Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

78 Alllooksame?
on the impact and meaning of television adoption in preliterate societies,
there has been relatively little on Internet adoption, though the popularity
and spread of cybercafés and gaming parlors on the global scene certainly
signal the massification of the medium among wider numbers of users. New
media collectives such as Sarai in New Delhi work to facilitate the adoption
and deployment of digital media among some of India’s poorest users, many
of whom are preliterate. This exploitation of the Internet’s increasingly
visual and graphical nature works to empower users of color in a way that is
useful to oppose the reification of race through visual means online. In this
chapter I begin by analyzing the Web site alllooksame.com to parse the
ways that race is ultimately deconstructed as a visually meaningful term. My
position is that rather than resulting in successful racial profiling, the site
provides more occasions for racial misrecognitions, thus exposing the active
process of the reification of race. I end the chapter with an assessment of
postcolonial theoretical stances regarding Internet adoption across ethnic
and national borders. Clearly there is much at stake in this debate: the
Internet is feared by many postcolonial media and technology critics partly
because they see it as an obstacle to the preservation of rare or endangered
languages. 13 The dominance of majority languages like English and Japanese
could potentially contribute to the eradication of rarer languages like Navajo,
languages with possible use value beyond their use as codes during a war.
Web sites such as Dyske Suematsu’s alllooksame.com effectively employ
interactivity and the spectacle of race online in ways that offer distinctive
forms of resistance to racial and visual categories. Alllooksame.com critiques
vision itself as a way of understanding race, culture, and the body both online
and off. There is a tendency in new media criticism to valorize ethnic identity
Web sites that have an overtly progressive political stance as being more
culturally “authentic” (and thus less corrupted by the West) than others. 14 I
chose to examine alllooksame.com because it is a space produced by an
Asian designer for an Asian and Asian American audience that debates national
and ethnic identities rather than simply affirming them. In addition,
alllooksame.com is a comedic site and thus part of a dramatically underexamined
genre that gets little critical attention even from Net critics. 15
Alllooksame.com is a weird, weird site. Interacting with it produces a mixture
of guilt and fascination and a lingering feeling of discomfort. In short, it is
uncanny. The initial screen features the familiar iconography of a Scantron
exam form with its ranks of numbered oval blanks, along with a “welcome”
narrative that reads: