"Cyber-rape?"

First of all, I second Sarah Etlinger's assessment of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet so far:  intriguing introduction, disappointing first chapter, redeeming second chapter.  Now on to some of Nakamura's ideas that got me thinking....

The J. Lo stuff in the Introduction was both compelling and difficult for me to read.  I haven't seen the "If You Had My Love" music video, but the descriptions and stills make it pretty clear what's going on.  I was angry with Lopez for pandering to the male gendered gaze (she is not alone, of course, as this is the modus operandi of nearly all female celebrities, singers, dancers, etc. regardless of the medium), and I wished Nakamura had problematized the production/producer aspect of the video (who generated the idea? who was the visual designer? who directed, produced, costumed?).  (She does mention that "it is really the invisible interface designer whose work conditions the limits and possibilities of interactivity in this case" [19].)

But here's where I really got interested:  "The pleasure of the interface lies partly in its power to control movement between genres and partly in the way that it introduces musical genres that audiences may not have even known existed" (25-26).  Actually, my mind took off after "power to control movement" and went in a different direction from the rest of the sentence.  Due to the interactivity of the simulated interface portrayed in the music video, and of actual websites, the user literally controls the movement of the objects in/of/on the site -- in this case, the object is Jennifer Lopez.  With simple clicks of the mouse, the viewer "makes" Lopez dance, in the style of his choice; he "makes" her undress, shower, etc. in front of him (or he could -- I don't know if these "selections" are shown on the video); he is allowed "multiple points of entry into her digital image" (19); he can replay particular parts of her performance over and over, at any time, at his whim.  Thus, in a sense, he "controls" this Latina.  I couldn't help but write at the bottom of page 25: "cyber-rape?"  Nakamura says, "The interface lets you 'have' Jennifer Lopez in a variety of ethnic and racialized modes by clicking on one of many links" (28).

You might argue that the viewer and his "object" are not operating on the same plane:  He is not actually controlling her because he sits as a physical presence in his darkened office, and she exists (as far as he is concerned) only as pixels on a computer screen.  But as Nakamura writes, "In the case of the video, the cursor functions as a visual proxy that in this case stands in for the viewer; it is itself a kind of avatar..." (26).  Thus through the cursor, the viewer enters the digital plane and joins Lopez there, but though they "exist" together, she is still the object and he the subject with the power.  His control is limited, of course, by what has been programmed into the website:  He cannot see more than she has chosen to show him.  But this brings me back to my earlier questions of who is really calling the shots behind the production of the website/video?  Not only do I suspect the involvement of male producers and directors, but, as Nakamura points out elsewhere in the book, commercial pursuits are always at the mercy of the consumer.

Nakamura gives us another example of the user's power by way of the cursor in Chapter 2's discussion of alllooksame.com:  "The site also shows that racial codes come from the user as well as the interface or content of the site itself.  The site exposes the user's participation in this construction; it shows how individual acts of viewing and 'typing' or clicking create race just as surely as do large institutions such as schools, medical establishments, and the law" (83-84).  Earlier on page 83, she refers to "interactive self-reflexivity."  I'm not sure that I agree with her that "alllooksame.com produces a community based on a shared act of interactive self-reflexivity," but I am intrigued by this concept.  Does the internet encourage us to be self-reflexive?  Other than remembering to delete cookies and browser cache every once in a while, and perhaps going to the "click here every day to end breast cancer" websites, do we think critically about our choices to click or not click, and what the implications of these choices may be?  Even though the entire premise of the internet is networking, how many of us consider surfing and interacting with websites to be an intensely personal activity?  How many of us get angry when confronted with the fact that many sites track our clicks, implant cookies on our machines to recognize us and record our movements, and seem to learn our tastes and interests (I don't know about you, but Amazon's "Recommended for You" creeps me out with its accuracy)?  More importantly, what world is constructed by the choices we make with our mouse?  Anne asked us the first day of class, "What kind of world do you want to live in?"  Do the ways you interact with/in digitality help move the world toward or away from your imagined ideal future?