Understanding Digital Racism: Networks, Algorithms, Scale

This book explores the ecology of digital racism. It offers an innovative contemporary approach for understanding how people manifest racism and transform it through digital technologies. It starts by highlighting the proliferation of technologically mediated racisms, and the shortcomings of existing accounts. Digital racism takes many forms, such as: viral memes circulating via social media platforms; the swarming of online users targeting a person of colour; the hidden bias of algorithmic sorting, or; the licentious racial profiling of policing and surveillance systems. The variance and complexity of technologically mediated racisms begs the question whether adequate attention has been paid to digital processes and environments through which race materializes (spoiler: it hasn't). Existing accounts see it as an extant 'real-world' phenomenon iniquitously amplified by digital media and communications; or in technodeterminist terms which attribute contemporary technologies as the generator of 'virtual' racisms. The book presents an analysis of digital racism by acknowledging the mutual entanglement of racism and digital technologies. It is influenced by a media ecology perspective which studies the complexity, interactivity and materiality of digital systems. This book elaborates the sociotechnical production of racism. It draws on 'assemblage theory' where digital race/racism is conceived as an emergent force constituted through the interactions of social and technical phenomena. That is, how digital assemblages – networked relations, communication platforms, interfaces, software processes, human interactions etc. – are constitutive of post-racial formations. Analyzing the conditions of digital post-raciality captures contemporary transformations of racism. Arguably, racism not only operates as a disciplinary mode of power, maintaining purity and excluding others. In a post-colonial age of technological globalization, deterritorialization, mobility and connectivity, a biopolitical racism attempts to manage difference. Overall, this book explores race/racism as informational and immaterial through interrogating its digital conditions of emergence, propagation and mutation. An analysis of networked relations, information flows, subjectivation and affects are critical to understanding contemporary productions of digital racism.