Online Social Networks: Identity Management and Ethnic Discourses

Abstract

New media technologies have played a key role in the formation and sustenance of diasporic communities within the landscape of global cities. The processes by which new media forms and practices may result in redefining cultural and ethnic belonging for transnational populations are at the centre of this work in progress. The digital platform of facebook, a currently popular online social network, provides a model for the investigation of ethno-specific digital media production in a diasporic context. Similarly to other new forms of media communication, facebook mediates the diasporic experience at an individual and a community level. As youths engage with the platform, versions of culture and ethnicity are enacted and placed on display. Asking how transnational populations use this online social network and how communication practices on the network are influenced by various aspects of identity, we look at the process by which information flows, images, values, and ethnic narratives are incorporated into everyday online practices. At a second level, the study of a diasporic population communicating over this platform provides an interesting case to explore whether and how aspects of ethnic identity are ‘imagined’ and negotiated around intersubjective representations. Having noticed that network use results in particular interpersonal dynamics whose narration continues even when the user moves away from the computer screen, we employ a combination of methodologies to investigate the interaction of the virtual with the social context within it is produced. Data is collected both online and offline by a number of profile pages, successive questionnaires and interviews, participatory observation, fieldwork, focus groups interviews and a case study. Along with the analysis of screen data over time, we aim to follow the narratives of a facebook group of ‘friends’, and through an ethnographic account we trace their online experiences as these interfere with offline contexts of interaction.