the cyber-space.

Jerry Kang is a Korean-American law professor also we can see him as an immigrant and racial minority in USA. He did provide two examples: ‘fighting words episode and car purchase’ to explain how he did discriminated by the other people. And in his reading, he did point out several things:

• How can we map each other into racial categories?
  
• Racial Mechanics.

Cyberspace provides a space for people to interact with each other and form a group, although they are at great distances. (e.g. real time chat, weblogs…etc)
Cyberspace not only help people maintain social relationships originally constructed in real space but also facilitate new relationships originally formed in cyberspace.
Cyberspace become more and more ‘real’ like the TV game, we can see that it have the potential to change everything, including racial mechanics.

ABOLITION

Most cyber interaction are based on text, which don’t need to disclose morphology
Race is not signalled in cyberspace but doesn’t mean that race ceases to matter in cyber or certainly, in real space. ‘Text’ will also permit racial mapping, explicitly (I’m Asian) and sometimes implicitly (consider cues from language, grammar, dictions, names).

INTEGRATION

• Cyberspace can help to reform racial meaning by promoting social interactivity?
• In real, we will imagine experiences, provided by mass media – stereotypically
• In cyberspace, we navigate less segregated communities, which means that we will engage in more direct experiences with actual people, not mediated by third parties. And direct experiences are less stereotypical than vicarious ones because there is less economic pressure for racial minorities to perform stereotypically for any audience.
• Also, there have a more equal social status in cyberspaces.
• Cooperation toward a joint goal is another important requirement. This defuses competition and highlights a common project rather than a common racial identity.

TRANSMUTATION

In a cyberspace, we can simply broadcasting a different racial signal than in a real space – cyber-passing. (racial masks) Moreover, the transmutation had given a reason for people to understand more about other’s race and identity. But in what way? Mediated stereotype. In the end, we may all unwittingly consume black/red/yellow-face, while believing it to be an “authentic” direct experience.