Ayhan: let me second David Golumbia's comment. I was presenting at the same time as you, and did not get to attend your talk, but I'm also working on the connection between "turking," orientalism, gold farming, and other forms of racialized transnational digital labor--those "nimble little fingers" of Asian people, as Haraway says, are part of the cultural imaginary of technoscience, but also part of earlier digital histories. The idea of Asians as ancillary laborers rather than "creative class workers" in digital technologies and economies goes all the way back to the history of circuit board assembly in Silicon Valley, as well as in more contemporary times. Lawrence Liang writes about the vexed history of piracy and copyright in the context of E. Asia, and how E. Asia is envisioned less as a space of innovation and more as one of imitation or copying, mostly illegal copying. Sarai has some great readings on this transnational difference of opinion on "open" media. <div>
<br></div><div>My parents' families were interned in camps in Wyoming during World War II. My father's parents had been gardeners and service workers for Stanford professors in Los Altos. After the war they returned to California and my grandmother lied about her age to get a job working at as assembly plant which was recruiting specifically Japanese American women, for their manual dexterity. She worked there for many years, and is still alive at 107. My father was recruited right after being released from camp, and later went to college on the GI Bill at Hamline in MN, and majored in business at UC Berkeley. He then worked as a businessman (not an engineer) at ITT, Fairchild, and Omron before starting his own polarizer business, trading between Japan and the US. His former boss William Shockley often shared his crazy eugenic ideas about the superior intelligence of Asians, especially in regards to technology, and predicted that his children would out-perform white children in school. He used the money he earned that way to send me to a nice private college in Oregon, where I got an extremely conservative liberal arts education and now study race and digital media. </div>
<div><br></div><div>This story has struck me as saying something about race, war, and technoscience, but because it's my story I'm not entirely sure what the message is. This is all to say that techno-Orientalism is a transnational and local formation.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Lias</div><div><br>-- <br>Lisa Nakamura <br>Director, Asian American Studies Program<br>Professor, Institute of Communication Research<br>Professor, Department of Media and Cinema Studies <br>Professor, Asian American Studies Program<br>
University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana<br>1208 W. Nevada Street, MC-142<br>Urbana, IL 61801-3818<br>office phone: 217 244-3768<br>fax: 217 265-6235<br><a href="http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/N/nakamura_digitizing.html">http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/N/nakamura_digitizing.html</a><br>
</div>