Kolko, Nakamura, and Rodman point out that In spite of popular utopian rhetoric to the contrary, we believe that race matters no less in cyberspace than it does in 'IRL' (in real life). One of the most basic reasons for this is that binary opposition between cyberspace and 'the real world' is not nearly as sharp or clean as it's often made out to be. While the mediated nature of cyberspace renders invisible many (and, in some instances, all) of the visual and aural cues that serve to mark people's identities IRL, that invisibility doesn't carry back over into 'the real world' in ways that allow people to log in and simply shrug off a lifetime of experiencing the world from specific-identity-related perspectives. (4)

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