Digital Media

Digital Media

     Race and Identity in Digital Media by Professor Nakamura talks about the impact of social life and the media landscape by the virtual communities. She first starts off talking about the public stereotype on the negative influences on video games like addictive, time-consuming, and wasting, and conducive to violence (Nakamura 1). Then talks about the term “microaggression”, which means microaggression is a non-physical form of aggression involving demeaning implications and other subtle insults, in order to emphasize that social behaviors are found in virtual worlds and other online social spaces by means of microaggression. I agree that microaggression is one of the most threatening and common form of behavior in virtual world. Players in virtual world insult other players by using sexist, racist, and harmful terms. These explains the most common microaggression in virtual world.

     Then Professor Nakamura talks about the importance of Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, virtual worlds like Second Life, Gaia Online, and World of Warcraft, video sharing websites like YouTube, and social awareness tools like Twitter (Nakamura 2). To provide examples of how worlds are beomcing part of public sphere. People can share their ideas and build relationships through these online communities. In the social networking sites, identification such as, race, age, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc are clearly shown. On the other hand, in neoliberal position or Neoliberalism celebrates “freedom, progress, and individualism” (Nakamura 2). People create their own avatars that are similar to the themselves, but much more enhanced ways. The reason is that they want to overcome their disabilities at least on virtual spaces. Thus, people are creating an avatar with gender, size, body shape, or skin color that the society most prefers.  In other word, people create their avatars with the most accepted race and identity.

     In some video games, some races are portrayed as the antagonist who must be killed. Korean MMO uncovered some the ways in which the condemnation of virtual currency buying is far exceeded by a visceral hatred of gold sellers or farmers. There is decidedly anti-Asian flavor to many player protests against “Chinese gold farmers” (Nakamura 6). This is largely due to the real world problems such as racism and lookism. A number of games employ Chinese gold sellers or farmers because it is based on real fact and many players find it acceptable since they are exposed to this type of scenarios. This is where Microaggression or microracism in virtual worlds engenders shame, just like other forms of insulting other races.

    I understand that it is much easier to insult other players on video games than in real life (face to face). Can you think of any ideas to stop the microaggression online?