 My name is Ginny Korn. I am a fellow brand new at the Berkman Client Center for Internet Society. I'll be looking at the way people talk about race and gender both online and in person. I've pretty much always been interested in issues of race because I'm a woman of color that grew up in Alabama and I was reminded of my race in both positive and negative ways at a very early age and ever since then. Talking about race more openly I think promotes it promotes a more my hope is that it promotes a more just society eventually because if we can't talk about race then we definitely can't talk about racism and so we have to get to the point where talking about race is not uncomfortable or feels forced but rather feels the same way as saying what your gender is or what your sexual orientation is to say it all together naturally and comfortably so that all of us can discuss what that means to everybody across different levels of society. The internet has definitely changed the way that we socialize but also the ways that we interact with what we believe race is. We're not only consumers of the internet we're also producers we actually can create different ways to discuss race we can share different representations of race and to me that's really exciting because we are able to reduce the distance and the time and the speed to creating those representations online instead of relying upon publishers for books or producers and distributors for movies we can kind of overlook that and then use the internet as the way to produce and broadcast and share those representations and that means we can change all stereotypes and make new representations of what we believe it is to be of color or to be white it's it's a brand new medium out there in terms of how far we can get this kind of message and so I'm excited by the possibilities