The Mobilisation of Race and Gender on an Internet Mailing List V1.0
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Published:
Jan 21, 2008
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Abstract
This paper explores an incident in which race and gender categories were mobilised on the Internet Mailing List Cybermind during an incident of conflict. The people on this Mailing List would resist easy classification as ‘racist’, yet race proved an issue of fracture, while gender appeared to function as a way of universalising sameness and attempting integration. The process of cultural construction is shown to involve the rhetorical deployment of categories, and deployment of these categories often makes sites of ‘expertise’, which become justifiers and motivators of behaviour. This suggests that cultural barriers are not so much latent but created in response to crisis and debate. Competitions between multiple viewpoints, uneasy truce, or resolution by departure, are all hallmarks of Mailing List life.
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References
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Turner, John., Hogg, M., Oaks, P., Reicher, S. & Wetherall, M. (1988) Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self Categorization Theory, Blackwell, Oxford.
Van Knippenberg, D., Lossie, N. & Wilke, H. (1994) "In-Group Prototypicality and Persuasion: Determinants of Heuristic and Systematic Message Processing", British Journal of Social Psychology, 33(3): 289-300. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8309.1994.tb01026.x
Van den Berghe, Pierre L. (1997) "Rehabilitating Stereotypes" in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 20(1): 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.1997.9993945
Baldwin, B. & Flood, T. (1997) "Introduction: to Rhetorical Dimensions of Cyberspace", RhetNet. http://wac.colostate.edu/rhetnet/rdc/edintro.html
Biernat, M., Vescio, T.K. & Green, M. L. (1996) "Selective Self-Stereotyping", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(6): 1194-1209. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.71.6.1194
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo (2003) Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, Rowman & Littlefield, New York.
Bowen, MC & Tal, Kali (nd) "interview with Kali tal: Re: boohabian texts" http://www.mdcbowen.org/p2/boo/kalis.htm
Brown, M.K., Carnoy, M., Currie, E., Duster, T., Oppenheimer, D.B., Schultz, M.M. & Wellman, D. (2003) White Washing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society, University of California Press.
Chakraborty, Jayajit & Bosman, M. Martin (2002) "Race, income, and home PC ownership: a regional analysis of the digital divide", Race & Society 5: 163–177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.racsoc.2004.01.003
Elias, Norbert & Scotson, John, (1994) The Established and the Outsiders (2nd Edition), Sage Publishers, Thousand Oaks.
Hage, Ghassan (1997) "At Home in the Entrails of the West", in Helen Grace et al. (eds) Home/World: space, community and marginality in Sydney's West, Sydney, Pluto Press.
Haslam, S.A., McGarty, C. & Turner, J.C. (1996) "Salient Group Memberships and Persuasion: the Role of Social Identity in the Validation of Beliefs", in J.L. Nye & A.M. Brower eds. What's Social about Social Cognition? Research on Socially Shared Cognition in Small Groups, Sage, Thousand Oaks.
Harris, David (1999) "Property values drop when Blacks move in because…: Racial and socioeconomic determinants of neighborhood desirability", American Sociological Review, 64(3): 461–479. https://doi.org/10.2307/2657496
Holt, Thomas (2000) The Problem of Race in the 21st century, Harvard.
Hopkins, Nick & Reicher, Steve (1997) "Social Movement Rhetoric and the Social Psychology of Collective Action: a case study of anti-abortion mobilization", in Human Relations, 50(3): 261-87. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872679705000303
Hopkins, Nick & Moore, Christopher (2001) "Categorizing the Neighbors: Identity, Distance and Stereotyping", Social Psychology Quarterly, 64(3): 239-52. https://doi.org/10.2307/3090114
Kahani-Hopkins, V. & Hopkins, N. (2002) "Representing British Muslims: the strategic dimension to identity construction", Ethnic and Racial Studies, 25 (2): 288-309. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870120109494
Krang, Jerry (2003) "Ruminations on cyber-race", Dissent, 50(2): 58-63.
Lennie, J. Grace, M., Daws, L. & Simpson, L (1999) "Empowering Online Conversations: A Pioneering Australian Project to Link Rural and Urban Women" in W. Harcourt (ed.) Women@Internet: creating new cultures in cyberspace, Zen Books, London.
Marshall, Jonathan (2007) Categories, Communication and Control: A Study of the Internet Mailing List Cybermind, Peter Lang, New York.
Marshall, Jonathan (2003) "The Sexual Lives of Cyber-Savants", Australian Journal of Anthropology, 14(2): 229-48. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1835-9310.2003.tb00232.x
Mashall, Jonathan (2001) "Cyberspace or Cybertopos: The creation of online space", Social Analysis 45(1): 81-102.
Mason, Eleanor Russel (1997) "Resisting Erase-ism", in Brillo No.3, http://www.brillomag.net/No3/erasism.htm
K.D. McKinney (2003) "'I Feel 'Whiteness' When I Hear People Blaming Whites': Whiteness as Cultural Victimization", Race and Society 6: 39–55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.racsoc.2004.09.004
Miller, Daniel & Slater, Don, (2000) The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, Berg, Oxford.
Nakamura, Lisa (2002) Cybertypes: Race Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet, Routledge, New York.
Poster, Mark (1998) "Virtual Ethnicity: Tribal Identity in an Age of Global Communications", in Steve Jones (ed) Cybersociety 2.0, Thousand Oaks, Sage, 1998. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452243689.n7
Steinhorn, Leonard & Diggs-Brown, Barbara (1999) By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race, Dutton, New York.
Taylor, John (1989) Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory, Oxford University Press.
Time Almanac 2006, Information Please, Boston 2005.
Turner, John., Hogg, M., Oaks, P., Reicher, S. & Wetherall, M. (1988) Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self Categorization Theory, Blackwell, Oxford.
Van Knippenberg, D., Lossie, N. & Wilke, H. (1994) "In-Group Prototypicality and Persuasion: Determinants of Heuristic and Systematic Message Processing", British Journal of Social Psychology, 33(3): 289-300. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8309.1994.tb01026.x
Van den Berghe, Pierre L. (1997) "Rehabilitating Stereotypes" in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 20(1): 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.1997.9993945