This list just came to me and it looks like there is some interesting stuff on here. So, being virtual community-minded, I thought I'd send it aong. I have not checked out any of these sites, being one of those people with a computer and a modem, but no internet access.
frances postmodern luddite
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 17:07:54 -0800 (PST) To: digital-culture at mailbase.ac.uk Subject: [10/24/1998]: Culture, Class, and Cyberspace
[The date in the subject indicates the last time this list was updated]
Greetings,
I don't agree with all the conclusions, but listed below are some very interesting and important resources, dealing with the intersection of ethnicity, culture, class, poverty, computers, and cyberspace.
Even if you're busy, please be sure to at least browse them.
If you have a web page, and you agree that these links are important, please do me a favor and add them to a section on your site. Thank you.
By the way, many of the links lead to original material, not the summarized articles with similar titles that you may have read in a newspaper or magazine.
---
[Ethnicity and Culture Section]
Buying into the Computer Age: A Look at Hispanic Families <http://www.cgu.edu/inst/aw1-1.html>
The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: African American Critical Theory and Cyberculture <http://www.kalital.com/Text/Writing/Whitenes.html>
Cultural Uses of New, Networked Internet Information and Communication Technologies: Implications for US Latino Identities <http://sunsite.unc.edu/jlillie/thesis.html>
Bridging the Digital Divide: The Impact of Race on Computer Access and Internet Use <http://www2000.ogsm.vanderbilt.edu/papers/race/science.html>
What it Means to be Black in Cyberspace <http://www.panix.com/~mbowen/cz/identity/blakCMC.html>
Cyborg Diaspora: Virtual Imagined Community <http://ernie.bgsu.edu/~radhik/sanov.html>
Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet <http://acorn.grove.iup.edu/en/workdays/Nakamura.html>
American Emissaries to Africa:
>From John Barlow via James Bond to James Baldwin and Back
<http://www.factory.org/nettime/archive/1292.html>
What Color is the Net? <http://www.hotwired.com/netizen/97/11/index2a.html>
WIRED 3.12: Idees Fortes - Race in Cyberspace? <http://www.wired.com/wired/3.12/departments/berger.if.html>
Book Review: The African-American Resource Guide to the Internet <http://www.otal.umd.edu/~rccs/books/battle.html>
Black Pioneers of the Internet <http://www.delphi.com/blackpioneers/>
Forsaken Geographies: Cyberspace and the New World 'Other' <http://eng.hss.cmu.edu/internet/oguibe/> <http://arts.usf.edu/~ooguibe/madrid.htm>
On Digital 'Third Worlds': An interview with Olu Oguibe <http://arts.usf.edu/~ooguibe/springer.htm>
The Virtual Barrio @ The Other Frontier (or the Chicano inerneta) <http://www.telefonica.es/fat/egomez.html>
Cultural Survival Quarterly: The Internet and Indigenous Communities <http://www.cs.org/csq/csqinternet.html>
Nils Zurawskis' Ethnicity and Culture in Cyberspace Papers <http://www.uni-muenster.de/Soziologie/Home/zurawski/papers.html>
[The next link is to some comments I made a few years ago]
AFROAM-L Archives - February 1995: Race, Ethnicity, Culture, and Cyberspace <http://www.afrinet.net/~hallh/afrotalk/afrofeb95/0796.html>
[Lastly, a link to a resource page that contains general and gender-based papers on net sociology/identity]
The Media and Communication Studies Site Resource Page for Gender, Ethnicity & Class: Social and Personal Identity <http://www.aber.ac.uk/~dgc/gender05.html>
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[Class and Poverty Section]
The Internet and Poverty: Real Help or Real Hype? <http://www.oneworld.org/panos/briefing/interpov.htm>
Possible Roles for Electronic Community Networks and Participatory Development Strategies in Access Programs for Poor Neighborhoods <http://www.unc.edu/~jlillie/310.html>
High Technology and Low-Income Communities: Prospects for the Positive Use of Advanced Information Technology <http://web.mit.edu/sap/www/high-low/>
Losing Ground Bit by Bit: Low-Income Communities in the Information Age <http://www.benton.org/Library/Low-Income/>
Falling Through the Net II: New Data on the Digital Divide <http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/net2/>
Impact of CTCnet Affiliates: Findings from a National Survey of Users of Community Technology Centers <http://www.ctcnet.org/impact98.htm>
Cybersociology Magazine: Issue 3 - Digital Third Worlds <http://members.aol.com/Cybersoc/issue3.html>
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[Gender and Sexuality Section]
You're probably wondering why I haven't included a section on Gender or Sexual Identity in this little list.
Yes, it's on purpose. I haven't fallen into patriarchy mode and forgotten about one of the most important aspects of computer culture, I've simply made the decision that ethnicity and class have been ignored for the most part, and need to have more attention paid to them. There is an abundance of papers and articles dealing with Gender going back for years, but you can count the number of scholarly works on Ethnicity or Class on one hand.
In addition, I have certain philosophical problems with the current body of work on Gender and Sexuality, primarily because so little of it (if any at all) has been written by non-"white" people (and none of it deals with the unique situation of female or gay/lesbian/bisexual people of color).
As soon as I start seeing some papers and articles from women of color or gays and lesbians of color, I'll include them in this section.
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[Definitive Quote Section]
Lastly, in case you're wondering why I even bothered to put this list together, one of my "white" colleagues said it better than I ever could:
"We're resisting the tired-but-still-commonly-accepted idea that the virtual world provides a somehow "level" playing field, in which race, gender, [and] culture(s) no longer matter. We think that such ideas are based on the false notion that there's a normative white male middle-class culture to which all folks can gain access, now that the barriers imposed by the physical body have been miraculously removed. We want [to see] essays, articles, and examples of work which show that the "politics of identity" is alive and well on the internet, and that instead of regressing to a sort of Eisenhowerian procession of the bland leading the bland, there are people out there using electronic technology to emphasize and celebrate and motivate and defend their own communities and cultural ideals."
"There's been a lot of talk (mostly by white men) about the "liberating" potential of the internet and of virtual spaces. What they usually mean is a liberation *from* the body, to some kind of higher plane. But we're interested in how folks whose bodies are usually threatened by the power structure (nonwhite folks, women, poor people, queer folks) are using the internet as a platform for making themselves more visible (a liberation *of* the body), and how that connects to other contemporary activist movements."
Kali Tal
Lecturer, University of Arizona
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