Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

38 “Ramadan Is Almoast Here!”
of user-produced buddy icons in Instant Messenger applications on the Internet;
these feature visual images of the databody as an instrument used simultaneously
for both socializing and entertainment, since in the case of IM,
socializing is entertainment. I wish to repurpose some of the rightly pessimistic
discourse of surveillance surrounding such things as electronic signatures
with a more hopeful reading about minoritarian identity creation on
IM. In particular, it is possible to find images of national, religious, linguistic,
and sexual identities created by users as icons on IM: overtly gay, fundamentalist
Muslim or Christian, Armenian, or Asian American visual images
are easier to locate there than in other media forms, including other parts of
the Internet, and are certainly not often seen in commercial games. The creation
and use of these images have particular relevance to questions of freedom,
diversity, and racial equality online considering the use of dataveillance
technologies to track precisely those groups—fundamentalist Muslims
(but not Christians) and immigrants—who are least likely to be fairly or
self-represented in American mainstream visual culture. In creating and using
these very personal and amateur digital signatures of identity, IM users literally
build themselves as subjects of interactivity.
Synchronous or real-time networked textual interaction, from one person
to another person, has existed since the early command-line interface
days of the Internet. Unix applications like “chat” and “phone” remediated
the most familiar person-to-person form of communication known by most
people—the telephone—but with little in the way of graphics; clients
could regulate the flow of text streaming down a screen so that it didn’t appear
radically fragmented and thus was more readable, but it really was a textonly
environment, with the user’s only intervention into it being the size and
perhaps style of font displayed. These applications also ran in the background
of others and could thus be overlooked by a busy user. Instant Messenger,
while it shares these basic qualities with “talk” and “phone,” remediates an
early application called “write” in that it pops up or supersedes other open
windows in graphical user interfaces; it is meant to intrude on the visual field
of the user, and though it can be demoted later, its use of alert sounds to signify
the arrival of an instant message makes it seem more immediate. Instant
Messenger has its roots in ICQ, a text messaging application that became
popular in 1996, and occupies a unique position in that it is in many ways a
low-bandwidth, anachronistic technology despite its popularity, and one
that defies academic prediction. As recently as 2001, new media theorists
David Bolter and Richard Grusin and Per Persson seriously questioned text-