Indian Transnationalism Online

New Perspectives on Diaspora

Ajaya Kumar Sahoo, Johannes G. de Kruijf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472419132
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317117391
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Present-day migration takes place in a world characterized by the compression of time and space, with cheaper air travel and the existence of new communication technologies - the internet in particular - making it easier to stay in contact with the places, people and cultures that one has left. This book investigates the online organization of, and exchanges within, the global Indian diaspora. Bringing together research from around the world and presenting studies drawn from the US, Europe and India, it engages with theoretical and methodological debates concerning the shaping and transformation of migrant culture in emerging sites of sociality, and explores issues such as religion, citizenship, nationalism, region and caste as they relate to Indian identity in global, transnational contexts. With detailed empirical case studies showing both how members of the Indian diaspora connect with one other and 'life at home' and how institutions in India maintain such links, Indian Transnationalism Online sheds light on the ways in which information and communication technology functions as both a catalyst and indicator of contemporary socio-cultural change. As such it will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists and studies of cultural studies working in the areas of migration, transnationalism and ethnic studies.

SECTION I:
Identity

Chapter 1

Performing Transnational Identity Online: Women Blogging from Domestic Spaces

Usha Raman and Sumana Kasturi

Introduction

To say the Internet creates space beyond boundaries is perhaps simplistic. True, one can travel through images and text generated from different places on the globe, allow them to converge on your computer screen in tiled windows, skip from one to another, speak to a distant someone in a foreign language and have a text chat with someone else in your own tongue. You can be here and there, this and that, switch professional and personal selves, all without leaving your seat or switching keyboards. But within this unbounded space there are distinct states of being, each divided in ways as clear as fences in the physical world. There are ‘sites’ that you walk within and ‘portals’ you walk through. There are different codes of interaction, (re)presentation and retrieval in each of these demarcated spaces. As we travel through the Internet, we take on different shapes and forms, and we generate our being through the footprints we leave with clicks and moves and in text and image. This ‘second self’ (Turkle 1985) could be a projection of who we are in ‘offline’ or ‘real life’ but it could also be something else, an aspect of personality we create as we find our way through the Net, forge connections and create communities.

Much literature has been generated on the changing meanings and contexts generated by the Internet; the idea of mobility, the nature of self, and the formation and maintenance of community, as well as its meaning and efficacy (Holmes 1998). The Internet has complicated our ideas of location and space; where we are at any given moment is more a function of our cyber-imagination than our physical location. Once we enter the Net we could be anywhere and everywhere at the same time, but in some essential way we operate from an imagined set of coordinates that are very real to us at that moment. Our experience of relationships, with texts, and processes of education and entertainment is divided between the online and offline worlds, as opportunities to engage in multiple contexts (often through multiple aspects of our selves – or our multiple selves) dramatically increase. Negroponte (1995) notes that life in the digital age depends less and less on being at a particular place in time, but others (Whitty and Gavin 2001; Valentine 2006) contend that the experience of specific ‘concrete’ geographies constructed as they are by the particularities of language, and culture, is important to a sense of place. While incidental communication may not require contextualisation within the structure of space and time, sustained interaction necessitates ‘fixing’ the other and the self within boundaries of some nature, to enable interpretation and understanding. The online self therefore does require location, even if this location is digitally constructed, thus temporary and variable.

On the other hand, many groups of people are experiencing increasing physical mobility – migrant workers of various hues, a global upper class that shifts with the season, and others who are constrained or who choose to move from ‘home’ to ‘elsewhere’. These moves do not necessarily result in disconnectedness or isolation for all those in this diasporic space. The Internet allows for a seamless re-rendering of communities online, through a variety of mechanisms ranging from email to voice and video chat to social media and mobile telephony. More and more of these postmodern migrants thus achieve continuity by generating a presence online and building links with other online presences, often others ‘like themselves’.

As globalisation fuels the massive movement of capital and labour across continents, both the meanings and uses of technology and communication, culture and society, are transformed in the process. Traditional binaries of native and diasporic, or home country and host country, are overturned, to be replaced by a hybridity that goes beyond our conventional understandings of migration and assimilation, voluntary or forced. The fluid and dynamic nature of globalisation restructures not just time and space, but society and culture. In this continuously shifting environment, identity becomes an important anchoring mechanism, yet one must note that the traditional markers of identity (language, religion, nationality, ethnicity, etc.) are both heightened and reconfigured in new and transformative ways. Cultural critics such as Appadurai (1996) have noted the need for a redefinition and a renewed understanding of concepts such as diaspora, migration and transnationalism in the context of globalisation.

Within the growing body of research focusing on themes related to cultural and geographical dislocations, the idea of transnationalism has provided a conceptual category that at once goes beyond the national and subsumes the global. This allows the definition of an identity that combines elements of the national/native with ‘international’, an identity that moves with fluid ease across contexts, its parts intact, yet part of a larger seamless global flow of ideas, capital and culture. This has been theorised by scholars from different domains but we situate our analysis within the feminist studies approach following the definition by Kaplan and Grewal (2005). In their view, transnationalism requires an ‘attentiveness to…linkages and travels of forms of representation as they intersect with movements of labour and capital in a multinational world’ (Kaplan and Grewal 2005, p. 357). Transnationalism generates the transnational subject – one who is from and of more than one geographical, political and cultural space, one whose representations become an important element of creating and contributing to the culture of specific transnational groups.

Rajan and Sharma (2006) coin the term ‘new cosmopolitans’ for these transnational subjects, defining them thus:

…people who blur the edges of home and abroad by continuously moving physically, culturally, and socially, and by selectively using globalized forms of travel, communication, languages, and technology to position themselves in motion between at least two homes, sometimes even through dual forms of citizenship, but always in multiple locations (through travel, or through cultural, racial, or linguistic modalities). (p. 2)

The transnational self, then, is a combination of identities that exists in several realms at once; when this self presents itself online, in the space of flows (Castells 1999) that is the Internet, it draws from and projects a kaleidoscope of elements that are differentially integrated and translated by its audience, or those it transacts with. Apart from the complexities produced by reading identity, there is a process through which these elements are differentially selected by a consciously transnational being to construct a visible (or discernible) identity for an imagined (or consciously produced) transnational audience, or members of a co-created transnational community.

The production of self on the Net results from the ability to represent one’s personality in a variety of modes and media – through abstract as well as realistic images, combinations of images and their manipulations, texts of different lengths and metaphorical structures, and through the display of linkages and associations (for instance, hyperlinked elements or ‘friends’ and ‘shares’ on social media platforms such as Facebook and Pinterest). In this chapter, we explore the creation of the transnational self by Indian women through the act of blogging – a popular means of generating and maintaining presence online, as well as a means of creating community.

‘Being’ on the Net

Many of us today are ‘connected’ in some way or other as we use the Internet in our daily lives in multiple ways. By the end of 2011, it was estimated that globally, as many as 2.68 billion people were using the Internet¹ – that is close to a quarter of the world’s population. Just under a half of all users are from the Asian region, even though Internet penetration in this region is less than 26 per cent. North America accounts for around 12 per cent of Internet users worldwide, but this represents more than 78 per cent penetration in the region. The numbers grow almost daily, with more and more people accessing the Net on their mobile phones and other portable devices. Much of this use is instrumental and serves specific purposes: browsing for information or making commercial or professional transactions on the Internet, for instance. The interactive or ‘social’ portion of the Internet – popularly known as Web 2.0 – encourages users to generate and share content, form linkages and build communities. So on the social web, there are the self-constituting activities of engaging online through one or more of the following: creating email circles, joining discussion groups and social network sites, blogging and micro-blogging, sharing photographs and other information, indicating preferences in visible ways on web pages, and so on. Estimates are that worldwide, around 1.5 billion people will be using social networks like Facebook by 2012² – that is, around 60 per cent of all Internet users.

The social web plays an important role beyond information provision and exchange, which has been the key role of the Internet until the advent of social media. Forrester, a market research firm specialising in new media metrics, describes five eras of the social web, the first having begun in 1995 with the ‘era of social relationships’, progressing through eras where social functionality, social colonisation and social context are predominant, to an era of social commerce, realised by 2013, where these communities deliver commercial value.³ In its current stage of evolution, the social web has become an important part of the Internet user’s life, with an increasing percentage of those on the network spending some part of their lives within this social space. Data from social networking monitoring services suggest that this part of the Internet is registering much more growth than any other. Facebook use in India, for instance, grew by more than 20 per cent in 6 months between January and June 2012, with total users numbering over 8.4 million by the end of this period.⁴

Research and thinking about the social web has fallen into two broad camps (Curran 2012). One group contends that the Internet has created opportunities for people to connect in new and unprecedented ways, to go beyond the limitations imposed by physical presence on understanding the ‘other’. The other holds that the Net has made our connections more superficial and transient. Sherry Turkle, for instance, began her work on online behaviour in the 1990s by hailing the Internet as holding promise for more ‘emancipated sensibilities’ (Turkle 1995). But in her more recent work, she notes that spending time on the Internet actually precludes us from developing richer, more fulfilling relationships offline (Turkle 2011). The debate as to whether the Internet – and more specifically, Web 2.0 – has affected the quality of offline relationships, and whether it is a benign or malign influence on society, is beyond the scope of this chapter. What we do accept is that the Internet does have a bearing on the way we live our lives, and the time we spend interacting with people and expressing ourselves online is important in and of itself. It is an important self-constituting space; it may play either a complementary or an additive (and in some instances even substitutive) role in how we deal with ourselves and with our social worlds.

Through the words, pictures and electronic thumbprints we leave as we leaf through others’ sites, we build a ‘literature of the self’. The status messages we post, the notes we write on social networks, the pictures and videos we post/upload to the ‘Net’, the blogs we maintain, and the Twitter feeds we write and follow all contribute to this. The ‘narrative bits’ or ‘narbs’ (Mitra 2010) that users generate on these platforms together serve to build a specific identity that then is put to service in creating a presence online and participating in communities online. The online self, in Mitra’s words, is a ‘discursive presence’, constructed through the accumulation of these narbs over time.

Women are an important presence in the social web, more so than on the Internet in general, which is still dominated by men. A Pew Internet Survey in the United States estimated as early as 2005 that women used the Internet more for social purposes than did men, with women being more ‘enthusiastic online communicators’ than men (Pew Internet Research 2005). Women’s participation in online forums, particularly in non-Western societies, has been linked with the growth of the women’s movement in these regions (Curran 2012), particularly because online spaces provided a less ‘visible’ and therefore more ‘safe’ space from which to articulate ideas that may be labelled radical or progressive. By the same token, these spaces were also seen as more patriarchal, a sense probably compounded by the fact that fewer women read online content. Curran also notes (citing a study by Youna Kim 2011) that the Web offered women in conservative societies a space in which to imagine a different world, a ‘utopian self-imagining’ that allowed them to ‘remake themselves in a Western context by placing themselves at the centre of their biography’ (Kim 2011, quoted in Curran 2012). A study by Richard Joiner at Bath University found that women Internet users in the UK spent more time on social networking and ‘communication’ than did men (Joiner et al. 2012). Market surveys in India too have found that women tend to use the Web more for ‘communication’ than ‘fact finding’, and while there are more Indian men than women accessing the Internet overall, women are bigger users of social networking sites (43 per cent of web pages visited by women are social networking sites, compared to just 32 per cent for men).⁵

Given that women appear to spend more time online engaging in communicative functions – interacting with others, writing about their own lives, looking for support from other women or other groups – it would be logical to expect that they would also create more conscious representations of themselves online, or, to use Mitra’s terminology, more consciously create ‘discursive selves’. Add to this the transnational identity: women who live in adoptive homelands and straddle two and sometimes more worlds. Their relationships and their activities are a complex of two or more cultures; they may integrate into their sense of self their ethnic roots and the cultural trappings and values of their adoptive social space. Their presence in a migrant geography often necessitates adaptation of domestic routines that incorporate elements of their homeland and the new country. For those who see themselves as ‘international’ or ‘global’ citizens, there is a conscious melding of various external and internal cultural characteristics – cuisine, fashion, leisure, parenting styles, etc. We contend that these find expression in communicative acts online, in their participation in social forums online, in the ‘narbs’ that they consciously and unconsciously leave behind in their online worlds.

Our interest is in those activities Indian women in the diaspora engage in online that directly relate to the construction and maintenance of identity. The next section discusses one of the many methods by which this discursive self may be constructed online – through blogging.

The Blog: Generating a Net-presence

A weblog, or blog for short, is at its most basic, an online journal that allows users to write and ‘post’ content in an easy manner. Early blogs required users to have knowledge of HTML and other web design and coding skills in order to build and maintain one. It was only in 1998–1999 that the technology for non-skilled users to build blogs was developed. Blog-hosting sites, Blogger and Live Journal, were launched around this time and allowed anyone who had basic email and word processing skills to start and run a blog. The blog host did the rest. Soon after, WordPress and other similar blog-hosting companies were begun, and there has been no looking back since then.

Technorati, a company that tracks Internet and blog use, has published an annual State of the Blogosphere report since 2004. As of December 2011 there were an estimated 178 million blogs on the Internet.⁶ Technorati’s 2011 report showed, among other things, that women comprise nearly half of all bloggers surveyed.⁷

The tremendous growth in the number of blogs indicates that it is a popular medium for both men and women. Accordingly, the ‘blogosphere’, as this is known, is rapidly gaining more importance in both public life and personal lives. Bloggers commenting on news and politics have come to wield increasing clout in the political process in the US (Drezner and Farrell 2004).

Since then, blogs repre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Introduction: Migrant Transnationalism and the Internet
• SECTION I: IDENTITY
• SECTION II: POWER
• Conclusion: The Diasporic Web: Reflexive Dialogue and Agentive Awareness
• Index