Identity, Media Imaginaries and the Transnational Gaze
Several theoretical perspectives have been key in shaping the study. In its treatment of identity, Unwrapping Identity Online draws on two theoretical frameworks to formulate a practical measure of the impact of digital culture on the self: imagined communities and a narrative theory of identity. Based on this foundational definition, the project focuses on the social production of media imaginaries as a powerful and defining expression of communal and personal identity. This social production is referenced in globalization and postcolonial studies, as well as critical and culture studies, manifesting as a global popular culture. Finally, the choice of the transnational as the main voice in the study stems from a belief that the transnational is an essential prototype in shaping media imaginaries through its everyday practices.
Imagining Communities and Narrating Identity
Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities is a powerful way to locate the individual in relation to larger communal identities. In his path-breaking key work Imagined Communities, Anderson defines any community larger than a village as an imagined community based on the fact that a citizen cannot know everyone else in the community yet can still feel a sense of shared identity. Anderson does not explore types of imagined communities other than nations, but many scholars have since used Anderson’s ideas to describe other types of communities, extensively applying it to those located in the digital sphere (Acquisti and Gross 2006, Baym 1998, boyd 2009, Rheingold 2000) as a way to assess the impact of imagined communities on self-identity. While they don’t mention imagined communities directly, Hollstein and Gubrium suggest in The Self We Live By that group forces are impacting the nature of how the self is created, referencing the increasing ubiquity of self presentation. They argue that the self “is increasingly constructed within, and from, distinctive public circumstances” and that this causes the self to become “deprivatized” (2000, 154). This notion of deprivatization reflects a partial migration of selfidentity from its core within an individual to a set of relationships and affiliations with imagined communities.
In his 2002 paper “Imagined Communities and Self-identity: An Exploratory Quantitative Analysis,” Tim Phillips develops a quantitative model that plumbs first “the plural sources, multi-dimensional nature and divisible character of self-identity” and second “the complex ways in which different layers of self-identity interlock to shape social attitudes” (1). The scope of this project did not allow for an extensive mapping of affiliations onto attitudes as Phillips’ work does for geographical communities in Australia, but I do map out some of the correlations between the depth and scope of individual imagined community networks and use of online tools to support those affiliations in Branded Social Networks.
While Phillips’ application of imagined communities allows us to deconstruct self-identity into a series of affiliations and corresponding attitudes about digital tools, a second theoretical framework for understanding the self—the narrative identity or “storied self”—offers a way to reintegrate the self into a cohesive whole, indicating potential answers for why the use of digital tools differs among participants, and how their use for expressive acts contributes to a sense of personal identity.
To explore the tactics used by individuals to construct self-identity and community in the digital space, I apply the psychological theory of self that integrates Fisher’s narrative personal identity into a postmodern context as Olav Bryant Smith describes in his 2004 philosophical exploration Myths of the self: narrative identity and postmodern metaphysics. Smith argues for an understanding of the self as “an expressive, sign-baring text that can be experienced, interpreted, creatively developed, and enjoyed” (1). Smith sees the world that the expressive self operates in as a network of “experiential, interpretive, creative, and expressive acts,” in which the self best articulates its underlying identity through a series of narratively-constructed communicative acts. In this formulation, membership in imagined communities is achieved through a series of communicative acts that bond the individual to a community and are in fact the very essence of membership. Similarly, Holstein and Gubrium argue that narrative practice as a form of interpretive practice “lies at the heart of self construction” (104).
The expressive acts Smith refers to are extensively explored as aspects of identity and membership by a number of traditions, including cultural and globalization studies, urban studies, and post-colonial and diaspora studies. The tradition of youth culture emerging from the Birmingham School sees these expressive acts as a social practice of culture production among young people, mostly discussed in the context of subcultures (Huq 2006, 47). In this conception, digital spaces like the online networks of branded social networks and photo and video communities act as a playground for cultural production. Research in the US from studies like the Macarthur Foundation funded Digital Youth Project draws on this tradition to explore the connection between informal digital practice and learning (Ito 2005-2008).
In New Social Ties, Deborah Chambers argues that the postmodern crisis of representation has led to new discourses of belonging that are reconfiguring the self: “new sexual communities and friendship networks, new urban movements, and new forms of global communication” (2006, 6). She connects the emergence of these new discourses to the rise of Castells’ network society, arguing for an umbrella “friendship discourse” that has reconfigured associations of “family, community, and place” (114, 154). Chambers uses friendship as the key contemporary social tie, and we will see in Branded Social Networks how BSNs use the discourse of friendship to collapse many types of relationships in a reductive fashion.
In urban studies, the notion of imagined community as expressive practice is applied to the urban space to transform the city from a fixed object into a collective imaginary. Alev Çinar and Thomas Bender formulate this model in Urban Imaginaries, stating that “whether it involves the constitution of national communities or of social realities or the city itself, the constitutive power of the imagination lies in its collective nature.… It is the social production and reproduction of the nation or city that enables the reification and naturalizing of the city or nation that enables its persistence as a thing in space and over time” (2007, xiii). Thus, everyday practice is the basis of establishing a collective identity in case of the city as well as other imagined communities: “A city is produced and sustained, that is, located in such narratives that proliferate through the daily travels, transactions, and interactions of its dwellers, thereby shaping the collective imaginary” (Çinar and Bender 2007, xiv). James Carey also emphasized the role of cultural practices as the key to linking communication to community as the representation of shared beliefs, originating the concept of ritual communication (Carey 1989, 65).
This becomes an even starker reality when examining media practices among transnationals. Geographically-dispersed communities like “Nuevo Hispania” and a growing number of diasporas are identified by their engagement in specific types of cultural and social practices—a form of narrative practice that makes up the bonding and bridging relationships identified as so essential to collective identity. Thus, across nations, cities, social, and religious groups, it is the expression and performance of cultural affiliations that generate collective identity, comprising a global media imaginary. This collective space is not only imagined, but also negotiated (Bailey et al 2007, 3). The social production and reproduction of digitally networked communities within a highly mediated environment is what allows it to persist over time and space, as will be seen in Branded Social Networks, which deals with digital identity practices on branded social networks.
In 1990, Albrow described globalization as “all those processes by which the peoples of the world are incorporated into a single world society, global society” (quoted in Rantenan 2006, 7). In the two decades following, this homogenizing view of globalization has been largely tempered into many other scholars to present a far more complex view of the local and the global (Rantenan 2006, 7-9). The media imaginary is not by nature borderless, but rather, offers the opportunity to breach cultural and physical borders (while constrained by other technical borders) in ways identified by scholars working with hybridity and global culture. The interaction of the global and local has been and will continue to be an embarkation point for scholars focusing on the transnational identity, particularly in the wake of vast migration movements that have reconfigured national identity as well as personal identity. The past two decades have seen broad-based studies on immigrant populations refine the specific issues facing immigrants and deepen the scale of study to acknowledge that different types of immigrants have differing experiences and draw distinct meanings from similar activities (Kasinitz et al 2004).
The postmodern and postcolonial traditions both identify hybridity as an essential aspect of identity in a globalized world. The idea of hybridity runs through much globalization research, particularly in relation to diasporic populations. Hybridity marks a movement away from the uneven relationship of appropriation towards a more equitable relationship in which influences are absorbed and outputted in new configurations. Hybridity discourses have, however, been challenged as mythic constructions that privilege oppressors by offering a way to wipe the slate of historical imbalances in the outputting process (Böse 170-171). On the other hand, hybridity is a particularly potent metaphor for understanding the experiences of second and 1.5 generation immigrants who are forced to contend with more than one dominant cultural influence in forging their own unique cultural practices and identity, as will be seen in several of the ethnographic profiles of Transnationals in the Field.
The idea of a global youth culture is a relatively new one that draws on a rich body of work located within the distinct but heavily intertwined traditions of media studies, culture studies, and globalization studies. Global youth culture scholars examine youth interact with the culture industry, and how postcolonial migration patterns and technological developments have created a global community of young people that is establishing new ways of making meaning in the world and challenging established hegemonic structures.
Global youth culture might sound like a cohesive grouping, but it is characterized by a restless, transformational energy that continuously emerges “in the lifestyles, performances, and sociopolitical practices of contemporary youth” (Kellner and Kahn, 1319). Kellner and Kahn identify two competing traditions that give a rather different connotative flavor to the idea of global youth culture.
The first tradition stems from the Frankfurt School, and indoctrinates the global youth community into the culture industry, seeing it as “actively responding to and identifying with modernized and cosmopolitan Western culture” (Kellner and Kahn, 1319). This leads to a conception of global youth culture that involves young people being incorporated into a Western-based, media-driven industry in a potentially culturally destructive and imperialist manner. In Kellner and Kahn’s second version of global youth culture, the agency of global youth culture lies in its ability to add new voices, cultural forms, and styles to popular culture, and it is framed as a dynamic force for positive change in the world. This model emerges out of a postmodern and postcolonial tradition, which privileges diversity and hybridity in direct response to prior models that focused agency through a subcultural model relying more on class hegemonic structures and ignoring minority struggles.
Both of these models are extremely relevant to transnational communities, and I suggest that rather than the emergence of a global youth culture, we are seeing the rise of a global popular culture that will remain an important frame for the participants even as they age out of the “youth” category. Even as rock and roll has aged and revealed itself as the sound of an era rather than the symbol of youth, our perception of the subcultures of the 70s and 80s has evolved into choices in lifestyle rather than stages in a life cycle. Particularly in the micro-ethnographies of Transnationals in the Field, we will see global popular culture emerge as an important force in shaping the lives of many transnationals.
“After these we have the Street-Finders, or those who, as I said before, literally “pick up”
their living in the public thoroughfares. They are the “pure” pickers, or those who live by
gathering dogs’-dung; the cigar-end finders, or “ hard-ups,” as they are called, who collect
the refuse pieces of smoked cigars from the gutters, and having dried them, sell them as
tobacco to the very poor; the dredgermen or coal-finders; the mud-larks, the bone-grubbers;
and the sewer-hunters” (Mayhew 1861).
This is Henry Mayhew’s description of what will become known as “rag-pickers” in an encyclopedia that attempted to document all the different types of urban poor that populated the streets of London in 1861. The rag-picker functions as the first in a series of urban prototypes and an important lens through which the urban landscape was experienced as London’s slums became notorious the world over. The efforts of scholars like Mayhew and writers like Charles Dickens to tell the rag-picker’s story not only began to define the urban cast of characters, but prompted social action as the affluent elite felt the pressure to “clean up” the slums.
The rag-picker motif was taken up in France by, among others, the poet Charles Baudelaire. German critic Walter Benjamin wrote extensively about Baudelaire’s body of literature dealing with modernity, pointing out how the poet romanticizes the figure of the rag-picker, channeling Baudelaire’s own gaze as “the ragpicker who collects urban detritus only to turn it into poetry” as well as the flâneur who observes and records images of the crowded streets of Paris. The flâneur becomes another mode of looking at the urban landscape, first read as a series of explorations and studies by a proto-ethnographer figure, then deconstructed as a normative gaze that describes and constrains power structures. These two roles, the prototype and the observer have interacted ever since, with the prototype providing the subject matter for the gaze to operate on, and the gaze exploring urban landscapes through prototypes, such as the detective/prostitute.
The gaze is just as critical to the ethnographer-observed relationship as to urban studies or visual culture studies. When looking at global communities, as this study does, it is not only futile but also detrimental to attempt to define the researcher outside of the researched. Traditional audience studies, like traditional ethnographies, have maintained a barrier between the researcher and the researched—the audience—despite evidence that media is simply too intrinsic to everyday life to pretend to such objectivism on the part of the researchers.
However, this is not to assert that media researchers and the individuals being studied will have the same or similar responses to various forms of media or their products. Arjun Appadurai has written about media’s critical role in developing the various imaginaries that define global culture with his “scapes,” effectively countering the argument that media is an inevitably homogenizing force, championing a highly developed model of the hybridity discussed above. Media and audience studies have also gathered copious data that shows individuals from different contexts “read” and respond to global media products in different ways.
Just as modern ethnography no longer begins with the ethnographer, it is time for urban prototypes to apply their own gaze to their environment. Terry Williams proposes the international student scholar as a valuable gaze and chronicler of urban modes of living. Williams writes,
“In one sense the student/scholar is a preeminent figure in relation to city life; in part because they are not just male as most prototypes have been, but female, gay, lesbian, bisexual, Latina, African, African-American, Indian both native American and continental, white, young, old, (or as one Chicago sociologist said later maturity persons), Jewish, Irish, Italian, Croatian, Serbian, Russian, French, as well as super cosmopolites. It should also be noted how the use of so many international student scholars made it possible to capture various social scenes and impressions simultaneously whereas it would have been impossible to do by one person alone” (2009).
It is an argument for a participant-observer paradigm that draws on the international student as a valuable resource with a new gaze to unpack the urban experience.
For the purposes of this study, the transnational gaze is defamiliarized, multiplicitous (hybridized), and can be seen as naturally and inherently subversive to the normative view. Rather than viewing the transnational as a passive figure to be observed, therefore, this study attempts to engage participants in applying their own lenses to their own practices. As we will see, globally-based identities such as the cosmopolitan, immigrant, refugee, or culture broker are relevant and do apply to this population, but in no way limits them or denotes them entirely. Other identities also become important aspects of global identity, such as fan, churchgoer, working professional, and translator/interpreter.
