Lisa Nakamura
Bio
Lisa Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media Studies Program and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000). She has published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, PMLA, Cinema Journal, The Women’s Review of Books, Camera Obscura, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. She is editing a collection with Peter Chow-White entitled Digital Race: An Anthology (Routledge, forthcoming) and is working on a new monograph on social inequality in virtual worlds. Her research focuses on race and gender in online social spaces such as Massively Multiplayer Online Role playing games, and she is currently investigating the racializaton of labor in transnational contexts and avatarial operations in a “postracial” world.
Abstract
| Digital Labor, Digital Immigration, and Transnationality, or, why Virtual Worlds Need a Civil Rights Movement “They want our labor, not our lives.”—Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk “All of the work, without the worker.”—Alex Rivera, Cybracero project Media scholars have a bias towards understanding digital labor as content creation, which is the form of labor that they have the most familiarity with. It enrages them to see their and other users’ labor monetized without their getting any profits or even credit—and they have a point, the reality of the digital commons as a digital shop or even factory is a sad result of the political economic system we have today. The basic tenet of the information society—that intellectual property is the most valuable commodity of all--enables the struggle over digital labor. It is both the justification for copyright and the motivation behind the copyright reform movement. But what is rarely discussed is the racialization of labor that is not content creation. In Czech, robota means drudgery—labor that nobody enjoys doing. Bodies of color engage with the digital economy as both labor and value. To paraphrase Lisa Lowe through my friend race and gender scholar Grace Hong, how are bodies of color both labor and capital? What do the Mechanical Turk worker, the Twitter user, the citizen journalist, the gold farmer, and the game level author or modder have in common? And how are their interests (part of what makes this conference exciting is that it views digital laborers are both more numerous and a broader category than we thought, and also as even having interests, rather than simply demographics) similar to or different from those of people of color? |