Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

Avatars and the Visual Culture of Reproduction 143
to the principles of “cleanness” and masculinity that dominated digital culture
in its early years. Rather than “toning it down,” their digital signatures
tend to do exactly the opposite, mixing media and textures and ornamentation
in a fashion that defies these notions of good taste and embodies “tackiness”
as exemplified by the lower-class taste cultures reviled by the modernists
cited earlier. In addition, the form of these sites challenges the bourgeoisindividualist
model of property and presence that characterized early cyberspace’s
rhetoric. This rhetoric of ownership and triumphant individualism
inherent in much of the electronic frontier discourse has since been critiqued
from both feminist and postcolonial perspectives. The notion that
representational and cultural power could arise only from the staking out of
individual spaces or “homesteads” on the Internet privileged singly owned,
managed, and designed Web sites or “home pages” as “domains” or sites of
identity. Susan Leigh Star critiques this notion of the home-page-as-home because
it requires an amount of cultural and real capital unattainable to many;
ironically, as she notes, academic nomads such as herself may be among the
few who can afford to be figuratively situated or “homed” in cyberspace
through the ownership and control of a personal site. She also notes that
technology, the Web included, has often resulted in “more work for mother”
rather than less and has also created more rather than less isolation for
women, who are often stuck at home in caregiving roles. 23 However, the
figuration of the individual home page, a space that Nina Wakeford notes
can reduplicate the endless housekeeping and drudgery of domestic upkeep
just as does the offline home, has since lost much of its cachet as a source of
digital visual capital on the popular graphical Internet. Despite early predictions
such as Star’s and Wakeford’s, which were published in 1996 on the
eve of the World Wide Web’s massification, the individual home page has not
turned out to be the main or even dominant route to independent expression
in terms of the Internet’s visual culture. Web sites like babydream.com
maintain or “host” discussion boards that permit users to create individual
posts or spaces of visual digital identity within the confines of a shared virtual
space. This model of shared rather than personal space, characteristic
of blogging and online journaling spaces such as LiveJournal, which have
also often been identified with female users, allows a model of digital participation
and cross-linkage that requires less technical skill than is necessary
to create a single stand-alone Web site, thus creating less work for
mother and easier navigation between different users’ virtual spaces of expression.
While an individual Web site may constitute a burden, a virtual
“room of one’s own” in the form of a digital signature, even an elaborate