Colonialism and Subjectivity in Cyber Space

Andrew Budd

2371 Cyber Life

Prof. Jennifer Martin

March 24, 2011

Colonialism and Subjectivity in Cyber Space

In Lisa Nakamura’s article Race In/For Cyberspace, she identifies several issues regarding the portrayal of one’s identity when using online communication tools such as a chat room like LambdaMoo. Nakamura points out that while the Internet is often championed as a democratic, equalizing medium, issues of race, class, and gender remain prevalent in many online communication tools. Nakamura is critical of  user’s phantasmic representations of themselves online, particularly users who posit themselves falsely as different races, and perpetuate racialized stereotypes. As Nakamura critiques, these users enjoy and “exploit [racial identities] for recreational purposes.” Nakamura is concerned about the damaging way this type of online activity affects representations of racial identity. Although Nakamura quite rightly identifies political and cultural influences for such damaging online activity, the following essay hopes to suggest an alternative cause for users posing as different races.

Before delving too deeply into Nakamura’s essay, it is helpful to consider John Suler’s essay Identity Management in Cyberspace. Suler points out that the internet provides people with “the opportunity... to present themselves in a variety of different ways” (455). He goes on to suggest that human identity is an extremely “complex aspect of human nature,” and the ways in which users choose to represent themselves online can say a lot about ones subjectivity. “Compartmentalizing or dissociating one’s various online identities,” continues Suler, “can be an efficient, focused way to manage the multiplicities of selfhood” (456). It is important to consider the motivations behind a user portraying himself as a completely different race. As Suler comments, “Cyberspace living... gives people the opportunity to focus on and develop a particular aspect of who they are. It may even give people the chance to express and explore facets of their identity that they do not express in their face-to-face world” (456). 

Perhaps then, users who elect to exist in cyberworlds as a completely different race are doing so because, as Suler describes, “Subjectively... people can feel shame, guilt, fear, anxiety, or hatred about some aspect of their identities. People also strive to attain new, idealized ways of being” (456). These observations seem to be overlooked in Nakamura’s article. She is extremely critical of many white users in LambdaMOO who pose as stereotypical Asian’s such as Samurai Warriors and Geisha’s because “the appropriation of racial identity becomes a form of recreation, a vacation from fixed identities and locals.” While Nakamura provides examples of users who do take and perpetuate these stereotypes in harmful ways, is it not possible that this is subconsciously a way for white users to express “shame, guilt, fear and anxietie[s]” about who they are as white people? Suler points out that “how we decide to present ourselves in cyberspace isn’t always a purely conscious choice... People usually select a username or avatar on a whim because it appeals to them without fully understanding the deeper symbolic meanings of that choice” (Suler 458). 

By no means do I wish to discredit any of Nakamura’s points. It is undeniable that the overtly stereotypical and false race that some white users take on in virtual communities “tend to reinforce existing inequalities, and propagate already dominant ideologies” as Nakamura claims. But I think it is equally important to consider that the “racial and racist discourse in the MOO is the unique product of a machine and an ideology” as Nakamura goes on to suggest. A critic of the type of Orientalism that Nakamura finds so concerning is Edward Said. In his essay Orientalism he offers an enlightening opinion upon the pressures of colonialism and being white:

It meant- in the colonies- speaking in a certain way, behaving according to a code of regulations, and even feeling certain things and                                not others. It meant specific judgements, evaluations, gestures. It was a form of authority before which nonwhites, and even whites themselves, were expected to bend. (58) 

    Allowing ourselves, as Nakamura does, to think of cyberspace as a new land to be colonized just as our real world or the moon have been, brings new revelations to Said’s comments. Is it not possible that these overtly stereotypical, false racial representations that white males are undertaking in cyberspace are a subconscious attempt to deal with the pressure they are feeling to speak, behave, and feel a certain way, as the feel expected to? 

Nakamura demonstrates convincingly throughout her piece that representations of race that are perpetuated through colonialism and popular culture pose a constant threat to racial minorities. As she points out, “a default ‘whiteness’ covers the entire social space of LambdaMOO<race is ‘whited out’ in the name of cybersocial hygiene.” Keeping Suler and Said’s observations in mind, I think that it is important to consider the possibility that white males acting out and perpetuating these stereotypes could be reacting to a subconscious pressure to fit into their prescribed online roles as white males in the colonization of cyberspace.

Works Cited

Nakamura, Lisa. "Race In/For Cyberspace." <http://www.humanities.uci.edu/mposter/syllabi/readings/nakamura.html>. 

Said, Edward. A Critical Theory Reader. Abingdon: Routledge, 2000.

Suler, John. "Identity Management in Cyberspace." Contemporary Media Forum. Journal of Applied Psychoanalutic Studies, Vol. 4, No. 4, Oct. 2002.