Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

94 Alllooksame?
cultural media, the Internet’s ability to approximate preliterate narrative
forms while also permitting access to a transcoded signboard or film culture
may make it the most appropriate medium to achieve these goals.
However, as has been noted in the past, the rush to bridge the digital
divide participates in a dangerously paternalistic discourse of uplift and cultural
imperialism that is compounded by the medium’s intense attractiveness
on both the cultural and economic levels; it is a medium that is conceived
of as being inherently educational in a way that television has never been.
The Internet differs from television, video, and film in the sense that it has
been accorded the cachet formerly given to literacy; its early associations
with research, education, and the written word, coupled with its increasing
convergence with moving-image forms, give it a positive cultural valence
that is hard to match. Eric Michaels notes that the popular perception of
television as a vast wasteland of mind-corrupting, contentless content extends
to both domestic and international contexts. The Western bias toward
literacy and against television and video, a way of thinking that sells “literacy
as a prosocial, prodevelopment medium” and denigrates television and
video as “antisocial and repressive,” 51 springs partly from Neil Postman’s influential
critique of television as a means by which we amuse ourselves to
death. In alllooksame.com, Asian Americans create networked spaces for
questioning identity that pinpoint the lines of fracture between race, nationality,
and ethnicity. If pattern recognition, or visual literacy regarding the
digitally mediated visual image, is indeed our new post-Internet paradigm of
knowledge and cognition, then the obligation to shake up old patterns of
identity fulfilled by allllooksame.com constitutes a welcome and important
intervention into race’s cultures, visual and otherwise.