Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

Avatars and the Visual Culture of Reproduction 153
Oh, btw: I was reading more about pregnancy symptoms, and you know
what? - most of them don’t show for weeks or months after a missed AF, so
I don’t know if that will help us not be obsessed, yeah right!
As far as hiding behind the sunglasses or feeling silly - don’t - we are all
just learning and I think not worrying about putting stuff out there on this
thread is what is so great about it - at least we find out answers to our questions.
and I know we are just going to get real close through all of this....
Ok - some techie help
- To not loose my postings, I always type them out in an email or word
document and then copy and paste into the thread but of course, I
learned that the hard way
- If you want to have your chart as a part of your sig, here is what you can
do. I am somewhat of an HTML nerd, so I hope this helps. Copy your
web address that you were given by your charting site. Go to your
signature here on IDOB, and add the tag below overwriting my note
about pasting with the web address, save and presto, you’re chart is
there.
If anybody wants to learn anything else about HTML, let me know - its
pretty easy (now that I know) and I could help with adding additional stuff
to your sigs if you want.
The liberal use of acronyms in this post reveals how common and naturalized
the language of obstetrics and gynecology has become in this online
community: “CM” stands for “cervical mucus,” and “GI” for “gastrointestinal.”
The use of more vernacular acronyms like “AF,” which stands for “Aunt
Flo,” a euphemism for menstrual period, and “BD’ing,” which means “baby
dancing,” or having intercourse, demonstrates the mixing of colloquial and
medical rhetorics. Indeed, the posts along with the signatures show the
blending of at least two modalities of discourse: the poster takes pains to reassure
an interlocutor that “we are all learners here” presumably in regard to
both the language of reproductive medicine and the language of HTML. 28
“Getting real close” through shared disappointment, technological expertise,
anticipation, and joy is figured as one of the benefits of this online community,
and the visual culture of the signature embodies this principle by calling
into question the notion of singular ownership of a body or of a pregnancy.
Their visual style is crowded, chaotic, and based on a principle of accretion
rather than integration. There are significant clashes in styles and textures
between images on the same signature, especially when compared to the
orderly ACSII sigs of the text-only days of the early-nineties Internet. These
are riotous combinations of bumpers, animated GIFs, blinkies, photos, borders,
cartoons, and other combinations of text and image, many or most of
them acquired from other sites or shared between self-styled “siggy girls”