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White middle-class European anyone?
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| White middle-class European anyone? |
| 10.05.03 (2:18 pm) [edit] |
When I “meet” people online on sites such as LambdaMOO I never really think much about who they really are. To me they are just characters – personas of people being represented in a different world. I never think too much about what they really look like or what sort of lives they live outside the MOO. Dave questions if we presume that users are white unless they state otherwise. I know that I never think about what race the people behind the people are, but I don’t think I necessarily presume that they are white. Ziauddin Sardar, in his article “Alt.Civilisations.FAQ, Cyberspace as the darker side of the West” describes cyberspace as being the “American Dream” and that it “ marks the dawn of a new civilisation”. His argument includes looking at the idea that the white man has “colonised” the Internet like they would conquer a frontier (pg 735 Reader). Despite this, he does not mean that other races are not included in the community of cyberspace at all, but more that they are a minority voice of an Internet dominated by the west, and generally speaking, the west is pretty much white. He states:
“Most of the people on the Internet are white, upper- and middle-class Americans and Europeans, and most of them, are men.”
Therefore, although the Internet can strip people of their race or cultural identity, it is quite probable that most of the culture is probably Caucasian to begin with. This again relates to what Dave was asking, which I think was basically that because we are European and we are the ‘majority’ on the Internet, are we forcing the people ‘other’ than us to define themselves as different from (as Dave stated) the ‘default’. I think that this may be the case, although having not experienced this myself, I can’t really say. Either way, I do believe that a lot of people use and enjoy chat rooms and MOOs because of the sort of ‘absence’ of real identity, and that has probably been one of the reasons they are so popular. So even if you are a ‘minority’ on the net, nobody really needs to know and you do not have to define yourself as such… we are all physically absent and invisible and free to represent ourselves how we like.
(Katie)
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