Digital racial interactions.(Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet)(Brief article)(Book review)

THE INTERNET, as an interactive medium, is a notoriously difficult space to contain. In theory, it is limitless. It shifts in tastes and moods at such a pace as to liken the attention spans of its users to those of children who get hyper after eating cake. Lisa Nakamura's new book, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press) attempts to step back from the melee and theorize for an academic audience how our understandings of race are shifting in the digital era.

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What Nakamura concludes though is what we already know: people of color can be subjects and objects online depending on the website. In her analysis, however, Nakamura makes some odd choices. She focuses on Jennifer Lopez's music video "If You Had My Love" and Instant Messaging avatars, ...