It is not difficult to see that the Internet has created a global economy that allows for enhanced international and intercultural communication. In Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, Lisa Nakamura emphasizes that the Internet is “a form with an increasingly visual bent, a development trajectory measured in months rather than years, a diversifying population of users and producers, a serious and thoroughgoing intervention into American culture and media practices, and a correspondingly crying need for flexible, rigorous, and multimediated forms of analysis. The challenges that the Internet presents to critics and theorists of imaging practices in our contemporary period are serious and myriad: the hybrid form to end all hybrid forms, the Web in particular brings together graphics and textuality, both streaming and still images, synchronous and asynchronous communication, new forms of commerce, amateur and professional production, and community building” (5).
With the Internet, an important form of technology that has improved vastly is gaming, mainly in that it has allowed for Massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPG’s. Through some of the most popular online games, such as World of Warcraft, players from all over the world conglomerate into this digital space to compete, have fun, and even make money. While this has been a good thing for the most part, it has also presented debatable ways of making profit and tensions between different cultures.
Gold farming is a term that describes making money in a virtual world of an online game and selling it for actual profit in the real world on websites like eBay. The game World of Warcraft has had a particular problem with this. It has been found that 80-85% of the gold farmers playing this game are living in China. Many of them work for actual gold farming organizations, working in buildings that are called sweatshops. The pay that most of the gold farmers receive is not great, but they are also provided with food and sometimes shelter by the organizations. To this segment of the Chinese population, gold farming is a legitimate way of making money.
However, elsewhere across the world, gold farmers are looked down upon. They are seen as people who ruin the game experience, making money in a cheap despicable way. The administrators of World of Warcraft started to recognize some of these gold farmers and banned their accounts, though the farmers usually return to the game with a new account. Do you think that gold farming is a legitimate way of making money for many of the disenfranchised people trying to make a living in cities like Beijing? Do you think that this practice is proof to the importance of Internet as an economic means over all other means?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dkkf5NEIo0
This video is called “Ni Hao (A Gold Farmers Story)” and is a parody of a popular Akon song. Americans attempting to bring down the name of gold farmers created it. Watching the video, you will notice the cultural tensions that exist between American and Chinese players, as lyrics of the song seem to point out that these Chinese people are unwanted in the game world. It even begins to blend Chinese stereotypes and Chinese-American stereotypes into one unspecific insult. Do you think that the message of this song is simply a cry for fair gameplay by American players or that it represents an international and racist tension between players on this MMORPG? Is it a sweeping representation of the Chinese people or an insult directed at a very specific segment of the country’s people? Also, do you think that this is proof that the Internet can lead to intercultural problems even if the race or nationality of the individual is hidden?
