Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

80 Alllooksame?
the score; the average score is seven. Users are given the corrected version
of their test so they can guess which ones they got “wrong,” and are told
that they are “OK” if they get a score higher than average.
Suematsu writes that he designed the site “ultimately as a joke” and that
he “didn’t mean this site to be some sort of political arena.” Despite this, as
he writes in an essay to the user, “Some people felt that this site would promote
racism, or that the site itself is racist. Others felt quite the opposite. I
was very surprised to receive many emails with encouraging words from
Chinese, Korean, and Japanese people. In some ways, I was expecting to
upset many of these people.” The wide range of responses to the site demonstrates
the ways that this particular kind of interactivity, one that puts the
user in the position of a racial profiler of sorts, functions as a nexus for
Asians and Asian Americans to actively consider race as an act of seeing.
The site’s bulletin board encourages active conversation about the meaning
of the test and most importantly constitutes a valuable and unique opportunity
to study the Asian American new media user. As Elizabeth Bird writes
in her perceptive study of media audience ethnography in The Audience in
Everyday Life, ethnicity and gender produce significant differentials in the
qualitative research process that must be thought through more carefully. In
her study of Native Americans and their media use, she noticed that group
interviews worked well in gathering information because they used a “communicative
style . . . more collaborative and less competitive than Anglos,”
but she discovered that this was only the case among single-sex groups, since
Native American females tended to defer to older males in group settings. 16
Bird encourages a careful interrogation of what she calls the “ethnographic
encounter” in a broad sense, taking note not only of the ethnographer’s
own identity and its relation to the type of interaction she is likely to have
with informants, but also whether the presence or absence of the researcher
might foreclose or enable particular kinds of conversations. Asian Americans
tend not to be especially forthcoming about themselves in non-anonymous
or interview situations for several reasons: if they are undocumented immigrants,
they may not wish to call attention to themselves, and many Asian
cultures tend to frown on individuals speaking about personal matters or
opinions in public settings. For these reasons, Asian Americans may post to
the Internet in cases in which they might not confide in an interviewer. In
addition, people who have noticeable foreign accents may be mocked or
devalued as “FOB” (Fresh off the Boat) in settings that require spoken language,
and the use of imperfect or nonstandard written English may also be
a source of embarrassment to survey takers. It matters what type of Web site