Fighting in the Exotic

Some people seem to think that the Internet is going to break down barriers between different races because race is much more obvious when communicating in person than in online chat.  I think the web will break down many barriers but it will not completely destroy racism and some types of racism will be safe to breed on the Internet.  Stereotypes of different races still exist online and so racism will live on.  Lisa Nakamura writer of the article "Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction" calls online stereotypes cybertypes.  Cybertypes are ways that the web "propagates, disseminates, and commodities images of race and racism" (p. 3).  It is hoped that with the web, people will be able to visit and experience different cultures with their computers and gain a greater appreciation of them.  What is actually happening is that instead of being respected, different cultures are being reduced to online tourist attractions.

 

The game, Street Fighter 2, is a typical Internet game that demonstrates this online racism.  In this game a player can masquerade as different players and go to different place.  My favorite character is Dhalsim who is an Indian fighter.  He is extremely agile and can even float.  One notices that he has mystical powers and is very scary.  He is the scariest fighter in the game equipped with the ability to shoot mystical fireballs, wears skulls on his costume, is bald, and has no eyelids.  He portrays the mysticism of India as powerful and dangerous when India is actually a very peaceful place.  Places outside Europe and America are shown to be technologically primitive.  For example, in China, the fight takes place in a dirt road with Chinese people in traditional dress in their cheap shops.  There are only carts and no cars at all.  In America, you can see advanced technology including boats and cars. 

The cybertypes this game portrays is that colored people are technologically primitive and attached to their traditional ways and that Europeans are advanced and are culturally modern and progressive.  There is little trace of the amazing technological advances that the developing world has made.  Like a tourist, the user gets to fight in different areas in the world and explore older cultures.  This game perpetuates the stereotype of colored people being scary and primitive and constantly living the past.  This deceptive image of the developing world as primitive regardless of the fact that places like Japan and South Korea are about as rich as we are, and that nations such as Brazil, India and China are growing technologically and economically at a very fast pace.

Bibliography:

Nakamura, Lisa.  Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and

Identity on the internet.  New York Routledge,

 2002. Print.