What Race Does Online: “Gangnam Style” and Asian/American Identity in the Digital Age

Abstract

109 Interface Konrad Ng What Race Does Online: “Gangnam Style” and Asian/American Identity in the Digital Age there are some unsettling parallels regarding digitization efforts for museums and the emerging field of the digital humanities: an exclusive focus on the use of technologies and social media to broaden public access, enhance engagement with students and the public, and improve collections and text management. These efforts, I argue, assume that the digital age is an apolitical domain and that the challenges of this moment are to overcome barriers to digital access (“the digital divide”) and to improve the management of voluminous points of data. This narrow interpretation of digitization obscures how participation in online life may be a political activity for everyone but perhaps most especially for racial minorities like Asian Americans. At the Smithsonian Institution , which seeks to digitize its vast collections, the experience of Asian Pacific American communities and their participation in forming the national patrimony are largely absent (Smithsonian Institution 1998). This was true for African American and Native Indian communities until the U.S. Congress approved the construction of a Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (expected to open in 2015) and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (opened in 2004). Currently the U.S. Congress is debating legislation for the construction of a Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino. Given that the principal goal of the Smithsonian’s efforts toward digitization is to serve the American people by broadening access and improving the management of collections and research, what is being digitized—the digital humanities discourse among museums—is disconcerting . Of primary concern is that the realization of the digital 110 Interface age may affirm a racial ontology of data that has not valued the experiences of Asian Americans in the collections of America’s publicly funded museums. Rachel Lee and Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong (2003) and Lisa Nakamura (2007) argue that digital culture is intrinsically political in that digital technologies are tied to gender, global modes of production, and the formation of racial identities. We can see this when we consider the recent study on the demography of social media by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Pew’s research suggests that the demographics of social media users are generally equal across sex and income, but differences emerge when it comes to age, where there is a generational divide, and race, where minority communities are heavier users of social media. As a recent story in the Washington Post notes, the disjuncture between the popularity of people of color on YouTube offers a striking contrast to predominantly white stars on network television and in Hollywood films (Tsukayama 2012). Kent Ono and Vincent Pham (2009) contend that the new media landscape has become the platform of culturally marginalized communities because of its capacity for open participation and freedom of expression. Indeed, Asian Americans are not only savvy users and participants in the online world, they form its core engineers. Richard Florida (2014) argues that nearly half of the Asian American population participates as cultural workers in America’s “creative class”—which includes those working in a range of artistic, scientific, technological, and educational professions, including the world of culture, design, and entertainment. In other words, a generation of drivers of digital culture is intersecting with the Asian American experience. As such, the critical question for discussions about museums and the digital humanities is this: how might we consider race in online space? I contend that the relationship between Asian American identity and digital life ought to be premised on the concept that Asian American identity may be constituted within an online space as opposed to Asian American identity only being constituted prior to it. What race can do online prompts a reconsideration of our assumption of what Asian American identitycandofromtheInternet.Todothis,IwanttoexploretheYouTube hit “Gangnam Style” by K-pop star and comedic performer Psy. I contend that “Gangnam Style” demonstrates the cultural force of Asian American digital life and a way of reading the relationship between Asian and Asian American identity in online and offline spaces in the United States. Released on YouTube on July 15, 2012, “Gangnam Style” became...