China Abroad: Travels, Subjects, Spaces

13. Our Space? Ethnicity, Diaspora, and Online Life

I The globally dispersed population of Chinese migrants and their descendants has attracted growing attention in discussions of transnational social practices. Chinese networks of capital investment, education acquisition, and familial accumulation are a force for social change in Asia, the Americas, and Europe (Ong and Nonini; Pan, Encyclopaedia). The transmission of the cultural cargoes through which Chinese and other migrants make sense of their lives has taken on new forms with the emergence of the Internet. Manuel Castells’s portrayal of the network society sees “the search for identity” in global flows of information and imagery as “the fundamental source of social meaning” (Castells 3). New communications technologies have radically disrupted relationships between culture, identity, and place, generating complex geographies of affiliation with loyalties often stretched between disparate locations (Barney; Ericksen). Researchers have begun to explore how diasporic populations are using online forums to express changing identities, reconnect with homelands, and reshape social networks across national boundaries (Brouwer; Ignacio; Mitra, “Marginal Voices” and “Creating Immigrant Identities”; Parham; Siapera, “Minority Activism” and “Multiculturalism Online”). In this emerging literature, the everyday cultural practices organizing the global Chinese 13 Our Space? Ethnicity, Diaspora, and Online Life David Parker* * The research on which this chapter is based was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, award (RES-000–22–1642) for the project Britsh Chinese Online identities, with co-researcher Dr. Miri Song, University of Kent at Canterbury. The ESRC’s support and Miri’s work on the project are greatly appreciated. 226 David Parker mediascape through new communications technologies have attracted serious scrutiny (Ong, “Cyberpublics”; Y. Shi; L. Wong; G. Yang, “The Internet and the Rise”). This chapter explores some of the formations of identity emerging through online interaction among second generation Chinese migrant populations. The discussion draws on a survey of Internet use among Chinese young people in Britain conducted through two of the best-known British Chinese websites in late 2006. The preliminary survey findings are discussed here, together with material from some of the thirty-five follow-up interviews conducted with British Chinese young people.1 The chapter addresses four issues. Firstly, online discussion forums have become an important site for expressing complex emotions about being Chinese and living outside of East Asia. Secondly, the enhanced profile of China prompts ambivalent responses. A renewed pride in China can coexist with a distancing from newly arrived undocumented mainland Chinese migrants. Thirdly, experiences of travel to East Asia stimulate new forms of identity self-fashioning incorporating Web 2.0 technologies such as interactive forums, weblogs, and video download sites. This combination of textual dialogue and visual stimuli generates a rapidly evolving informational ecology of spaces for reflection and the testing out of senses of belonging. Fourthly, the chapter discusses the relationship between online and offline interaction, and the potential for long-standing social networks and institutions to emerge. The apparently superficial exchanges in chat rooms, discussion forums, and blogs provide a new context for reflexive racialization and critical reflections on the experience of being a racialized minority (Parker and Song). These online interactions stimulate fresh perspectives about what being Chinese means, and reconfigure the social and political networks of the global Chinese population. II Analyzing online life: Why websites matter Rather than a separate “second life” in a wholly distinct virtual world, online interactions are increasingly embedded in the everyday lives of Internet users, offering a rapidly evolving fusion of fantasy and reality, the frivolous and the serious, that demands extended investigation (Cavanagh; Nunes). The analysis of how ethnic minorities in affluent societies communicate online is a developing field (Lee and Wong; Nakamura). One of the most perceptive analysts of new media stresses their importance in reorganizing the relationships between postcolonial subjectivities and structures of Our Space? Ethnicity, Diaspora, and Online Life 227 domination (Poster). Transnational migrant populations with access to forms of communication having relatively low entry barriers and rapid dissemination potential are implicated in “new configurations of subjectivation” (Poster 38). According to Poster, the digital public sphere “constructs the subject through the specificity of its medium in a way different from oral or written or broadcast models of self constitution” (41). The digitally projected self is more like a broadcaster than an individual speaker at a meeting, but with the difference from established media that the audience can produce as well as consume the messages. In this user-generated mediascape...