I found Hansen and Gonzalez’s thoughts on technology as race to be extremely interesting. I am very interested in the concept of passing and, when applied to the digital media sphere, the idea of passing means something different as it fully “allow[s] us to suspend existing cultural figurations of the self…in order to forge new cultural forms” (Hansen 107.) In our previous class discussions we have thought about passing in terms of crossing borders in society to become something you may not be, or appear to be to others; however, online, you have the freedom to manufacture an image, since the Internet is often an anonymous place. Whether it be on an online message board or in another community such as second life, you create an avatar; however, this “online image may or may not have a ‘real world’ referent” (Gonzalez 41) like a real-world picture, but could be something you created yourself, or it could be an image of someone entirely different. Online, we all have to pass as something, as there are not the visual markers of race for other people to classify us by. While this is freeing in the sense that we are not judged at face value, it's also very strange since we have the freedom to create how we want people to view us without these markers.
The Internet also erases the visual marker of the human, since robots and other software have the power to do things like buy tickets and post things online, thus making it necessary for humans to prove their humanity when going on Ticketmaster or doing other human things. On the other hand, the human has the power online to become a completely different human, such as people posing as other people to lure people into a trap, or to pretend to be a celebrity. Through these discussions we can see that both a world with visual markers and a world without can both be very freeing, but also very confining.
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