The White Male Self of the Internet
Take Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen, which is interesting, as far as it goes, but limited in scope. If Turkle had looked to W. E. B. DuBois, she might not have had to wait “more than twenty years after meeting the ideas of Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari” to find an environment in which these “Gallic abstractions” were “more concrete.” Turkle is talking about the *white *self, and a limited set of the white self: middle- to upper-class, educated, usually male - the “we,” unfortunately, of most of the Net.
I think this has gotten better since 1996, when this was written. My Twitter feed has some people of color, and some queer people. But I also think it’s important to remember, and it’s something that for me has been lost in all the noise recently, that the Internet is skewed towards being white and being male.