The electronic mass media—consisting of the global media environment of television, radio, the news media, and now the Internet—brings an additional complexity to the issues of visual representation and communication (Griffin, 2001). The interactive modes and media of images and communication are becoming complicated in daily usage (Block, 2001; Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001). Central to this complexity is the concept of “new media,” which Manovich (2001) argues is digital in nature, allows  for random access, and is interactive (49). The digital nature of new media allows differing media types of “texts, still images, visual or audio time data, shapes, [and] 3-D spaces” (49) to be presented on one machine, namely a computer. Layering the human component onto this electronic frontier has resulted in concerns of accessibility (Tseng, 2001; Novak and Hoffman, 2002; Hubbard, 2003), identity (Haraway, 1991; Turkle, 1995; Sullivan ,1997; Marx, 1999), and more recently considerations of race (Walton, 1999; Kolko, Nakamura, and Rodman, 2000; Barber and Tait, 2001; Nelson, Tu, and Hines, 2001; Social Text, 2002; Molina, 2003).

The expansion of computer mediated communication in electronic mail, listservs, chatrooms, and online communities has led users to become more focused on social interaction through visual representation. The early attempts at defining oneself was left to textual descriptions and imagination. The movement from the online textual environment to a graphical community has provided the opportunity for cyberspace users to take images as representational versions of themselves. The advent of message boards and other asynchronous online spaces allowed for individuals to use graphical representations as the embodiment of their physical selves, including gender, race, and social class. Computer users thus sought to locate a suitable representation of themselves that would allow for a representation of themselves, their personality, their interests. These visual representations have come to be called “avatars.”

While gender and ostensibly social class representation are interrogated and engaged in the electronic spaces of computer mediated communication, race remains a problematic fixture (Burkhalter, 1999; Kolko, 2000; Knadler, 2001). Kolko (2000) argues  that “interactions of community members show [that] the default race of the multi-user domain is assumed to be white” (216). Often designers of avatars—the visual representations of the individual’s personality and interests—create representational images as raceless beings representing the dominant white culture, where personality, gender, and emotions are the predominant characteristics (Fabri, Moore, and Hobbs, 1999; Kolko, 1999; Rampoldi-Hnilo, 2001; Berner and Rieger, 2003; Broglio and Guynup, 2003; Schmitt and Rist, 2003; “Make Your Own Avatar”; Kushner, 2004). Rather than the simplistic process of choosing a representation of oneself as a virtual construction of the body, Kolko (1999) discusses the user’s rhetorical intent of creating a representational persona, for "avatars created by commercial design firms” (179) often embody stereotypes of feminine and masculine characteristics. Nakamura (2000) suggests that these stereotypes may simply be the result of the commodification of race, as the avatar designers seek to represent race from their own perspectives.

I argue that this commodification of raced avatars has led to the "racially correct" Ken- and Barbie-like images in the form of Brad and Christie being construed as representational of African Americans. These images, which are supposed to appeal to Black users of message boards, often provide a comfort image for Euro-Americans to see and control. Brown, Gillem, Robbins, and Lafleur in their 2003 paper on “The Effect of Black Women’s Skin Tone on College Students’ Ratings of Their Employability: A Preliminary Study,” discuss the assumptions of Euro Americans which “perceived mixed race Blacks as ‘genetically’  superior because of the contribution of White blood” (3). The acceptability of these Black people “because their light skin color, facial features and straighter hair were similar to European features” (4), by extension led to the relational assumption of “the ‘mulatto hypothesis’ [which] states that Whites tend to be more comfortable around Blacks who are mixed due to the contribution of White blood” (9).

Ziegler (2001) offers a potential solution to this myopic view. She argues that “African Americans can be the source that influences mass consciousness through the production and distribution of Afrocentric content to the world” (221). Knadler (2001) suggests that this is occurring already. He relates his surprise that his Black students chose not to be “the self-focused transgressive cyborg of postmodern theory” (250), but instead sought to evoke reality by using “pictures of themselves [that] recodes a self-promotional style for a Black female identity that understood itself within communal terms” (250). I argue the the conscious choice to erase ourselves from cyberspace in our visual representations not only denies our history, this choice also denies us ourselves. Only by ascribing to the view posited by Zeigler—that of Blacks producing and distributing our likenesses in electronic spaces—can we truly be represented in cyberspace. In order to disrupt the cinematic gaze with an oppositional gaze, Black people can respond to the challenge to visually portray their lived experiences by critiquing these visual images and also by creating their own avatars.