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To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2009.01342.x Byline: Peter A. Chow-White (1) Abstract: When James Watson suggested that Africans are less intelligent than Whites in October 2007, he was quickly called 'stupid' and 'irrational' by the international media. In this article, I argue that this characterization misses the structural elements at play and the larger social transformations where shifting discursive formations of race are converging in old and new ways with developments and innovations in digital culture and information technologies. This article identifies three discursive frames that characterize race talk in contemporary society, drawing on the work of Bonilla-Silva, Bell, Gilroy, Hall, and Spivak, and explores how they operate in a specific institutional context. Medical biotechnology, like many other enterprises, has been undergoing enormous changes enabled by developments and innovations in computing technologies such as databases and the Internet. As a result, scientific understandings of genetics and race are being recoded in the digital age. Author Affiliation: (1)School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada V5A 1S6 Article note: Peter A. Chow-White; e-mail: petercw@sfu.ca

Foucault's problematic empirical and complementary combination of content analysis and network analysis is used to study the quantitative approach to qualitative concerns regarding sex tourism. The ways by which gender and race find novel expression through the Internet in the employment of the sex tourism industry are discussed.

In the 1990s, scientists, social advocates, policy makers, and entrepreneurs debated the promises and perils of emerging digital technologies that could bring about enormous and wide-reaching changes in society. One [...]

Scholars, educators, regulators, pundits, and other observers are advocating for regulation and oversight of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genomic testing. As a result, the technology has been subject of highly visible public and regulatory controversy. In this article, we explore the nature and the shape of the sentiment of public discourse about the DTC company, 23andMe. We conduct a quantitative content analysis and qualitative framing analysis on Tweets. We find that the discourse surrounding DTC genomics and 23andMe is largely positive. We also identify a number of frames users deploy to debate, discuss, and share their experiences with DTC genomics and 23andMe. We argue that these frames create meaning around this emerging technology for its users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2009.01429.x Byline: Peter A. Chow-White (1) Author Affiliation: (1)Simon Fraser University, Canada

We examine the television show Battlestar Galactica (BSG) through interviews with creative people working on the show to illustrate the production context of the show and the science fiction (sf) genre. Media scholars suggest sf stories are critical stories about our political systems and our anxieties about new technologies, social change, race, gender, class, and religious conflicts. We investigate constraints and agency in the production of BSG as a site of critical cultural commentary and the politics of racial and gender representation in the series. We find that the creators behind BSG struggle with the moral and political nature of the stories they create, within the constraints of power, social structures, and a neoliberal economy and in doing so actively participate in their own acts of meaning-making in the production process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If the 1990s was all about the information superhighway and the network society, then the first 10 years of the 21st century is perhaps best described as the decade of data. Actors in different enterprises worked feverishly to develop innovative database and data mining technologies for institutional goals such as marketing, social networking, and scientific discovery. These researchers and data entrepreneurs follow an emerging belief that gathering and mining massive amounts of digital data will give objective insight into human relations and provide authentic representations for decision-making. On the surface, the technologies used to mine big data have the appearance of value-free and neutral inquiry. However, as information entrepreneurs use database and data mining technologies to purposively organize the social world, this seeming neutrality obfuscates domain assumptions and leaves cultural values and practices of power unexamined. We investigate the role of communication and social shaping of database and data mining technologies in the institutional context of genome science to understand how various stakeholders (scientists, policy makers, social scientists, and advocates) articulate racialized meanings with biological, physical, and big data. We found a rise in the use of racial discourse that suggests race has a genetic foundation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that a new form of racialization is being produced in the information age through developments and innovations in communication technologies. Increasingly, racial knowledge is being constructed from seemingly neutral and unrelated pieces of information, which are collected, sorted, and analyzed through two key technologies: databases and the Internet. I call this interaction between technology and identity the "informationalization of race." As a mode of representation, a structuring device, and as a biological category, race is undergoing a significant transformation in the digital age. I ground this concept in a case study of the next Human Genome Project -- the HapMap Project -- to understand how technologies are being shaped in a specific institutional setting. Advances in human genomics have recently re-invigorated scientific research into the relationship between race and biology. Where the HGP concluded that humanity is similar at the genetic level, the HapMap Project began by looking for differences between white, African, and Asian groups. It's anticipated that promising findings from the HapMap project will be of help in developing pharmaceuticals that can target common diseases, such as cancer. However, this development also opens the door to old biological conceptions of race and a new phase of the biopolitics of the human body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]