When I was 13 years old, I got on my Dad's computer and found my way into a chat room online. I met people online who would immediately message me "a/s/l" for "Age/Sex/Location," and I realized that online, I could be anything I wanted to be. Of course, as a 13 year old girl, what I wanted to be was a 16 year old girl, which nearly got me in trouble with some gross online stalkers who wanted to meet me in real life.
I've heard more than one story from friends meeting someone from a dating site, only to find out that they were not exactly "as advertised."
The point is, that online, people can be anything that they want to be. And they often are. They can be a different age, sex, race, religion, nationality, etc. all with a little bit of imagination and typing. Lisa Nakamura found that "when [online] users are free to choose their own race, all were assumed to be white. And many of those who adapted non-white personae turned out to be white male users (p. 391)."
According Lisa Nakamura in cybertyping and The Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction, the phenomenon of stereotyping has made its way online into what she calls "cybertyping." Specifically, the word cybertype describes "the distinctive ways that the Internet propagates, disseminates, and commodifies images of race and racism (p.318)." In theory, the Internet could and should be a place above and beyond race and gender. However, in reality, this has ended up not being the case. Even when race and gender are not specified online, white male is almost always assumed. "One of the symptoms of cybertyping is this convenient 'disappearance of awareness' of American racial minorities, a symptom that 'multiculturalist' Internet advertising and the discourse of technology work hard to produce (p. 327)." If a certain race is not shoved in our faces, most Americans will not see or think about it, especially online, where that person is not easily seen.
The irony of this is that in today's society we are seen by more cameras and observers than ever before. If you go out in public you can bet that you will be seen by at least one camera. If you run a red light or a tollbooth, you may be sent a picture of yourself in the mail. We are living in a version of Bentham's Panopticon or even Orwell's Big Brother society. Whether or not we are actually being observed at any particular time, there is a chance that we are. Under the Patriot Act, the government can even check our emails and phone calls if they think we may be doing something illegal. At the end of his essay, Discipline and Punish, Foucoult asks, "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? (p.486)" The regimented, disciplined, observed way of life, which started in government and prisons has now come to dominate other institutions which effect our daily lives.
Has this quest for discipline and observation reached into our homes though the internet? I have already suggested that the government can monitor communications if it thinks that you are a terrorist, but what about more daily regiments online for the "regular" user?
On the way home from work the other day, I heard a familiar story. A couple of teenage girls took some provocative pictures over Summer break and put them on their MySpace pages. Someone at the school started passing the pictures around, and now the girls are suspended from participation in sports and have to make a public apology. These girls did something (questionable or not) on their own time in their own homes, but the act of putting pictures of the event online made them a part of the public system and subject to its rules. The sports team at those girls' school has rules about behavior both inside and outside of the classroom. Their actions became known and punishable because of the publicness of people's lives now on the internet. The system can now reach into our lives like never before and change them for better or worse.
With all of the positive things that the internet can bring: organization, communication, digitization, and more, it is far from a perfect place. It is not accessible to everyone. The poor and many minorities have not seen the saturation that white middle class America has. But even if and when that saturation does catch up as did television, the internet may still not be as diverse or equal as people might think. "Mainstream film and television depicts African Americans in consistently negative ways despite extremely high usage rates of television by African Americans. Hence, the dubious goal of 100% 'penetration' of African American communities by Internet technologies cannot by and of itself, result in more parity or even accuracy in representations of African Americans (Nakamura, p. 330)."
Although the internet has vastly changed society in many ways, we still have a long way to go as a culture to catch up in racial equality and in finding a balance of power and privacy.
