Racial projections: cyberspace, public space, and the digital divide

ABSTRACT

Scholars of critical race studies, urban history, and information and communications technologies (ICTs) share an interest in the relationship between spatial and racial disparities, including the quality of basic infrastructure, degrees of connectivity, and participatory culture. However, contemporary research on the digital divide struggles to link historical legacies of uneven development, as well as social justice strategies, with digital participation in urban spaces. By examining contemporary digital art that critiques the spatial inequalities encountered by U.S. racial minorities, this article illustrates how public intellectuals use ICTs in ways that draw upon past strategies to territorialize space for political ends. It focuses on digital pop-ups, open-air installations that cast images onto public space using projectors. Historicizing these new efforts illustrates a continuity of tactics engaged by communities of color in response to socio-spatial inequalities in the urban United States, such as the 1970s mural movement’s efforts to re-politicize spaces of exclusion. While existing literature finds that digital inequality results in differential digital human capital, this research indicates that place-based claims, such as digital pop-ups, are important sites for combatting racial injustice and creating more inclusionary spaces, especially among youth adults.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital divide
• digital arts
• race
• urban studies
• young people

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the artwork and curatorial expertise of the cultural producers highlighted in this article, especial my students Javier Cienfuegos, Ivonne Gonzalez, Karen Lazcano, Katherine Lee Berry, Joshua Mandell, Christofer Rodelo, and Alfonso Toro. I wish also to thank Sara Fingal, Jessica Kim, Priscilla Leiva, and Courtney Long for feedback on early drafts of this article and Maria Nava Gutierrez for help preparing the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Genevieve G. Carpio is Assistant Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where she was a Ford Foundation Predoctoral and Dissertation fellowship recipient. She spent 2013–2015 as Cassius Marcellus Clay Fellow in the Department of History and Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. Address: Chicana and Chicano Studies, UCLA, 7339 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1 In doing so, I seek to help bridge a gap in digital studies and American studies underscored by McPherson (2012).

2 For a compelling analysis of transmedia organizing and its expression in physical space, see Costanza-Chock (2014).

3 The digital exhibit can be viewed online at http://gourmetintersections.com/about/.

4 My analysis of the event is shaped by a telephone conversation held with Adriel Luis, 26 March, 2014.

5 Native American, Native Hawaiian, Alaskan Natives, and Pacific Islanders have been omitted from these reports. Thom File, ‘Computer and Internet Use in the United States,’ U.S. Census Bureau (May 2013); Lisa Nakamura notes that surveys failing to account for non-English-speaking Asian immigrant populations, such as those taken by the Pew Research Center, exclude a segment of the Asian American population which is far less likely to have internet access than the aggregate.

6 Author was a participant in the summer workshop. For more on FemTechNet, see FemTechNet Collective, ‘FemTechNet: A Collective Statement on Teaching and Learning Race, Feminism, and Technology,’ Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. in press.

7 Research suggests that despite the increase in opportunities for sharing user-produced materials on on-line platforms, the likelihood that young people will distribute content is negatively compounded with marginal race, gender, and socioeconomic status.

8 The ‘White alone’ population in New Haven is 42.6%, significantly higher than Connecticut as a whole at 77.6%.

9 These figures do not include international enrollment, which would bring the percentage of enrollment for African American and Latino students down further.

10 An archive of social media engaging the hashtag #CaLatino can be viewed at https://storify.com/GenevieveCarpio/digital-pop-up-latin-mobility-in-california-histor.

11 Participants were sent an anonymous online survey, authored using Survey Monkey. SurveyMonkey Inc, Palo Alto, CA, www.surveymonkey.com.

12 These actions are akin to the efforts of Wikipedians, foremost Adrianne Wadewitz efforts to address the gender gap in Wikipedia. Conversations with students show that reflective and community-based project options in the introductory courses for ER&M, as well as Latino/a New Haven, taught by Alicia Schmidt-Camacho, were particularly formative in this regard.

13 Site visit by author to ‘Social and Public Art Resource Center-SPARC,’ 22 April 2016. For more on the DML’s activities see http://sparcinla.org.

14 In Los Angeles, for example, ‘bland architecture’ combines with ‘carceral’ elements to create a ‘fortress effect.’ Mike Davis argues that the goal of the fortress effect is ‘to obliterate all connection with Downtown’s past and to prevent any dynamic association with the non-Anglo urbanism of its future’ (Davis, 1990, p. 158).