André Brock

‘‘When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong’’: Resident Evil 5, Racial Representation, and Gamers

Videogames’ ability to depict cultural iconographies and characters have occasionally led to accusations of insensitivity. This article examines gamers’ reactions to a developer’s use of Africans as enemies in a survival horror videogame, Resident Evil 5. Their reactions offer insight into how videogames represent Whiteness and White privilege within the social structure of ‘‘play.’’ Omi and Winant’s (1994) racial formation theory notes that race is formed through cultural representations of human bodies organized in social structures. Accordingly, depictions of race in electronic spaces rely upon media imagery and social interactions. Videogames construct exotic fantasy worlds and peoples as places for White male protagonists to conquer, explore, exploit, and solve. Like their precursors in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, videogame narratives, activities, and players often draw from Western values of White masculinity, White privilege as bounded by conceptions of ‘‘other,’’ and relationships organized by coercion and domination.

“a Belief in Humanity is a Belief in Colored Men:” Using Culture to Span the Digital Divide

Building on Harrison and Zappen’s (2003) contention that technologies are infused with the values and social goals of their creators, I argue that Web content reproduces existing norms, rules, and power relations, some of which may prove inimical to Black identity, culture, and information needs. To explore this claim, I construct a culture-specific framework based on W. E. B. DuBois’ analysis of race and racism in the United States, that is then used as an evaluation schema for web content in the form of images, links, and text on mainstream Web sites vis-a-vis Africana.com. The results of the analysis uncover basic cultural differences in the design of and responses to mainstream and African-American sites.

LIFE ON THE WIRE

This paper focuses on the construction of racial identity online through the mediating influences of popular culture, old media, weblogs, and Internet users. This paper examines the production of race on the Internet by examining the elements that make up the weblog Freakonomics: the topic, the environment, the medium, and the users. Recent cyberculture research has called for Internet studies to integrate critical theories of race and culture into its analyses. The argument, which this paper seeks to extend, is for the increased recognition of the salience of race in understanding Web content and production. In examining the blogs structure, posts, and comments, I applied Omi and Winants racial formation theory to the cultural representations and structural phenomena articulated with respect to themes of race, racial interactions, media, and geography. Omi and Winant argue that people interpret the meaning of race by framing it in social structures, and that conversely, recognizing the racial dimensions in social structures leads to interpretations of race. Accordingly, this paper examines interpretations of race in The Wire (a critically-acclaimed minority-led television show), the New York Times news website, the Freakonomics blog, and the Web-enabled audience of the three elements. The paper concludes by arguing for more use of critical race and theory in information studies research in order to understand how racial perspectives affect the presentation and interpretation of Internet content.

CULTURAL APPROPRIATIONS OF TECHNICAL CAPITAL: Black women, weblogs, and the digital divide

The aim of this paper is to use cultural and technical capital as a sensitizing framework for exploring novel ways of thinking about information and communication technology and social inequalities. This paper takes a particular focus on three weblogs in which women of different ages, social classes, and races constructed discourses on Black womanhood. The participants employed their personal experiences, structural analyses of racism and sexism, media criticism, and aesthetic arguments about Black womens worth, beauty, and value to articulate their vision of Black womanhood. In earlier times, these conversations would have taken place in beauty salons, or other gendered spaces where these conversations could proceed unknown to broader society. In todays information society, these conversations have spilled over to the Internet. It is our contention that this phenomenon – the articulation of cultural capital mediated through technical prowess – is a strong argument against the deficit models of minority information and communication technology use promoted by digital divide research.

Beyond the pale: The Blackbird web browser’s critical reception

The browser has become part of our communicative infrastructure, invisible to our information literacy practices until a rupture occurs. In December 2008, the Mozilla-variant ‘niche’ browser, Blackbird, was released. Blackbird’s cultural affiliation with African American users became the rupture for pundits and early adopters. It was derided as racist, unnecessary, and pejorative to the actual needs of Black internet users. This article examines the racial and technological discourses surrounding Blackbird’s release on technology and cultural blogs. Findings indicate that racial ideologies play a factor in the reception of this culturally themed ICT artifact.

Who do you think you are?: Race, Representation, and Cultural Rhetorics in Online Spaces

This essay looks at the articulation of Black identity in personal and online contexts. Following Omi and Winant’s argument that racial formation is a matter of racial representation within social structures, I examine the Internet as a “third place” for the online representation of Black identity by Blacks and by non-Blacks following two critical incidents in recent public culture: Kanye West’s Hurricane Katrina speech and the Rev. Joseph Lowery’s inauguration benediction. As a third place, the Internet encourages intimate discursive interaction, similar to the way Black barber shops and beauty salons allowed private spaces for identity discourses between Black men and women. The Internet also opens these formerly private spaces to non-Blacks, who contribute to the articulation of Black identity online.

Critical technocultural discourse analysis

Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) is a multimodal analytic technique for the investigation of Internet and digital phenomena, artifacts, and culture. It integrates an analysis of the technological artifact and user discourse, framed by cultural theory, to unpack semiotic and material connections between form, function, belief, and meaning of information and communication technologies (ICTs). CTDA requires the incorporation of critical theory—critical race, feminism, queer theory, and so on—to incorporate the epistemological standpoint of underserved ICT users so as to avoid deficit-based models of underrepresented populations’ technology use. This article describes in detail the formulation and execution of the technique, using the author’s research on Black Twitter as an exemplar. Utilizing CTDA, the author found that Black discursive identity interpellated Twitter’s mechanics to produce explicit cultural technocultural digital practices—defined by one investor as “the use case for Twitter.” Researchers interested in using this technique will find it an intervention into normative and analytic technology analyses, as CTDA formulates technology as cultural representations and social structures in order to simultaneously interrogate culture and technology as intertwined concepts.

Deeper data: a response to boyd and Crawford

Data analysis of any sort is most effective when researchers first take account of the complex ideological processes underlying data’s originating impetus, selection bias, and semiotic affordances of the information and communication technologies (ICTs) under examination.

Critical informatics: New methods and practices

While social informatics (SI) is uniquely positioned to examine the technical and organizational properties of information and communication technology (ICT) and associated user practices, it often ignores the cultural mediation of design, use, and meaning of ICTs. Critical informatics, more so than normative and analytic orientations to ICT, offers possibilities to foreground culture as a sensitizing context for studying information and technology in society. This paper articulates a new critical informatics approach: critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) as an analysis employing critical cultural frameworks (e.g. critical race or feminist theory) to jointly interrogate culture and technology. CTDA (Brock 2009) is a bifurcated approach for studying Internet phenomena integrating interface analysis with user discourse analysis. This paper outlines CTDA, providing examples of how its methodological flexibility applies to examining varied ICT artifacts, such as twitter and search engine phenomena, while maintaining a critical perspective on design and use. CTDA is an important tool for critical informaticists that contributes to building understanding of technology as culture, grounded in user perspectives and real-world practices.