Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

Introduction 11
the matrix of power. This is a crucial omission, because young people use
IM a great deal. Chapter 1 of this book discusses the visual field of IM and
its evolution from text-only forms of chat toward a form that includes userchosen
and user-produced digital images of the body as an integral part of
communication, signification, gendering, and racialization. Technological
convergence is making all HCI spaces potential spaces for CMC, and vice
versa. The continued existence of digital inequality necessitates considerations
of identity and power relations—racial formation—along the axes of
race, gender, and class. While Manovich’s Language of New Media stresses the
importance of interfaces as vectors of ideology, there has yet to be a visually
oriented critique of new media networked communications on the most
popular network to date—the Internet—which considers these issues of
raced and gendered bodies, both virtual and real.
Visual culture studies was born in response to a crisis in art history: it is
an insurgent art criticism that merges at some points with cultural studies
but has different foundational texts that are oriented toward constructed
social identities and a concern with the visual apparatus. Art history is a longstanding
and canonized field in the letters and sciences and had become
mired in debates regarding its adherence to traditional modes of analyzing
visual objects that resulted in many scholars identifying against it. In theorizing
digital racial formation theory, I am proposing a somewhat insurgent
response to new media studies, a move that may seem premature considering
its recent vintage. However, there are many advantages to correcting
the omission in new media studies of gender, race, class, and communication
as quickly as possible. Digital racial formation can trace the ways that
race is formed online using visual images as part of the currency of communication
and dialogue between users. Performing close readings of digital
visual images on the Internet and their relation to identity, itself now an
effect as well as a cause of digitality, produces a kind of critique that takes
account of a visual practice that is quickly displacing television as a mediabased
activity in the United States. 16
Several visual culture anthologies have had a hand in shaping the field
and its engagement with new media. Three of the most influential—Nicholas
Mirzoeff’s Introduction to Visual Culture and Visual Culture Reader (first and
second editions), Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall’s Visual Culture: The Reader,
and John Walker and Sarah Chaplin’s Visual Culture: An Introduction—display
varying degrees of engagement with digital culture. Armstrong’s fears of
ungrounded “cyber critiques” that might be generated by visual culture studies
are laid to rest after perusing these volumes, because they take pains to