Digitizing Race – Application – btguiden – 11/10

In the recent reading that we had, the author talked about digitizing race. I chose to focus on the part of the reading that examined race and access to technology. The example that stood out the most was the Matrix example and the difference in race and their technologies that they interacted with. There was the white room with the complex advanced system and then the ship with the dark and old technology.

I found these two videos of Microsoft’s future vision and I think that it does a good job with showing futuristic technologies with all races, age, and gender. There is no one race that has access to or uses any other prominent technology than the other. Everyone shown in the videos have the same level of interactive technologies and the range of demographics collaborate throughout both videos.

 

Digitizing Race – Application Example

 

 

 

In the digitizing race article Nakamura explains how different races are represented or portrayed through media. The focus of this article was on the Matrix Trilogy where she makes many points that she believes are making connections between certain races and what technology they use in the movie to represent their race. For example, there was a connection made between the use of touch screen with white individuals and keyboards and analog tools with African American individuals. In my opinion I don’t think that the movie was created to show this distinction between the two races in the way that it did. I think that it just happened to work out that way in the end. I found a video that I think is a good example of how technology in the future is projected to work and does a good job showing that there is no correlation between the different races that will use the technology.

Digitizing Race-reading- Kim-11/08/11

Nakamura explains representations of different races in The Matrix (1999) to highlight the different access to and usage of digital interfaces by the African-American and white American characters. The author says that in this film, blacks are never depicted as masters of the interface, creators of digital images, and are never depicted manipulating the interface as directly as the white American (109). Digitizing Race focuses more on the relationship between representations of race, gender, and sexuality and political coalitions mobilized through the Internet.