Menu Driven Identities

In "Menu-Driven Identities: Making Race Happen Online," Lisa Nakamura displays how the internet is designed in a way that is very good at making a user identify with a single race when interacting with the rest of the world. Forcing an identity through a series of dropdown menus forces a user to approximate rather than truly represent his or her race. Nakamura's says that major corporations would rather brush race under the rug than embrace it.

We still live in a society where we still have problems with emotive people understanding issues of race, sex, gender, sexuality religion, etc., how can we be concerned if our machines do it properly? I think Nakamura has something valuable to say, but I don't think she fully explores the idea that issues of race have an emotional component that can't be expressed in HTML. Websites and their designers are limited by the Kennedy-esque want to serve as many people as possible (with the key distinction that JFK wanted social change and web designers usually want to get paid).

The internet is a technology that is created by the connection of client and server machines. The machines have no personal identity (while they can be profiled based on processor architecture,  most academics will find it hard to compare that to race, sex, gender, religion, etc.), and it is the input of the user that creates identity. Until we have technology that is capable of working on the same level of understanding as human beings (arguably the goal of such companies as Google which focus less on conventional demographics and more on what you've historically interacted with), I think we need to understand that there is an inherent issue in outward acknowledgement of or pandering towards any demographic division on the internet.