Lisa Nakamura

“Where Do You Want to Go Today?”

"Where Do You Want to Go Today?"; Cybernetic Tourism, the Internet, and Transnationality is the essay of Nakamura in the book Race in Cyberspace. She is describing how Media Giants during 90’s such as Compaq, IBM, Origin, Anthem, and Microsoft indiscriminately consumed the exotic images in order to let western viewers feel as if the whole world is connected. This idea is explained by examples of how those corporations featured "...idealized images of Others who miraculously speak like 'us' still look like 'them'." Caravan camel and Arab guy middle of the desert are talking about technological terms in a perfect English.^[10] Nakamura mentions "...putting these incongruous words into the Other’s mouth, thus demonstrating the hegemonic power of its “high-speed information network” to make the planet smaller by causing everyone to speak the same language ... " Exaggerating the exotic "otherness" while making them use the same language like "us," makes western viewers as a subject in this whole technical journey and "them" as the touristic object. Indeed, she mentions that the idealized exotic others speaking perfect English "frames the whole ad for its viewer as a window onto an “other” world." Furthermore, she mentions that this whole phenomenon is highly related to colonialism and post-colonialism.

As reviewed by Samantha Blackmon from Purdue University, Nakamura’s third book, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet, aims to interrogate how the internet shapes and reshapes our perceptions of race, ethnicity, and identity. Blackmon states that Nakamura names the images of racial identity online that shape the specific perceptions of cybertypes, and how these cybertypes are often determined and defined by the racial and ethnic stereotypes that are already established in our current society.^[11][12]

"Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture"

In her seminal essay, Nakamura examines the racialization of digital labor, focusing specifically on narratives constructed around the employment of Navajo women at the Fairchild semiconductor plant in Shiprock, New Mexico. Fairchild was lured to the Navajo reservation in 1965 by tax benefits and cheap labor; reservations existed like foreign nations in that they were exempt from U.S. minimum wage laws. It was via a mobilization of gendered racio-cultural traits that Fairchild built a justification for this exploitation of the labor of a largely female and indigenous workforce and the reservation that existed in a state of exception. In a 1969 Fairchild brochure, for example, a photograph of a geometric, woven rug appears in junction with an image of a semiconductor. Nakamura writes, The resemblance between the pattern of the rug depicted on the first page and the circuit is striking and uncanny. It makes the visual argument that Indian rugs are merely a different material iteration of the same pattern or aesthetic tradition found within the integrated circuit." She continues: "Depicting electronics manufacture as a high-tech version of blanket weaving performed by willing and skillful indigenous women served two goals: it permitted the incursion of factories into Indian reservations to be seen as a continuation of rather than a break from “traditional” Indian activities, and it pioneered the blurring of the line between wage labor and creative-cultural labor; one seamlessly became the other." In her analysis of the visual and written discourse surrounding the Shiprock Fairchild plant, Nakamura concludes that digital labor done by women of color is presented as an extension of an existing cultural practice rather than a cultural loss. This discursive erasure has continues wherever digital labor is transposed; as labor markets for electronic manufacture have shifted to Asia, the same "nimble fingers" arguments, imbued with gendered and racialized meanings, persist.