Week 10 DMCT

As digital media has expanded into cultural consciousness and popular use over the last three decades, the notions of identity and subjectivity have been increasingly fragmented. People construct different identities across a variety of platforms—from social media to MMORPG's—and engage with these identities in different ways depending on the publicness or anonymity of the platform. However, when engaging on an anonymous platform, how do standard markers of identity come into play? How do race and gender translate across digital media? 

Thomas Foster (1999) argues that digital media implicates a post-human ontology that presents possibilities of liberation from traditional notions of race. His analysis of the 1990's comic Deathlok offers textual examples of how race becomes problematic in the image of the cyborg. When Michael Collins is transformed into a cyborg (Deathlok), his traditional identity as a black man is not longer a primary indicator of his self. Instead, identity becomes a fluid state. Deathlok appears to his son in a video game, and in entering the virtual, becomes man again. Foster (1999) states that "the cyborg and the racial thematics converge around the possibility of intervening in the ways that cultural constraints take the form of limitations imposed on particular types of bodies, with those constraints coming to seem 'built-in' or 'hard-wired' to those bodies" (p. 161). Through the fragmentation of identity provided by the disembodiment through the cyborg, traditional markers of identity like race become maleable and dynamic. They are no longer inherent to our being. Instead, race becomes yet another transmutable identity marker.

However, the digital age doesn't provide an arena for negotiation of identity unproblematically. Everett (2009) sees several problems with representations of race in video games. Specifically, she sees benefits of inhabiting other racial identities, but does not this this is inherently beneficial. Rather, video games often reinforce existing stereotypes and provide little critical context for the gamer. Games like Read to Rumble, Tekken Tag Tournament and Imperialism reinforce existing colonialist and orientalist discourse. She does mention the game series Civilization as a game that may differ with regards to race. In an attempt to control the world, the player chooses a civilization (Roman, Chinese, Zulu) and tries to dominate the rest of the civilizations either through force or diplomacy. The wide variety of races available to play provides the possibility of defying traditional colonialist roles. I also see a variety of new games (The Fallout series,  The Elder Scrolls series) that allow the user to choose their race. They can choose anything from a green-skinned wood elf to a black-skinned female. This affordance of choosing and designing your own identity provides an arena for negotiation of identity.

This is not the case for most games. Many still rely on outmoded stereotypes and colonialist hegemony to create their content. Theorists like Foster see the liberative potential of digital media, while those like Everett seem more skeptical of these possibilities. Marshall McLuhan was particularly utopian with his image of the global village, but as Mark Poster (1998) notes, "McLuhan's position, developed mainly in the early 1960's, was limited by, among other things, its focus on the broadcast media, appearing before the dissemination of computers and their communication networks" (p. 198). Poster sees computer networks as a definitive new development that allows for a global village, but its not necessarily a good thing. Many cultures would prefer to remain separate from such a village. Some like to maintain their racial markers rather than converge and erase these markers through cyborgization or video games. These complex questions are vital for understanding how race functions in the digital realm.