Digital Diaspora in the Digital Age
With the rise of social media, digital diaspora communities have flourished. They play an important role in cultural identity and bring immense community value.
Humans have been wandering around the planet for quite a while for various reasons. Sometimes due to climate change, like ice ages where it got a bit chilly to stay around, or conflict where one preferred staying alive. And we’re still moving around, for similar reasons.
Staying in touch with friends and family back home however, was a bit hard in the early ages of human migrations. Within a generation or two, ones origins would become cloudy and eventually, forgotten and a new culture and society would emerge. This is no longer the case.
With advances in information and communication technologies (ICT), such as the internet, mobile devices and the ability to move money and travel faster and easier, we have seen the rise of what are referred to as digital diaspora.
First I’ll explore what digital diaspora means, the role they play in preserving cultural heritage and their importance in a hyperconnected world.
The Evolution of Digital Diaspora
The term diaspora is a neologism created by Greeks in the 3rd century B.C. in the translation of the Hebraic Bible. With “dia” meaning “through” or “across” and “speirein” meaning to “scatter”. The term has evolved over time to generally meaning a group of people from one culture moving to another country in the world.
An interesting example is Welsh settlers who moved to Argentina in the early 1800’s as they found that Welsh diaspora moving to America were being forced to integrate into American culture and society. The leader of one such group, Michael Jones in Bala, Wales, negotiated with the Argentinian government to move to a remote area on the Atlantic coast and be allowed to keep their language and cultural traditions.
To this day, a form of Welsh dialect known as Cymraeg y Wladfa evolved and is still taught. They have even revived their own version of the annual cultural event also held in Wales called the Eisteddfod, which is conducted in Welsh and Spanish. It is highly likely that the internet played a key role in the revival of this cultural festival.
In the mid 00’s, there was the large Sepia Mutiny, a blog and discussion forum created by mostly second generation Indian Americans, which was largely about South Asian issues. It was hugely popular at the time and an early example of digital diaspora community building. It shut down in 2012, but the archive, fortunately, remains alive.
As social media tools arrived and evolved and the ability to easily connect around the world, diaspora communities started to form online. As research I and others have conducted show, it is more often second, third and fourth generations who tend to build digital disapora communities. It is theorized that usually the first generation has various reasons for wanting to disconnect from their culture of origin.
While there’s yet to be a standard definition of digital diaspora, we can generally say it refers to online communities living in a country where they or their past generations moved to from a country or place of origin.
Community is an imagined idea to begin with, especially larger cultures. Digital diaspora communities take on a new form of cultural representation as well. How a second and third generation of immigrants imagines their community is often different in subtle ways than the initial generation and the communities in their country of origin. Sometimes, second and third generations can be even more passionate about their place of origin than those living in their place of origin.
The Value of Digital Diaspora Communities
Anthropologists and sociologists have been studying digital diaspora communities for over two decades now. Essentially due to the arrival of the internet and the tools that enable these communities to evolve. Professor Jennifer Brinkerhoff wrote the first book on this topic, “Digital Diasporas” in 2009.
As a digital anthropologist, I’ve researched, mostly for commercial purposes, Welsh, Spanish, Haitian, Iranian and Ghanian digital diasporas. Others have done such research to help understand cultural identities and their role in societies. My most interesting one, being Welsh myself, was for Global Welsh.
Digital diaspora communities have become valuable in international trade where a country may seek to engage with their diaspora to help foster foreign investment, attract entrepreneurs or foster soft power connections to improve diplomatic relations. Such communities help marketers looking to engage with ethnic groups in a respectful way so they avoid cultural appropriation or other mistakes.
Ireland has long nurtured its diaspora communities, even before the rise of social media and only increased its digital engagement over the years. This has helped Ireland to build a strong tourism market and extend the soft power of the country as well.
Digital diaspora communities can often help where second and subsequent generations seek to understand their cultural heritage and find ways to preserve it in their new home country. This is useful for those who are struggling to navigate two cultural identities; that of their ancestral origins and their new home.
In a time of massive migrations and where cultures are interconnected like never before, digital diasporas can help preserve cultures. For cultures that underwent the downsides of colonialism and cultural assimilation, they can rediscover and enrich their communities and lives by reviving cultural practices such as customs and behaviours.
In their new home countries, this can enrich the cultural tapestry of where they live now through festivals, literature, food and music. These activities in turn, help reduce issues such as racism and fears held by those in diasporas new country. This is a form of cultural exchange and transmission through both digital and physical spaces.
By researching and engaging with digital diaspora communities we can also gain insights into how cultures can be preserved, especially the aesthetic aspects such as art, music and literature in a globalized world. We can also learn how to develop effective public policies to help immigrants thrive in their new homes.
As digital diaspora communities grow and thrive in their new country, it enables online engagement with other cultures in their new home and fosters better engagement with the current culture.