|
I confess to participating in the exuberant embrace of cyberspace, the lovely and ludicrous suggestion that digital dialogue has the capacity to become the locus of unmitigated identity hacking: that somehow through tappity-type text in a faceless telnet window, I can shed my "always already" socialized biology. And to my defense, identity as constructed through this electronic medium does unravel the seemingly seamless concepts of naturalized identity like "gender" and "race," revealing them to be socially constructed variables of infinite malleability.
|
|
But really. This is an ideological indulgence, an exploration that somehow fails to acknowledge or account for the conditional economic and social circumstances of electronic conversation -- such contingencies as access to computers, modems, phone lines, basic operating knowledge, literacy and leisure time, for instance.
|
|
From academic considerations of virtual communities to the media hype that has generated the mass popularization of computing (from nerdy to trendy), such conditions are a given. There is an unspoken, unconscious assumption regarding the identity of computer users that is reflected in representations of the digital domain/new media/computer world: from print advertising and software packaging, to the over-the-anchor's-shoulder graphics on tv news, to website navigation elements and the icons on your desktop.
|
|
The visual vernacular used to represent the world of new media and its inhabitants is dominated by no singular image, but rather composed of a collection of images that we have come to associate with "all things cyber": hands on a keyboard, a bespectacled face awash in the glow of a monitor, two arms extended and caught in mid-handshake. It's as if everyone working in software packaging and advertising were using the same well-worn, limited collection of clipart. Were we to piece together a few versions of the computing body as described by our corpus of "wired" signifiers, we would find our laboratory crowded with a computer club that was predominantly male and overwhelmingly white.
|