Forum: New Media & Society

This article explores the way in which a specific immigrant group – Indians outside India – utilizes the dwelling space offered by the synthesis of real spaces and virtual spaces to create a unique immigrant identity. The argument is offered that the combination of the real and the virtual produces a cybernetic space where the immigrant identity can thrive without being controlled within the increasing anti-immigrant sentiments of the real world. Using illustrations from internet discourse it is demonstrated that cybernetic space offers a ‘safe’ alternative living space where the marginalized immigrant can find a voice.

This article critically examines the politics of home, homeland and homepage on what it calls the ‘Indian-American’ web. It demonstrates how the Indian-American web emerged during the 1990s by targeting non-resident Indians (NRIs) and persons of Indian origin (PIOs) in the United States. NRI refers to an Indian citizen who resides outside India, while PIO refers to a foreign citizen who claims an ‘Indian’ origin. The central argument of the article is that the web disrupts hegemonic notions of NRI and PIO identities by articulating diverse imaginations of ‘home’, such as household, homeland and homepage, to the cultural, economic and political discourses of nation, family and community. In the process, the web foregrounds the contestations over ‘old’ and ‘new’ identities within the NRI and PIO communities in the United States.

Motivated by new theoretical perspectives that emphasize communication technology as a symbolic tool and physical extension of the human body and persona (Apparatgeist theory and Machines That Become Us), this article explores how fashion, as a symbolic form of communication, is related to self-reports of mobile phone behaviors across diverse cultures. A survey of college students in the United States and Japan was conducted to demonstrate empirically the relationship between fashion attentiveness and the acquisition, use, and replacement of the mobile phone. The results suggested that young people use the mobile phone as a way of expressing their sense of self and perceive others through a ‘fashion’ lens. Hence it may be useful to investigate further how fashion considerations could guide both the rapidly growing area of mobile phone behavior, as well as human communication behavior more generally.

In its current state, the internet may be understood as a dynamic, shifting network of computers and other electronic signal receptors transmitting and/or receiving bits of digital information. Popular conceptions of the internet, however, depict this exchange of information as delimiting virtual space. Rather than recognizing the networks formed through online information exchange, the prevailing images of the internet and world wide web locate individuals, not to mention data, within spatial coordinates. Some websites use networking and exchange to describe how they disseminate data; Tamil Eelam online provides an example where spatial metaphors are eschewed and network figures highlighted. Virtual Tamil Eelam is not focused on geopolitical sites but rather on people in dispersion, as well as the spread of information regarding its history and virtual nation, in order to create recognition for state and national sovereignty.

This article analyzes the online representations of the identity politics discourse of the elite Hindu nationalist community and the subaltern Dalit community. The assumptions underlying assertions about Hindu and Dalit identity on select Hindu nationalist and Dalit websites are remarkably similar despite deep ideological differences between the two. Developments in the Indian technological and cultural fields in the 1990s have enabled the emergence of a new mode of representing collective identity (‘global primordiality’), which explains the resemblance between online Hindu nationalist and online Dalit discourse. The logic of global primordiality typically finds expression in cyberspace, where the realms of technology and culture intersect. The representational framework of global primordiality is shaped primarily by Hindu nationalists who also occupy a privileged position as elites in the Indian technological field. In its participation in cyberspace, Dalit discourse may tend to mirror this dominant mode of online representation, even as it remains opposed to Hindu nationalism.

This study approached online games as an innovation and new medium with both Uses and Gratifications Perspective and Diffusion of Innovation Theory as theoretical frames. Based on a survey sample of Korean college students, this study investigated the differences in game adoption (1) between adopters (including continuers and discontinuers) and nonadopters (including potentials and resistors), (2) between continuers and discontinuers, and (3) between potentials and resistors of online games. Multiple logistic regression analyses showed that demographic profiles and innovativeness were strong predictive constructs for predicting online game adoption.

In the popular imagination skinhead identity has come to be inextricably connected to a white-racist identity. This article explores this tenet through an ethnographic exploration of an online skinhead newsgroup, a milieu where racial markings are seemingly absent. The empirical findings expose that ‘racism’ is read ambivalently by the newsgroup’s skinheads. ‘Racism’ is not viewed as a constituting component of skinhead identity; however, there is widespread commitment to a ‘white identity’. This article concentrates on the processes which give rise to a digitalized (white) skinhead identity, (re)established online in and through textual performances. Narratives of whiteness articulated through the node of skinness, reveal the salience of racial bodies in the virtual world. However, the imagined relationship between skinheads and racism is not straightforward. The skinheads of this research do not enact an explicit discriminatory racism, but rather they imagine whiteness as a performative condition of skinness, a notion that necessitates a figurative (and literal) aggressive relation to ‘otherness’.