Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

Introduction
Digital Racial Formations and
Networked Images of the Body
A constellation of events in relation to the Internet, digital visual representations
of bodies, and racial identity came into alignment in the mid-nineties.
First, 1995 was a turning point in the history of the Internet. In 1995 Netscape
Navigator, the first widely popular graphical Web browser, had its first public
stock offering and initiated popular use of the Internet and, most importantly,
heralded its transformation from a primarily textual form to an increasingly
and irreversibly graphical one that remediates video and other pictorially
representational practices such as photography, cartooning, and digital gaming.
That process has only accelerated in recent years as the Internet converges
with nonstatic media forms such as streaming video and television.
Much of the earlier research on the Internet discussed it as a vehicle for
writing. This primarily textual Internet no longer dominates and in some
cases no longer exists: many MOOs, MUDs, and Listservs have gone offline.
Much of the research written in the nineties centered on hypertext theory,
or on discursive “virtual communities” formed by shared interests that assumed
subcultural status for their users. The days in which Wired magazine and
Mondo 2000 set the agenda for an elite and largely male digerati have passed;
Internet use has definitively crossed the line between hobby or niche practice
and has taken its place as part of everyday life. This new way of conceptualizing
the Internet is reflected in scholarly titles such as The Internet
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