Xue Wang-Final Reflection Paper

Xue Wang, Final Reflective Essay, CCTP505, Fall 2011
New Diasporas and Cyberspace
In the on-going process of globalization, world travel and various modes of human
relocations (Pendery, 2008), including virtual human resources movements, have readily
made new diasporic forms possible based on new economic, political, technological and
communications conditions, such as neoliberal markets, global human development agendas
and global information flows. Although traditional conceptualizations of diaspora – such as
William Safran’s (1991) well-known model of diasporic population and Stuart Hall’s
“Minimal Selves”(1987) and “New Ethnicities” (1988) – still apply, new diasporic experience
calls for renovated lenses to investigate it by taking account of multilingual global computermediated
communications (CMCs) and the ongoing social reconfigurations of our post-digital
and post-Internet media world 1 . The question of how cyber-communities constructed by new
classes of diasporic people influence their diasporic identity constructions and offline
community building is one problem associated with these new conditions of diaspora. Prof.
Irvine’s lecture in network theory and mediology and Prof. Nelson’s lecture in policies and
cloud computing speak to this problem from a nominalist and an objectivist perspective
respectively.
Mediology emphasizes the mediated and interconnected relationships among
technologies, communicated messages and social beliefs and practices. Technology itself is
culture 2 . It interacts with other social structures, such as language systems and invisible power
hierarchies, to influence individuals’ self-awareness and identity constructions. Hence, the
research question arises from this domain is how people’s diasporic identities are constructed
ethnically, nationally, culturally and technologically through cyber-communities and to what
extent these identities differ from those traditional ones.
Cloud computing and crowdsourcing icon two big web trends in web 3.0, since they
move technology and people resources into the cloud and onto the web (Letts, 2010).
1 Quoted from Prof. Irvine’s lecture slides
2 Quoted from Prof. Irvine’s lecture slides
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Xue Wang, Final Reflective Essay, CCTP505, Fall 2011
Government policies could either hinder or foster these trends. Similarly, the government
policies in diasporic people’s host countries on immigration, intellectual properties and
technical infrastructures will also influence the organizational and collaborative models of
diasporic online communities. Therefore, the research question specific to this area is how the
notions of cloud computing and crowdsourcing and their related policies influence the
operating structures and models of these virtual communities and thus add new dimensions to
these people’s offline diasporic experiences.
In order to research how cyber diasporic communities impacts their participants’
identities and real-life community buildings in new diasporic conditions by seeking answers
to the above two questions, I will examine two virtual communities formed by new Chinese
immigrants in U.S. and Singapore, because these two countries represent the most popular
immigrant destinations for Chinese in the Western and Eastern world respectively. The
majorities of both virtual communities are well-educated overseas Chinese students, scholars
and professionals, who are greatly different from those semi-literal early Chinese emigrants.
With regard to my research methods, I will conduct critical discourse analyses of computermediated
communications within these virtual communities, in-depth face-to-face interviews,
participant observations and broad PEST 3 researches. Among these methods, online critical
discourse analyses, which seek to reveal social and political ideologies and power relations in
online discourses, speak particularly to the mediological approach. While broad PEST
researches, which examines macro-environmental factors affecting the online communities’
activities, echo the influences of cloud computing and crowdsourcing and their related
policies. Except for these two methods, the assumptions associated with the mediology and
cloud computing could all exert an effect on how in-depth interviews and participant
observations are conducted. For example, from a mediological perspective, the analyses of
interview results may focus more on linguistic features of what interviewees said; while from
3 Political, Economic, Social and Technological analysis
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Xue Wang, Final Reflective Essay, CCTP505, Fall 2011
an objectivist cloud computing perspective, more attentions might be paid to what contents
expressed by the interviewees reflect the ideas of cloud computing and mass collaborations
highlighted by crowdsourcing.
Using the mediological approach to research the first question, we may find that
virtual communities by linking traditional diaporic social systems into computer-mediated
milieus might redistribute semiotic resources and reformulate power relationships among
newly diasporic people and between them and their host societies. Using more objective
research methods to investigate the second question from the cloud computing and
crowdsourcing perspectives, we may find that the notion of cloud computing might heavily
influence how these communities are technologically organized, that the idea of
crowdsourcing could lead to the mass collaborative nature of the interactions within these
communities both online and offline, and that some related government policies may forbid
these diasporic people’s compatriots back in their home countries to access or contribute to
these communities’ online services. Although these two approaches offer unique insights into
the problem, they both have their shortcomings. On the one hand, the mediological approach
may risk the researchers’ biases since how to uncover the invisible networks of institutions
and how to interpret the internal logics of various underlying meaning systems are largely
depended on the researchers’ own knowledge systems. To get interviewees’/research subjects’
meta-pragmatic comments, to ask the same question, or to conduct the same analysis in
various ways may be some strategies to reduce researchers’ biases. On the other hand, the
practical technology and policy research may exaggerate the power of cloud computing and
crowdsourcing in shaping human’s behaviors; overlook the complexity of interdependence of
different forces which bring about clouding computing and crowdsourcing; and attribute
inappropriate agencies to these 3 rd -phase internet technologies. These two approaches –
though not comprehensive by themselves – combined could offer additional angles to see how
new diasporic experiences are constructed in cyberspace and, in turn, affect those offline
activities.
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Xue Wang, Final Reflective Essay, CCTP505, Fall 2011
References
Hall, S. (1987). Minimal Selves. In Identity: The Real Me. ICA Document 6 (1987): 44
Hall, S. (1988). New Ethnicities. ICA Documents 7: 27-31
Letts, P. (2010, May 23). Cloud Computing and Crowdsourcing Drive Web 3.0. [Online].
Retrieved November 13, 2011 from the Blur Group website
http://www.blurgroup.com/blog/cloud-computing-and-crowdsourcing-drive-web-3-0
Pendery, D. (2008). Identity Development and Cultural Production in the Chinese Diaspora to
the United States, 1850-2004: New Perspectives. Asian Ethnicity. Vol. 9, No. 3,
October 2008, 201-218.
Safran, W. (1991). Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return. Diaspora
1, no. 1, 83–9.
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