NetTime May 25, 2004 Talking Race and Cyberspace: Interview with Lisa Nakamura By Geert Lovink I met Internet scholar Lisa Nakamura at a conference in Oslo, late 2001, where she showed how techno-utopian dreams reproduced racist patterns. Her analysis was of a shocking normality because it, once again, proved how 'the old' got teleported into the new in such a friction-free manner. Nakamura's material shows how the Internet, despite all its alternative claims, is part of dominant visual culture. "No one on the Internet knows you are a dog." It is this flirt with fluid identities, so common in the roaring nineties, that distracted Internet advocates from futher investigations. That, of course, changed over the past years. A number of conferences were held and studies done, and Lisa Nakamura's work stands out within this context. The following email interview was done after we both got involved in a debate about the merits of 'Internet research'. Full Interview: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0405/msg00057.html -end- Art McGee Principal Consultant Virtual Identity Communications+Media+Technology 1-510-967-9381 artmcgee@cyberspace.org