On entering the course, my thoughts on the subjects in the course title (“Race, Gender and New Media? Woo!”) were fairly vague. “I like to deconstruct issues of race and the presence of institutional racism and white supremacy in all facets of our society!” I thought, “Issues related to gender are always pertinent to my existence as a queer person also! (And I use facebook a lot I guess…)”

Essentially, while I have often encountered an intersectional analysis of race and gender in and out of the classroom, I really had no idea how to really incorporate ‘new media’ (whatever that meant to me at the time) into that discourse. I knew that vitriolic racism and sexism was as present in cyberspace as anywhere else, but the specific analytic concerns that new media might require were lost on me. How to approach these fairly different areas of society in a way that made sense and would be useful to me? Where to start? Racist youtube comments?

The answer was pretty simple: money. The internet, due to its nature as a self-replicating and collectively-produced organism can appear as a mess of content for which no one is really responsible or benefiting. But one of the first questions we asked in this course was: who’s making money on the internet? Who’s making the most money? How are they making that money? And, as a regular visitor to cyberspace, how are they making money off me and what does this mean?

These questions now haunts me whenever I use the internet and participate in new media culture. Knowing that through the seemingly innocuous act of clicking on a link or using a free (“free”) service, I am supporting vast and invisible systems that I may not want to support.