Virtual Homelands: Indian Immigrants and Online Cultures in the United States

Conclusion: Home Matters in the Age of Networks

Conclusion Home Matters in the Age of Networks What is the most fitting way to conclude a book about immigrant belonging and the politics of home online? Rather than embracing the upbeat rhetoric of homecomings or remaking home—in the sense of creating a new, stable location in place of the old—I am emphasizing a deconstructive and critical position. As Rob Shields reminds us, “the Web is not visible from the point of one single webpage. There is no one page at which it all comes together.”1 Although Shields is speaking more generally against totalizing myths of the Web’s technologies, the literal and metaphorical insights of his remarks bear particular significance in the context of our effort to interweave the idea of the homepage with that of home. The online media examined in this book are complex cultural sites where thetechnological,social,andpoliticaldynamicsshapingtheearlytwenty-firstcenturyworldconverge .Ahighlydynamicandincreasinglyimportantaspectof thatworldisimmigration:Themovementofpeoplefromoneplacetoanother continuestobeoneofthedefiningfeaturesofmodernlife.Andnowmorethan ever,weunderstandimmigrationthroughmedia,particularlyonlinemedia.As a result, our physical mobility is increasingly played out via the tools of technological mobility. Inturn,theequationsbetweenthephysicalandthevirtual,thenationaland the transnational, the private household and the public homeland, are being reformulated in myriad ways as immigrants use online media to make sense 144 conclusion of their place in the world. Against such a backdrop, this study has attempted to reinvigorate the question of what home means by studying homepages and by considering how online media targeting specific segments of the Indian immigrant community bring various dimensions of belonging, both old and new,tothefore.Yet,notwithstandingthecentralityofhometoitsinvestigation, this study does not offer a totalizing perspective on the contemporary Indian immigrant home space. Instead, it has tried to emphasize the need to take into consideration multiple realities or ontologies of conceptualizing, engaging, and engendering belonging. The notion of a “global Web” is tantalizing but is a myth. It is beguiling to think of the Internet as “a landscape before us awaiting our instructions” and theWebasapreexisting,singularnetworkofsites,fromwhichwecansummon exactlytheindividualpagesanddataweneedontoourcomputerscreens.2 But suchafantasydoesusadisservice.Shieldsarguesthatwhenwegivewebsitesa static and “singular integrity,” we feed into that myth of a total, coherent, and, most importantly, preconstituted online space. To deconstruct websites and their homepages, then, requires us to shift our focus from the tempting idea of a stable page to that of a dynamic hyperlink. The link has a “double function , as a sign that is a seamless part of a page or text and as an indexical sign that flags and indicates.”3 In Shields’s vision, then, it is the link, rather than the page, that is the heart of the Web, reminding us of the mobility and movement inherent in online media. Virtual Homelands has explored that mobility a bit furtherforwhatitindexes,signals,andpointstointermsofonlinemedia’srole in reconfiguring home, and our epistemological frames of engagement with it. This study, while about migration and movement in multiple senses, is not anuncriticalcelebrationofimmigrantsensibilities,practices,orspaces.Rather, much in the spirit of Shields’s rhetorical query—“What is the ontology of the mouse click?”—this study has attempted to ask and, to an extent, has offered some avenues for thinking about a related question: Is there an ontology of the Indian immigrant homepage? Of course, rhetorical or otherwise, we cannot claim to pose or seek to arrive at an understanding of the above question without related queries, like “Is there an ontology of the homepage?” and “Is there an ontology of the immigrant home?” Pertinent to this framing is the overwhelmingattentionthathasbeengiventomobilityanddeterritorialization inthetwenty-firstcentury.DavidMorleycallsattentiontosimilarthemeswhen he writes in Home Territories that while “images abound of our supposedly deterritorialized culture of ‘homelessness’: images of exile, diaspora, time-space compression, migrancy and ‘nomadology,’ the concept of home often remains as the uninterrogated anchor or alter ego of all this hyper-mobility.”4 145 Home Matters in the Age of Networks Onemightsaythatcritiquingthediscursiveconstructionofmetanarratives about the technological, institutional, and cultural domains of homepages, while essential for the analysis of websites, is less necessary for the wide range of social media, mobile media, and online media that have emerged in the last decade or so. While it is the case that concerns generated about social media, peer-to-peer networks, remix cultures, and Web 2.0 user-generated practices havesignificantlydentedthehyperboleandutopiannarrativesassociatedwith the Web’s origins, histories, and past and present trajectories, it is my view that if anything, the ontology of online media in the present moment requires a carefulretracingofthehistorytocontextualizehownormativeunderstandings of the Web were constituted and in turn are constitutive of our contemporary ideas about mediated mobility and migration. Iwouldpointtothereemergenceofthesekeythemesinthreerecentbooks, GerardGogginandMarkMcLelland’sInternationalizingInternetStudies(2008), Niels...