Peter Chow White

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: This paper proposes a new bi-directional way of understanding the convergence of biology and computing. It argues for a reciprocal interaction in which biology and computing have shaped and are currently reshaping each other. In so doing, we qualify both the view of a natural marriage and of a digital shaping of biology, which are common in the literature written by scientists, STS, and communication scholars. The DNA database is at the center of this interaction. We argue that DNA databases are spaces of convergence for computing and biology that change in form, meaning, and function from the 1960s to the 2000s. The first part of the paper shows how, in the 1980s, DNA sequencing shifted from passively incorporating computers to be increasingly modelled in digital coding and decoding. Information retrieval algorithms, reciprocally, were altered according to the peculiarities of DNA in the first sequence-storage databases. The second part of the paper investigates the impact of these reciprocal interactions and globalization on the organization of research centers, ways of conducting big science, and scientific values. Through convergence and new technologies such as data mining, biology and computing were transformed technologically, institutionally, and culturally into a new bio-data enterprise called genomics.

Keywords: Genomics, DNA, databases, data mining, sequencers, convergence, globalization, Internet, biology, computing

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.

Keywords: Semantic networks, Genomics, informationalization of race, digital

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.

This study investigates how discourses of race, gender, sexuality and the market intersect online in sex tourism websites. The selling of sex tourism and sex tourist storytelling are structured in a manner where neither race, sexuality, gender, nor the market overdetermine the character of the discourse. Using a quantitative approach to usually qualitative concerns, this study employs a complementary combination of content analysis and network analysis to show how identity formation is based not on a dominant unitary identity but emanates through a number of strategic points of negotiation over the meaning of identification and difference. Increasingly, information and communication technologies, such as the internet, are playing a particularly significant role, not only in the promotion and packaging of sex tourism but also of a new type of global surveillance of bodies, race and desire.

Key Words: content analysis • internet • network analysis • online community • racialization • sexuality • technology • building tourism

As journalism faces a 'critical juncture', we see a parallel opportunity emerging to examine the field's long-term cultural crisis. Peace Journalism (PJ) offers a set of journalism conventions that can promote racial comity and justice, rather than racism and misrepresentation. While ...