This book examines the intimate relationship between race and technologies and how digital platforms reabsorb racism as an internal arrangement within its modes of technical and affective architecture. Premising the idea that technologies supplant and mirror the ‘logic’ of racialization as mimetic instruments of social control and violence, the book interrogates the present arrangement of platform capital, and its modes of re-abstraction of race into its fibres and terrains of re-territorialization of the human spheres of social, economic and political life. If capitalism reframed and consolidated racialization through its re-territorialization and primitive accumulation producing continuities from colonization and imperialism, platformization and digital capital redrafts and redistributes its racial logic in new modes of reassembling social and economic life through data, machine learning, algorithms, software designs and in tandem its automaticity. In learning, refining, and accelerating its enterprise through the mimetic violence of producing difference, racism in the digital age calibrates intimately with power, Western rationality and the ubiquity of technologies within the everyday. If the non-hominization of alterity relied on discoveries of science and its conflations with truth and White supremacy, the sustained production and oppression of the ‘inferior other’ co-opted automaticity and technologies, reiterating our fascination with and our understanding of human progress as pegged to machines, as entities working in excess of human cognition and comprehension, connecting and responding to its ambient intelligence despite its material absence. The book underpins the configuration of power and White supremacy through its co-enterprise with technologies seeks to provide an alternative and decolonial approach to technology studies particularly new media and digital technological advancements, leveraging on the notion of the digital age as an era of acceleration of difference, experimentation and the production of alterity through overt and covert modes of surveillance, image recognition software, and algorithms which work in complicity with racial capital.

Digital technologies are proliferating and transforming racism, complicating our understanding, and making contemporary racism increasingly harder to challenge. Digital racism takes many forms, such as viral memes circulating via social media platforms; the swarming of networked users targeting people of colour; hidden algorithmic classification and sorting; and the racial profiling of policing and surveillance systems. The variance and complexity of technologically mediated racisms begs the question of whether adequate attention has been paid to digital processes and environments through which race materializes. Understanding Digital Racism analyzes the digital realm as a race-making technology, by exploring the rise, dissemination, and evolution of contemporary racism. Sanjay Sharma offers an innovative approach for understanding how racism─as informational and im/material post-racial phenomena─is manifested and remade through digital technologies. Digital racism is grasped through foregrounding the sociotechnical entanglements of racism and digital technologies. An analysis of networked relations, information flows, subjectivation and affects are critical to addressing the production of digital racism.

In Race After the Internet, Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White bring together a collection of interdisciplinary, forward-looking essays exploring the complex role that digital media technologies play in shaping our ideas about race. Contributors interrogate changing ideas of race within the context of an increasingly digitally mediatized cultural and informational landscape. Using social scientific, rhetorical, textual, and ethnographic approaches, these essays show how new and old styles of race as code, interaction, and image are played out within digital networks of power and privilege. Race After the Internet includes essays on the shifting terrain of racial identity and its connections to social media technologies like Facebook and MySpace, popular online games like World of Warcraft, YouTube and viral video, WiFi infrastructure, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, genetic ancestry testing, and DNA databases in health and law enforcement. Contributors also investigate the ways in which racial profiling and a culture of racialized surveillance arise from the confluence of digital data and rapid developments in biotechnology. This collection aims to broaden the definition of the "digital divide" in order to convey a more nuanced understanding of access, usage, meaning, participation, and production of digital media technology in light of racial inequality. Contributors: danah boyd, Peter Chow-White, Wendy Chun, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Troy Duster, Anna Everett, Rayvon Fouché, Alexander Galloway, Oscar Gandy, Eszter Hargittai, Jeong Won Hwang, Curtis Marez, Tara McPherson, Alondra Nelson, Christian Sandvig, Ernest Wilson

This Handbook explores the relationship between digitisation, social organisation and social transformation at macro and micro levels, making this a valuable resource those conducting research across the social sciences.

A toolkit for understanding how Asian Americans influence, consume and are reflected by mainstream media. Asian Americans have long been the subject and object of popular culture in the U.S. The rapid circulation of cultural flashpoints—such as the American obsession with K-pop sensations, Bollywood dance moves, and sriracha hot sauce—have opened up new ways of understanding how the categories of “Asian” and “Asian American” are counterbalanced within global popular culture. Located at the crossroads of these global and national expressions, Global Asian American Popular Cultures highlights new approaches to modern culture, with essays that explore everything from music, film, and television to comics, fashion, food, and sports. As new digital technologies and cross-media convergence have expanded exchanges of transnational culture, Asian American popular culture emerges as a crucial site for understanding how communities share information and how the meanings of mainstream culture shift with technologies and newly mobile sensibilities. Asian American popular culture is also at the crux of global and national trends in media studies, collapsing boundaries and acting as a lens to view the ebbs and flows of transnational influences on global and American cultures. Offering new and critical analyses of popular cultures that account for emerging textual fields, global producers, technologies of distribution, and trans-medial circulation, this ground-breaking collectionexplores the mainstream and the margins of popular culture.

Bringing together contributions from the fields of sociology, media and cultural studies, arts, politics, science and technology studies, political communication theory and popular culture studies, this volume engages both with theoretical debates and detailed empirical studies, showcasing how the public sphere is transformed by digital media, and in turn how this digital public sphere shapes and is shaped by debates surrounding crisis, conflict, migration and culture. Case studies from Bulgaria, Nigeria, China, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, UK, Mexico and India are discussed in detail.

How can we make media anti-racist? The rise of the far right, the impacts of Covid-19, and the mediated evidence of racist police violence have challenged the dominant complacency that racism was a thing of the past. We are now witnessing the renewed anti-racist commitment of social movements and the rising authoritarianism that seeks to suppress it. Rather than making media ‘less racist’, how can media systems be transformed in ways that actively challenge the production of racism? What should an anti-racist media look like? Saha, Sobande and Titley address these timely questions to outline the essential steps for working towards an anti-racist media future. Revealing how the media are implicated in racism, the authors consider how systems, policies and practices can be transformed to confront and prevent it. Focusing on the problems of impartiality, the limits of diversity and representation, and the contradictions of digital culture, this manifesto illuminates key strategies and suggestions to move us closer to an anti-racist media future for everyone.

The first systematic, comprehensive reference covering the ideas, genres, and concepts behind digital media. The study of what is collectively labeled “New Media”—the cultural and artistic practices made possible by digital technology—has become one of the most vibrant areas of scholarly activity and is rapidly turning into an established academic field, with many universities now offering it as a major. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media is the first comprehensive reference work to which teachers, students, and the curious can quickly turn for reliable information on the key terms and concepts of the field. The contributors present entries on nearly 150 ideas, genres, and theoretical concepts that have allowed digital media to produce some of the most innovative intellectual, artistic, and social practices of our time. The result is an easy-to-consult reference for digital media scholars or anyone wishing to become familiar with this fast-developing field.

Settler societies habitually frame Indigenous people as ‘a people of the past’—their culture somehow ‘frozen’ in time, their identities tied to static notions of ‘authenticity’, and their communities understood as ‘in decline’. But this narrative erases the many ways that Indigenous people are actively engaged in future-orientated practice, including through new technologies. Indigenous Digital Life offers a broad, wide-ranging account of how social media has become embedded in the lives of Indigenous Australians. Centring on ten core themes—including identity, community, hate, desire and death—we seek to understand both the practice and broader politics of being Indigenous on social media. Rather than reproducing settler narratives of Indigenous ‘deficiency’, we approach Indigenous social media as a space of Indigenous action, production, and creativity; we see Indigenous social media users as powerful agents, who interact with and shape their immediate worlds with skill, flair and nous; and instead of being ‘a people of the past’, we show that Indigenous digital life is often future-orientated, working towards building better relations, communities and worlds. This book offers new ideas, insights and provocations for both students and scholars of Indigenous studies, media and communication studies, and cultural studies.

Is about enlarging the boundary of racial justice by recognizing and addressing private racism. It draws on political theory and civil rights law to do so.