theorizing race on the internet
With the recent events in Charlottesville, social scientists across the country have been attempting to make sense of the new face of white supremacy and the modality it uses: the internet. New research from Charlton McIlwain published in Information, Communication & Society draws a powerful parallel between the history of technology and the history of race.
Using racial formation theory as a framework, McIlwain asserts that the similarities between computing and politics in the U.S. are not a coincidence, and that the colorblind ideology that pervades one also pervades the other. He also argues that space, used historically in the U.S. as a vehicle for racialization and White supremacy, is used online in nomenclature and interface, and that analyzing the Internet as racial-spatial relationship is ideal for studying inequality.
In addition to crafting a theoretical framework to fill the gaps in previous research, McIlwain uses an original dataset and network graph to examine web traffic in an attempt to identify how race is systematically produced online. He suggests that previous research on internet racism can be easily dismissed because it is performed at the individual level, and therefore uses websites as his level of analysis. While sites can be racialized based on their content, current website categorizing projects such as DMOZ.org do not group sites into explicit racial categories, which further proves the idea that the those who categorize these sites are operating within a colorblind ideology. It is more accurate to use meta-tags to examine networks. Meta-tags are bits of text in a page’s code that describe its content and influence how the site shows up in search results. McIlwain used a hyperlink (producer directed) network and a clickstream (consumer directed) network and examined their nodes and edges — the sites users go to and come from — to determine traffic patterns.
Networks could exhibit three patterns of traffic between non-racial and racial sites: segregated (in-group links are higher than expected, links between groups are lower than expected), integrated (in-group links are lower than expected, links between groups are higher than expected), and status quo (there are no links outside of what is expected by chance). He found that the clickstream network was significantly racially homophilous — those who visited nonracial sites were clicking from and going to nonracial sites, whereas those who visited racial sites were clicking from and to other racial sites. The hyperlink network, controlled by content producers, was status quo. Essentially, when users shape their own internet experiences they tend to do so with others who share their racial identity.
The multidisciplinary status of the internet makes it difficult to theorize, but the complex theoretical framework proposed by McIlwain, looking at the Internet as a racial project, is promising for future research in the field.
