@RACE

(From Beth Kolko’s “Erasing @race”)
- Race tends to be missing from signifying one’s virtual identity, even though information like gender and age are available.
- Some people think that race should be left behind in the real world because marking race online can bring undesired responses from other people.
- The lack of @race makes race irrelevant or assumes that everyone is of one race.
- “Technology interfaces carry the power to prescribe representative norms and patters, constructing a self-replicating and exclusionary category of ‘ideal’ user, one that in some very particular instances of cyberspace, is a definitively white user” (218).