Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

46 “Ramadan Is Almoast Here!”
and car modifications—in other words, as ephemeral, often replaced or
swapped-out modules of signification that convey a sense of identity, style,
and community in everyday life, particularly for girls. And like them, the language
of AIM buddies has much to do with popular televisual media, licensed
characters such as Hello Kitty and Powerpuff Girls, and musical trends. Yet
on the other hand, AIM buddies differ from these in that they are part of a
graphical real-time communicative practice that occurs on the computer
desktop, the same space most commonly associated with the Internet and
computing. David Silver’s study of teen girls’ use of the Internet represents
them as a group of users who are more resistant to the commercialization of
the online sphere than had been thought, and notes that the online activities
most popular with girls, e-mail, IM, surfing for fun, and visiting entertainment
Web sites, have more to do with communication than with consumption:
“Female teens approach and use the Internet as a communication tool
rather than as a consumer medium. It appears to us that although American
female teens are eager to use and explore various activities on the Internet,
e-commerce is not one of the major ones.” 11 He also defines IM as a “girl
dominated activity” along with using e-mail and obtaining dieting and
fitness information, and he documents unsuccessful attempts by new media
industries to commodify IM, perhaps as a response to having failed to do so
before it reached its current height of popularity with youth. In any event,
the commercial stakes as well as the theoretical ones for articulating IM
with identities in formation, in particular female and racialized diasporic
and other marginal types of identities, are undeniably high. Herbert Gans’s
writings on the formation of popular culture preferences and practices shed
some light on this issue. Given that the Internet is used with particular intensity
by youth, it makes sense to look to networked new media for representative
examples of diasporic taste cultures. Gans defines popular culture as
the raw material for “taste cultures, because each contains shared or common
aesthetic values and standards of taste. Aesthetic is used broadly, referring
not only to standards of beauty and taste but also to a variety of other
emotional and intellectual values that people express or satisfy when they
choose content from a taste culture.” 12 IM is a communication practice that
possesses a mixed and chaotic taste culture partly because it has resisted
formal modes of commodification until now, and part of its potential lies in
its ability to be repurposed or tweaked in ways that convey identity differently
from received digital networked images.
Identity is a category that has long been perceived as central and important
in cultural studies. Stuart Hall describes the development of the concept