Politics, gender, race, (no evaluative order intended here), seem to be amongst the major factors influencing the ways that people interpret others and react to others online.
Thank you. I'm so glad we're on the same page. I know that more learned scholars such as the folks in AOIR always knew that, but there was a time, a very frightening and scary time, when a certain cliquish set of privileged "white" people were running around, writing articles in magazines like Wired and Mondo 2000, and claiming a utopian vision for cyberspace that completely ignored and dismissed issues of socially constructed race and ethnic identity and their effect in and on cyberculture and virtual identities. Thanks to the cyberfeminists, issues of gender began to be interrogated and discussed with much more frequency, but "race" (along with class) was *always* left out of the equation. I'm so glad those folks are all gone now. That was a truly sad time in cyberspace history. I hope they were able to get some help. A mind is terrible thing to waste, you know. Art