Facebook Blog Post

When I first received this assignment I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for on facebook. I thought about all of the articles we read in class and I couldn’t think of one article that related to anything that was on facebook. After I continued thinking about it the one article that I thought related the most was the article about Abercrombie. The article about Abercrombie was the one article that people in my generation could relate to the most and so I thought that it would be the best one to relate to another important part of our generation, socializing on the internet.
When I searched facebook for the word Abercrombie I got a lot of results. The first few pages were all people who had Abercrombie as their last name but then I found groups supporting Abercrombie, people who worked for Abercrombie and listed it under employment and even people who listed it under their interests. I was surprised that I didn’t get more results when I typed in Abercrombie and Finch. I got more results when I just typed Abercrombie. It was interesting to see how the article related to what I found on facebook. I don’t agree with what the article said, I believe that there are other reasons as to why facebook’s target market is white, but just for the articles sake I will say that all the results on facebook showed Caucasian Americans. I do believe that there are alternative reasons as to why when you search facebook for people with the word Abercrombie. I do not think that it means that Abercrombie is a racist organization its just that their target market is a specific group of people that just happens to be Caucasian, young, hip teenagers.
As an overview, I don’t think that facebook promotes discrimination. Instead it allows people to express their true identity. Race and Nationality are about of people’s identity.

“Where do you want to go today?”: Cybernetic Tourism, The Internet, and Transnationality

This article talks about discrimination on both the internet and in television and print advertising. Nakamura, the author talks about how on the internet, or in cyberspace, it is easy to have certain parts of your identity overlooked; Aspects of your identity such as race, gender, age, sexuality. She also talks about how this isn’t always the case. It’s not always possible to completely abandon that aspect of ones identity. In the articles introduction paragraph it says, “This pure, democratic, cerebral form of communication is touted as a utopia, a pure no-place where human interaction can occur, as the voice-over says ‘uninfluenced by the rest of it’”. This quote is referring to a television commercial that claims that on the internet individuals are not influenced by ‘the rest of it’. It is referring to how on the internet there are only minds and no discrimination based on race, gender, age, sexuality etc. MCI Internet Services also used a similar advertising concept. In their advertisements they pushed the idea that getting on the internet made individuals part of a global network that freed them from their attributes that may or may not discriminate against them. Another example was a television commercial created by AT&T that promoted a world without limits and that communication is that tool to make it work.
Nakamura uses many great examples of how large corporations have advertised that the internet allows individuals to express their identity not by their skin color, or their gender, or any other discriminating factors but rather show their individuality thru their personality. Nakamura does an incredible job of analyzing these promotional messages but very rarely did I see her address the deeper issues. She spent majority of her time analyzing the promotion and what it meant and not really talking about the effectiveness of the advertisement or even the way that the message was received by customers. She also spends very little time addressing the hidden meanings in the advertisements. On page 94 when she is discussing the IBM commercial I think she finally digs a little deeper into the true problem of these advertisements. She says, “These ads claim a world without boundaries for us, the consumers and the target audiences, and by doing they show us exactly where and what these boundaries are, and that is ethnic and racial”. She further addresses this underlying issue beginning on page 96 when she states that advertising in magazines such as Wired, Time, Smithsonian, the New Yorker and the Chronicle of Higher Education are directed towards upper-middle-class white readers.
I don’t think that Nakamura ever directly states this but I think that the underlying issue with all of these promotional campaigns is that they are true, but only to their target audience. However, I don’t think that it’s a negative concept and that it promotes discrimination based on race, sex gender or any other discriminating factor. It’s a basic business concept that in advertising the message in any promotional material has to speak directly to the targeted audience. I think that instead of arguing that these certain advertisements discriminate people should argue that business re-analyze their target audiences and design other advertising campaigns that speak to another proportion of this audience.

Erasing @ Race

I didn’t have to read much of this article before I discovered what the most important concept behind the article was. At the end of the first paragraph it says, “Experience is defined by taking action, including deciding explicitly who you are, or who you want to say you are. Consequently, the design of such spaces- the interface that user’s access- has significant power to affect the interaction expressible at such sites”. This quote sets the tone for the rest of the article. It is simply saying that since users use computers and not real human interaction it’s easy to deceive people into thinking that individuals are different than themselves. Having said that gives this interface a lot of power because it gives people the opportunity to hide behind this created reality. The article continues to further discuss race as a part of this virtual identity.
Something that I found interesting early on in the article is Kolko’s discussion about language choices in text- based worlds such as instant messaging. With interpersonal communication facial expressions, hand gestures, tone of voice etc play a very important role in our interpretations of others. In the text based world all of these communication tools are absent; therefore language choice is very important when individuals describe themselves. It plays a crucial role in creating an individuals virtual identity. This is also true of physical appearance. Without being able to see the individual, language choice is the only significant factor that can be used to significantly identify ones virtual identity.
The most interesting argument that I found was Brenda Laurel’s argument about the politics of interface design. She argues that, “constructing a self-replicating and exclusionary category of “ideal” user, one that, in some very particular instances of cyberspace, is a definitively white user”. I know I have gone back to this concept a lot but why do we focus so much on this? Nothing is ever going to change because we over analyze everything so much. This quote says that people make the assumption that users are white until they are given distinct and direct clues to learn that they aren’t. It’s a common fact that people are more comfortable around people that they can relate to. Regardless of skin color that is something that everyone has in common. The world needs to take a step back and embrace our differences and realize that we are never all going to be the same and that there will always be some forms of discrimination but that over analyzing isn’t going to help.