Information Society Watch

April 2005, Linda Leung, Ashgate Publishing

In this book, the author makes a pioneering exploration of ethnic minority presence in cyberspace. She finds that despite the apparent white, Western, male, middle class profile of cyberspace, there is significant ethnic minority activity. The work draws on the author’s empirical research amongst ethnic minority women and incorporates discussion of media and web-texts from the US, Canada, Britain and Australia. This book engages media theory across television, film and the internet in relation to race and ethnicity, thus allowing a historically contextual and nuanced understanding of the interplay of virtuality and ethnicity, online and offline. Leung lays out the complexity of absences and presences of racialized bodies's works in relation to the Internet. Her work addresses gaps in what has thus far been a mostly US-centric approach to race in cyberspace. This is a fascinating interdisciplinary examination of the web-participation of ethnic communities, which sheds light on how ethnic identities are articulated in cyberspace and contemporary society in both predictable and surprising ways (Publishers).

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