“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.