Transnationals in the Field

I collected ethnographic data from recent transplants to New York, attempting to draw out themes that unpack aspects of how narratives, the self, and the collective interact in the context of globalization, especially with respect to ideas of emerging techno-social practice, hybridity, cosmopolitanism, and imagination. By not limiting the study to immigrants who expect to forge new lives in the US, I tried to maintain a focus on transnational-based networks and services and present a broad range of cross-cultural dynamics in participant identities.

The First Class

From my years of teaching English language learners in France and San Francisco, I knew I wasn’t by nature the most organized teacher. In fact, I often found that when I developed a lesson plan, halfway through the class period, the lesson was unrecognizable from the original carefully structured plan. But this was in small classrooms of eight to 12 students, where if a conversation veered from the topic at hand, it was fairly manageable to keep everyone engaged and return to the schedule as needed.

I knew that I was to expect closer to 30 students in this class, which would require more structure and classroom management than I was used to. I was also ready for a multilingual experience, which would be quite different from the classrooms I knew in France but which I was familiar with from teaching at a private language institute in San Francisco. Multilingual classrooms tend to remain more fully immersive, as students can’t lapse into their native tongue when challenged – there is no guarantee that others will understand them any better. But students also often have difficulty understanding each other’s accents, and have very different areas of weakness they need to work on in class.

Even knowing all of this, the first class was a more chaotic experience than I had anticipated. The topic of the class was evidently a popular one; the classroom was not large enough to accommodate all the interested members. Students continued to pop their heads in during the lesson to see if there were empty seats, and a few students left to meet conversation partners or for other appointments throughout the period. I spent about twenty minutes going through all the students and writing down their names and learning to pronounce them. It was an exercise I was to regret, as I found the following week that the class was full of new students. The class is “open,” which means anyone can attend. As a result, the population in attendance changes dramatically from week to week.

I distributed a handout that asked students to fill out a few details about their national and linguistic background as well as media use. The language levels in the class spanned a wide range, as did the media literacy levels. The class included mostly Japanese, Taiwanese, Koreans, and a smattering of Europeans. There were two Brazilian journalists and a university professor from Spain who were particularly strong and confident English speakers. There were also three middle-aged refugees from Burma who were largely quiet. All together, there were 13 countries represented among the 25 students who turned in the questionnaires I distributed to them. Of the 19 students who indicated their language background, over 40% (8) spoke more than two language excluding English. The Center also attracts mostly recently arrived newcomers to the US. In class that day, the average length of time spent in the US was just over four months, and nearly two-thirds had only been in the country for less than three months. I also asked students to rank different forms of media by frequency of use.

Unsurprisingly, the Internet was the highest ranked type of media among the students, making it into all but one’s top three. The remaining student didn’t use it at all. I was able to introduce new vocabulary through a lesson that focused on exploring students’ interest in, and usage of, different types of media. I found that the class knew types of media, and some technical terms like wi-fi, but not more specific and less encountered vocabulary like ISP (Internet Service Provider).

After class, I went to the snack room to hang out, hoping some students would take me up on my invitation to chat after class. One student had come up to me right after to express interest and make an appointment, which I happily made for the following week. Yoichi was a student at Columbia University as well as a member of the Center, so we made an appointment for after his morning class at Columbia. No other student approached me, but I was able to observe the room generally, which was full of eight-person round tables and had a small window station where you could purchase small doses of coffee and tea in Styrofoam cups or Ramen noodles. There was plenty of animated conversation taking place in the room, but little to no media use. It was too loud to talk on the phone, and being on a computer was not the point either—the room was intended for casual conversation, and that is what the members primarily came for, to strengthen their oral language skills.

I soon realized that media use was not going to be a dominant aspect of the Center. There are four computer terminals, but they often go unused. There is also wireless access, but students usually use their mobile phones and translators at the school. Because the main focus of the Center is on strengthening member’s language skills and introduction to American culture, students keep their media use for times when they are not at the Center, using their time on site to be as productive as possible in conversation and listening practice. Members go into the hallway with the elevators to make phone calls, and I’ve only seen a little texting activity, so phone use is not encouraged (or is possibly prohibited) inside the Center. As a result, I decided to focus more on recruiting students to interview in informal, wide-ranging conversations. Following, I present six interesting cases of how media practices are shaping the lives of several students.

Micro-Ethnographies

Yoichi: Embedding Emotion in Everyday Practice

Yoichi is a very animated, constantly smiling young man from Japan. He’s been in New York for three months at the behest of his job, living in Astoria in Queens. In that time, Yoichi has been taking classes in Computer Science at Columbia University while also coming to the Center for two structured classes a week as well as other open classes. He works for the Japanese government as a Patent Examiner where he reviews new patent applications and researches the technologies and databases of other patent application around the world to confirm that there are no other patents that already cover the technology in the application. When I asked him how he uses media, he stated that he didn’t use it for anything except for work, conducting online research for these patent applications. I was a little disappointed, I had expected someone who was so interested in the topic to be more active online or on mobile platforms.

But as I probed his Internet uses, he added that in addition to the professional research he also used Skype for video chat. That seemed to be the total sum for the first half hour of our conversation, with email and IM included when video chat or phone calls weren’t possible. But as we talked further, I gradually realized that his use was more widespread than he first suggested. He seemed to realize this as well, interrupting himself to mention that his use included buying tickets for events (such as baseball games or musicals) and travel, both here and in Japan. He also mentioned that his online activities had increased since coming to New York, now including making restaurant reservations. During our conversation, he not only mentioned many more uses, but he also pulled out several electronic devices he hadn’t first realized were part of his media use, including a netbook, a mobile phone, a digital camera, a Japanese to English translator, and a Nintendo DS as well as a Sony PSP, both handheld gaming consoles. At his apartment, he added, he has an aging Toshiba laptop which is so slow he barely uses it. After he arrived in New York, he bought the netbook to replace it, as US netbooks are almost half the cost of the ones in Japan. He also uses the Sony PSP as a replacement for the laptop, using it to read the news or check email.

After joining the Center, Yoichi had met a Japanese girl who became his girlfriend, and now that she had returned to Japan, he has settled into a routine of hour-long nightly video chats with her using Skype. He uses Skype with friends and family too. He never mentioned a father, but he speaks twice a month with his mother and younger brother and weekly with several friends. He uses video chat with them all, including those who don’t have video sending capacity — he doesn’t have any issue with the imbalance of not being able to see the person he is speaking to while they can see him. For Yoichi, face-to-face communication is important not only to send and pick up non-verbal cues but also to reassure his friends and family that he is doing well so far away from home.

Another surprising moment in our conversation occurred when Yoichi suddenly announced, “I have a blog!” He pulled his netbook out of his messenger bag and typed in the address of his blog, showing me a series of posts in Japanese kanji against a blue backdrop and peppered with cheery pictures of himself at various famous landmarks in New York and beyond. He had made outings to Boston and the nearby parks in Astoria where he goes regularly to hang out. Yoichi never had a blog in Japan, saying that he had never felt the need to have one. If he had started one, he added, chances are he would have tapered off and abandoned it because there was no “end” in sight. Yoichi is in the US for one year, and that defined period makes it possible for him to see the blog as a project with a beginning and an end, one which has replaced his daily gaming activities for the time being. The blog serves as a diary of his experience, but more importantly to Yoichi, as a richer way to share his trip experience with friends and family on an ongoing basis in addition to the video chats.

Through the regular posts, Yoichi maintains contact with his friends and family, posting plenty of pictures of himself smiling and waving, which he describes as a way to demonstrate that he is having a good trip and fun experiences here, so that his friends and family won’t worry about him. It’s also a centralized and efficient place to share pictures and thoughts he has about his experiences in the US, in effect, a one-person broadcast tool. He also gets regular feedback from his readers, both as comments and emails. He mentioned that his boss, who he is very close to and who financed the trip and education, responds to every post but only via email. Yoichi chuckled and added that his boss was too shy to comment publicly on the blog.

The blog is in effect the story of his adventure, his year in America. It is storytelling with a purpose; to let his network in Japan know that he is enjoying his trip and making use of this once in a lifetime opportunity. This is not the first time I heard this expressed as an important aspect of taking and sharing photographs—Tina, a 22-year-old woman from China who is a student at NYU, expressed the same sentiment in relation to her Flickr account. Her photostream was a way for her to show her friends and family how much she was enjoying her experience studying abroad. The expression of enjoyment was important to show her family that the financial investment was worthwhile, and to keep her grandmother from worrying about her.

Gratitude and reassurance are themes that run through both Yoichi and Tina’s descriptions of why they take and share photos. Both of them take and share pictures of themselves smiling directly at the camera in front of famous landmarks that are easily recognizable the world over, in what can be thought of as the classic tourist photo. In this way, the tourist photo becomes an important symbol of reassurance, a self-conscious performance of happiness, excitement, and the act of enjoyment that is directed towards their networks. It is also an acknowledgement that they are doing something special, taking advantage of opportunities that will not come often in life.

Yoichi’s media habits are so embedded in his daily life that he doesn’t think twice about them. He first described his use as very low, dismissing his Internet use as merely for work. And his adoption of Skype was not out of excitement for a new technology, but rather, to create a closer connection with his friends and family than a regular telephone conversation or email or IM conversation could achieve. His use of the Internet for buying tickets and making reservations is again out of utility and convenience rather than any self-conscious adoption of technology for the sake of technology. Yoichi described his culture’s habits in A very similar way, denying that Japan was particularly advanced in their use of technology or media when I suggested it.

Anne Allison, who investigates Japan’s relationship to technology through the lens of its dominance in the entertainment market in Millennial Monsters, writes about a spirit of techno-animism that permeates the creative and commercial practices of the nation. Allison writes that technology in Japan is “a key component to the way life of all kinds is constituted;” so deeply embedded in its everyday practices that it can “map the desire to find meaning, connection, and intimacy in everyday life onto commodified apparatuses” (2006, 13). Yoichi does not seem to possess the emotional attachment to his devices that Allison describes. He uses technology as a means to an end, whether that end is communication, convenience, or information gathering.

But the pervasive spirit of techno-animism provides a frame for understanding how Yoichi could be so dismissive of his own technology practices, and fail to see Japan’s position at the forefront of technology use. For Yoichi, his techno-social practices are so naturalized and a part of mundane life, that he simply doesn’t see them as unusual or even that advanced, despite regular evidence that Japan is one of the most connected cultures in the world and earliest to adopt most technologies. Similarly, he didn’t notice how many devices he carries with him regularly because these technological apparatuses are the stuff of everyday life, as mundane as a teakettle.

Majid: Hybrid Identity as Performance

I first noticed Majid in class when he mentioned that he was from France. Because I spent a year in Paris and speak French reasonably well, I have a tendency to gravitate towards the French speakers in class, whether from France or, just as often, from Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, or any number of Francophone countries—a leaning I have had to curb in class and in pursuing interview subjects. Majid had a serious, even stern gaze in class that I found somewhat intimidating, but I reminded myself that language learners often look solemn in class as they try to parse the words and phrases unfamiliar to them. Moving from lower level classes to more advanced classes, it is often astounding to mark the leap in levels of facial animation and expression among students.

I had invited all the students to approach me if they were interested in sitting down to chat as language practice or as part of my research. After about four weeks, Majid approached me after a lesson to ask about meeting for a chat. At this point, I knew very little about him, but his sense of fashion—oversized hoodies emblazoned with stylized patterns, large t-shirts, slicked back hair and sneakers—reminded me of the young people I encountered in the banlieue outside of Paris, an area predominantly inhabited by French minorities. For our meeting, I chose the Lower East Side, thinking that this vibrant neighborhood with its mix of crowds would perhaps appeal to him.

The banlieue has been a source of serious civil unrest, and a focus for conservative and xenophobic fears of “Islamization” diluting the traditional influences in the country and culture. Long before extremism took Islam for its main foe, the area was already a focus for a more generalized xenophobia as portrayed in the film La Haine (1995). Majid’s hometown is Flers, a small town in Normandy near the English Channel, but his face lit up when I mentioned La Haine, and he volunteered that it was a film that youth everywhere could identify with.

Majid is a young man of 22 with what he calls a “Latin face.” His mother emigrated to France from Algeria when she was 22, and his father is originally from Spain. He spoke at length about the conflict this has raised for him. For Majid, others’ visual perceptions of him are closely linked to his culturally plural identity. And these perceptions are more often than not wrong. In France, he’s used to being identified as “the Algerian guy” or “the Spanish guy.” Meanwhile, navigating the streets of New York, he became accustomed to being hailed in Spanish, by Puerto Ricans especially he mentioned. Majid identifies strongly with Spanish cultural products, like the flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla and is a quietly practicing Muslim.

His hybrid identity has clearly been a source of frustration for Majid as well as the overriding lens through which he makes sense of the world. During our second interview, when I asked him directly whether he identified himself as a French citizen, he said it was “complicated” and began to talk about his cultural influences. When describing his cultural background, his gesticulations as he spoke placed his Algerian, Spanish and French cultural backgrounds in discrete places, indicating the difficulty he’s faced in trying to consolidate these disparate influences into one unified identity. In the same interview, he expressed frustration with being labeled and categorized as Algerian or Spanish, saying, “I’m French.” The feelings of alienation and fragmentation created by this disconnect between external perception and self-identification is a natural and common characteristic of second generation immigrants and often leads them to join diasporic communities.

Writing about hybrid identities and diasporas in Digital Diasporas, Jennifer Brinkerhoff asserts that hybrid identity is the core of diasporic participation, an identity which emerges from “give and take among perceived peer groups from the host society, one’s diaspora, and the homeland” (2009, 33). In this model of identity as social practice, “cultural beliefs and practices, the fodder for identity, are tools for adaptation” helping individuals move “from the physical reality of dispersal into the psychosocial reality of diaspora” (33, 32). Touching specifically on young diasporans, Brinkerhoff draws from Stuart Hall and Steven Vertovec to claim that young people assert greater personal choice over which aspects of cultural practices and artifacts they wish to incorporate into their own identities (36). Finally, she adds that collective identity can create a “sense of belonging” that can keep crises of identity at bay (38).

Majid’s media practices reflect many of these aspects of diasporic identity as cultural practice with a particular focus on performative self-identity. Like many diasporic youth, he uses culturally-specific and creative products as a means of enacting his identity everyday. For Majid, it is necessary, when people are constantly making assumptions about him based on his appearance, to assert his Spanish and Muslim identity in an ongoing fashion to be able to create a more holistic sense of self. Majid described his now-abandoned blog from his teenage years (where he posted pictures of the part of Spain his family is from along with other Spanish cultural artifacts) as a way to connect himself with and express his pride in his Spanish heritage. When I asked him why he no longer kept it up, Majid laughed and dismissed it as a youthful endeavor. He no longer needed to display his affiliation with Spanish culture to others publicly, he added. In his description of his motive for keeping the blog, it becomes clear that for Majid, it functioned as a tool of performative identity definition.

As we continued to talk about his media practices, Majid mentioned that most of his communication was now done through Facebook. He uses Facebook’s internal IM function to stay in touch with friends and family, but also posts pictures and links to songs and other meaningful cultural artifacts, continuing the work of his blog but directed towards a smaller, more intimate community. Majid laughed as he described his use, becoming aware of how similar his current Facebook practice sounds to his former blog practice. But there is a distinct shift in his identity practice, as he no longer directs it to the world at large but instead to his friends and family. The type of pictures he posts are more focused on significant or amusing events in his life rather than the beautiful landscapes of Spain. His practice is now about describing his daily life rather than communicating a yearning for a homeland to affiliate himself with.

This does not mean that Majid has retired or renounced his love of Spain or Spanish culture, however. Majid’s dream is to move to Gibralter, the British territory attached to the southern border of Spain after he trains to be a croupier, or dealer in a casino. He fell in love with the area after a recent visit and sees it as a perfect location to settle down, combining as it does a diverse population, proximity to Spain, and the advantageous combination of the relatively low cost of living of Spain with a British salary. Majid’s hybrid identity urges him to seek an equally diverse place to live so that he can feel at ease in his surroundings, one which combines his love for his Spanish heritage with an English speaking setting, which he seems to find less constraining than the French culture.

The other dominant aspects of Majid’s media practice involve consuming music and movies and staying informed with news and current events. In a typical day, Majid will perhaps listen to some music on YouTube and watch the news for about an hour. While he is in the US, he also tunes in to the radio, primarily Christian channels so that he can listen to English speakers. His move to the US has also impacted his reliance on French media sources for news. Majid said that before he came to New York, he thought all Americans “were very fat,” rude, and racist. He added that his assumptions were formed on the basis of French TV and Internet news coverage of the US, which would highlight less attractive aspects of US culture, such as the Ku Klux Klan. Majid added that this negative bias was not limited to the US, but that he found a similarly negative attitude towards Muslims in the French media. Majid now prefers to get his news from a variety of sources.

Fausto: Physical Community Trumps Virtual

Fausto arrived in the US from the Dominican Republic three months ago, leaving behind a large family of brothers and sisters, a mother he is very close to, and a wife from whom he is separated. Although he has no family members in the country, before he landed, Fausto had already been referred to a neighborhood in the Bronx to live in, as it has a sizeable population of Dominicans in residence. When I asked him about his goals in the US, Fausto had a very defined plan: to learn English, save some money, and return to the Domican Republic to start a call center, a rapidly growing industry in the Domican Republic at the moment.

As we continued to talk about his life here, however, Fausto began to interpolate comments that suggested that were he to find a good job, he would be willing to establish a new life here. He also described a lifestyle that was strongly suggestive of trying to remain undocumented, with a series of restaurant jobs and a shared apartment with several other men from the Dominican Republic. He also hinted at the fact that it would be difficult for him to take college classes and get jobs. I asked him directly, “Are you here with a valid visa? Are you here legally?” Fausto stared at me for a moment, seemingly in shock that I asked the question so baldly. Then we both chuckled, and I added, “You don’t have to answer that question. I was just curious.” He did not answer the question. We moved on to discussing his media habits.

Fausto is rarely online, and uses the Internet mostly to read news articles about the Dominican Republic and read the occasional email. He doesn’t use any chat clients, video or text. He uses a mobile phone to talk to his friends and family in the Dominican Republic and does not use any online social networks. When I asked how he was able to establish himself, get an apartment, and find the Center, his answer to all was his church. Even before arriving here, Fausto knew which church he would attend, as he is deeply religious. The church forms the center of his life here. He attends services regularly during the week and on weekends, and he meets most of his contacts through his participation.

For Fausto, Internet research is for the most part not necessary as he already has a ready resource of valuable information from his church community. Media and technology for Fausto is primarily an entry point to a better life. Fausto aspires to establish a secure base of wealth and respect as a business owner, and call centers are a hot industry in the Dominican Republic. But beyond envisioning this future, Fausto sees little value in learning more about and using other technologies.

Fausto has one other immediate objective, which is to marry again and start a family, another goal he hopes to achieve through his church community. He spoke eloquently and at length about family, stating, “family is the center of life.” Fausto has three essential communities in his life: his family, his church, and his country. He is not interested in expanding to incorporate other communities into his sphere, and is able to maintain these ties with a very focused use of mobile and Internet tools.

Mihaela: Evolving Media Practices for an Identity Shift

I met Mihaela at the Center when she needed to charge her laptop, and the table I was sitting at with another student in the snack room was the only one within reach of a power outlet. A Romanian academic working in museum studies, Mihaela’s focus is on medieval history and she hopes to find a paid position at a museum in New York. After our conversation, she started attending class regularly, and her animated demeanour and keen intellect brought a jolt of energy to our class discussions. Mihaela only recently left
Romania to emigrate to the United States, joining her new husband in Brooklyn. She is now in her fourth month in the United States.

Mihaela had never considered moving to the US until she met her husband two years earlier, a Jewish Brooklynite who was on a visit to his birthplace in Romania. For Mihaela, moving to the US presented “our only opportunity to really live together for our life.” Since her move, Mihaela finds that media has become an even more essential part of her life, and she has developed a set of media practices that maintain ties to her old life in Romania while building her new identity in the US.

Mihaela recognizes that she is at a major turning point in her life where she must transform her media habits to accommodate her new life. As such, Mihaela’s activities reflect an orientation in two major directions, towards the past and into the future. Towards the past lies Mihaela’s pledge to never forget her roots in Romania, which relies on her efforts to maintain ties with her country, friends, and family. At the same time, Mihaela is trying to move forward to establish a new life in the US on a personal, professional, and national level. One area where this dichotomy surfaces is in her use of email addresses.

Mihaela maintains a variety of email addresses, which she uses to facilitate a functional distinction between her multiple identities. “I know if I want to speak to my old friends, my friends from earlier in my life, most of them are on Yahoo Mail, also on Yahoo Messenger and have my Yahoo email address. After, I have Hotmail, and this is a new part of my life, and I know this address is more important for me.” Mihaela sees her many email addresses as a way to manage her identity in a very direct way, using a organizational metaphor of compartmentalization similar to how Majid describes his three ethnic identities to describe the value of having many email addresses: “This is an address for work, for projects, this is an address for friends, so I really try to divide these boxes concerning my feeling, my goals, my expectations.”

Mihaela has email accounts on every major free provider, including AOL – a recent addition created to mark a new phase in her life. She says, “this I just made because I saw many people from here have AOL. I saw it’s more popular and more common for American people. So I said okay, let’s do this first step to get [habituated] with this email.” For Mihaela, having an AOL email address seems more “American,” although many Americans who know the history behind the company might perceive an AOL address as possibly outdated.

While Mihaela considers herself a European, the nature of this identity has transformed with location. From Romania and within Europe, Mihaela’s identity as a European was based in difference. Although Romania has helped shape in Europe’s political and cultural heritage, modern Europe’s official recognition of Romania as a European country came only a few years ago in 2007 when Romania and Bulgaria were admitted to the European Union. Mihaela sees a conflicted European identity for Romanians as both insiders and outsiders throughout the region. In admitting Romania to the EU, “they made just a political agreement,” she states. “I don’t think they have sustainable programs concerning culture, traditions, values.” Even today, Mihaela believes that the European Union does not represent Romania’s interests accurately within Europe. She laments that within the political structure of the EU, “we don’t have an advocate, someone to say, this is the Romanian voice.”

When Mihaela was living in Italy, she experienced discrimination directed towards the Romanian community and had to adapt herself to a repressive environment. “When I go to Italy, I speak with my best friends from childhood in Italian. Because I’m afraid what will happen if I speak in Romanian.” She explained that the gypsy community is much maligned, and many people perceive Romanians as thieves. She feels that the negative attitude she observed towards Romanians in Italy was representative of the rest of Europe. She also compares the repression of expression she experiences in Italy to the repressions experienced within Romania under the Ceausescu regime, both limiting the full range of the Romanian identity.

Mihaela believes that the former regime’s restrictions have left an enduring scar on the nation. Romania, she says, “was a really big nation before, and now you just feel everybody just doesn’t want to speak about nation.” Mihaela herself feels the consequences in her own attitudes about her country. “If somebody ask me now, I love my country, but I don’t love my people. And it’s not nice to say that but it’s true…. They [destroyed] our mentality. And it’s very difficult to grow up.” While Mihaela wants to see Romania excel in the world, she feels that the country still needs to heal. “Fifty years, they were not competitive. Even now, it’s very difficult to change this mentality. And it’s just 20 years since that happened. After one generation, maybe something will really change.”

But being in the United States has altered Mihaela’s perception of difference, aligning the Romanian identity much more closely with European identity. Of Romania, Mihaela says, “we don’t have so many cultures there. [Romania is] a country with a lot of history, German, Jewish, Hungarian, Greek, Turks, yeah, it’s a mixture. But it’s not the same feeling, because they didn’t build up a new country. It’s a big difference.” In order to maintain a connection to her previous life, Mihaela reads news and information about current affairs in both Romania and Europe, while also keeping a steady flow of communication with her friends back home. For this last activity, Mihaela values the real-time communication of instant messenger services, which she strongly favors over branded social networks.

When I asked Mihaela whether she used branded social networks, her response was based around trying to express why she was reluctant to use them. “For me, network not equal with friends. So network for me means just if I want to have a network on my career, for my field of study, research. It’s a more artificial word for me.” Mihaela paused and mused for a moment. “Maybe for that reason, I didn’t choose to use Facebook. Yeah, I have a profile on Facebook because I accept an invitation from one of my friends. But I prefer to stay away. Network equal artificial, virtual world.” Mihaela doesn’t think of her IM activities and social networking activities as similar, although she knows that she is not entirely divorced from what she sees as the artificiality of online communication. “Yeah, even me I live on this virtual world because I use Internet But not… I’m still prefer to live nowadays and on reality. So I’m not so attached to network.” She sees herself as more emotionally involved with her Messenger list and makes a black and white distinction between the two activities: “It’s two different worlds for me.”

Mihaela doesn’t use Messenger everyday. She says she’d like to, but the time zones make it tough to schedule conversations. “My mom is the only person I can make an appointment with. But the other people, I was trying, but it didn’t work. I can accept why. We really live on different times now.” In this way, time remains far more significant of a barrier than distance in maintaining her relationships, and Mihaela recognizes that her relationships back home will inevitably weaken. She describes her grief about this transition, but also points out that her old friends will never experience many things that she has already come to appreciate about her new home.

In order to forge her new life in the US, Mihaela wants to learn about common traditions and current affairs in the US, and she sees Internet research as essential to this process of becoming acclimated. Mihaela says, “for me, media means to keep in touch with something, somebody. ‘Something’ means information, with ‘somebody’ means people, means tradition, means country.” When it comes to learning about the US through broadcast news, Mihaela prefers CNN; she feels that not only is it more middle of the road, but it is comfortingly familiar as one of the only US channels that she had access to in Romania. “For me it’s strange here with just two sides. It’s really not difficult to choose, just two sides. I never knew what to choose because we had so many political parties. It was a big problem for me and a lot of friends.” Mihaela also wants to learn more colloquial English to supplement her classroom skills. “I watch a lot of movies just for language. It’s a good way to learn the street language.”

In one final major area of her life, Mihaela is contemplating an enduring shift in her identity that will have significant consequences for her new life. As is the greater part of the Romanian population, Mihaela is an orthodox Christian, while her husband is Jewish. Mihaela’s new home is located in the heart of a sizeable and established Jewish community in Brooklyn. In describing their relationship, Mihaela says, “speaking in religious terms, we have two different backgrounds.” But culturally, Mihaela and her husband are largely united. “For me because I’m coming from a very conservative and traditional family, even if we are coming from two different sides, we have the same values.” Unity is extremely valuable to Mihaela in her family life. Despite their shared values, she and her husband had to come to the doctrinal agreement that despite their different faiths, the god that each of them worship is one and the same. “We decide just to have one God,” Mihaela recalls.

The longer Mihaela has spent in her new community, the more appreciative of it she has become. “I really decide to keep all his traditions, all his religious holidays, and I’m so enthusiastic when we try to keep this. I really enjoy when he explain me about that. For me it’s like [discovering] a new world.” Not only is Mihaela open to learning about and adopting her husband’s religious traditions, she is contemplating converting to Judaism, prompted by long-term future considerations for her family. “We are talking about having children, it’s a very important step in a family for us. Thinking like a future mother, maybe I start to prepare myself, maybe I will convert. In Judaism, children take the religion of the mother. I don’t want them to get confused. For my children, it’s very important for them to have a god.” Mihaela feels that this is an option that she has some control over, and that if she converts, her family will have a more solid foundation and unified identity.

Manthita: Aspirational Media Engagement

Manthita, a 25 year old from Paris, has only recently returned to her family home where she lives with her parents and most of her siblings after a four-month stay in New York. Although Manthita came to my class every single week, I didn’t get to know her very well through the class. She didn’t volunteer a lot of information about herself in the group setting, but as we had more one-on-one conversation, she opened up about her hopes and goals. Manthita comes from a large family of five brothers and three sisters, and says the media consumption practices vary widely within her family. “My two younger brothers use Internet to play video games with their friends online. I don’t know what they do but they speak together and play at the same time. My parents, they just watch TV, news. But my dad uses a lot of the Arabic channels on the TV.”

Manthita’s family is from the West African country of Mali, but she was born in Paris. Like Majid, Manthita has developed a hybrid national and cultural identity that leaves her conflicted at times about where she belongs. Of her national identity, Manthita says, “I don’t feel like French, I don’t feel like Malian. because when I’m in France, I feel like a stranger, and when I’m in Mali, I feel French! I feel like stranger too.” Her knowledge of Mali has largely been formed through the mediated images of the country presented on television and in school. This remained the case until last year when she visited Mali for the first time in her life and was surprised to discover a very different reality. “It was very different for me, because when I was young I saw on the TV the desert with animals, with little houses. I thought Mali was like this! And when at school when they talk to us about Africa, they talk to the same way. So I never saw how Mali is.”

During her stay, Manthita remained in Bamako, the capital, which is far from most of her family. But nevertheless, the trip was enough to expose her to a completely different side of the country and she describes her experience as a formative one: “I saw a lot of people import French food, French furniture, a lot of things. And I saw beautiful houses, better than French houses, I was very surprised. So now I have a different view of my native country. So I think one day I’m going to do something in this country too. A house, or a business too.”

Not only did her trip to Mali inspire Manthita to consider a future in Mali, but it widened her view of the world in ways that enable her to envision a future different from the one she expected for herself. “The first time I traveled and I took the airplane was in 2008. I went to New York for the first time. I just start to travel two years ago, so now I know how it is, it brings to me a lot of things, new skills. So now, it’s just beginning. I’m going to travel a lot.”

Manthita’s professional career to date has been shaped by the French educational culture and the economic crisis. She describes an educational system that encourages the segregation that remains strongly entrenched in French society. “The way they advise students, when you’re from colored, like Black or Arabic people, even if you have good scores, they’re not going to support you to go to the college. They’re going to tell you to go to the technical, like learn a job quickly, cleaning, something like that.” Manthita was subjected to this influence at an important stage. “Even in the beginning when I finish high school, I apply for a lot of schools and my teacher say, if you go to these school, you’re going to give up, you don’t have the level. So I feel confused when you have pressure by your teacher, so I went in this way.” Her ability to see beyond this paradigm she dates back to her recent exposure to new cultures and ways of doing things. “Then when I start to travel, I saw I could get a lot of opportunity, that’s why I go back to school to do what I want and not what they told me. When I want to get a job, they just give me a bad job that I don’t want to do. So now I decide to do the job I want and not the jobs they give me.”

Manthita has very defined professional ambitions. She is dissatisfied with her current life in Paris, and much of her media use is aimed at improving her situation, using online research to develop her professional skills and learn about industry options. Her first goal was to be in the airline industry. “So first, when I learned English, it was after high school, I want to work in the airport, like a checking agent. But in France they have a lot of criteria. We have to speak good English, we have to have good manners, we have to be like a model, I don’t know!” she laughed. Outside forces then intervened in her plans. “I did everything but when I was ready, the [economic] crisis came. So I didn’t get a job, and I didn’t get any training. I was mad, fed up.” After this blow, Manthita looked for a new field, and spurred by her recent travels, discovered international commerce. “When I get to Paris, I’m going to start in April. It’s import-export and customs. Instead of in two years, I’m going to do it in ten months, very quickly. I want to go fast and get a job.”

Much like Majid, who wants to live in a country that combines cultures, Manthita wants to work in a profession that will allow her to combine different cultural influences. It is quite notable that for many of the people profiled here, the United States represents not only a version of the American dream as a “land of opportunity,” but a society that is more accepting of racial difference. Despite its global reputation for racial tension, the US provides a more relaxed atmosphere for many students at the Center, who have described with wonder the ability to walk down the street and be entirely ignored. Manthita found this anonymity of difference in a crowd one of the harder aspects of the culture to leave behind when she went back to France.

Despite her aspirational outlook, Manthita still values family above other relationships. She recently broke up with her boyfriend of two years because of family wishes. “Now I know I have to marry someone from Mali because my parents prefer someone from Mali. Because before that I went to a Guinean guy, and Guinea is very close to Mali, we just have the frontier between them, but they say no. So I have to change and find someone from Mali who speak my own language. They say if you marry with someone and they don’t speak your language, when they go to speak between them, they going to speak [behind] your back.”

Manthita is far from satisfied with this kind of pressure, but accepts it as an inevitable part of her family culture. “I feel angry. I don’t feel free. I can’t take my own decisions. I just changed my mind and I gave up. It’s not that I made the right choice, because since I was 18 they want me to marry but I don’t want to get married with someone just to please people. It was a hard choice, but I have a lot of pressure. We say your family is more important than a guy, so if I choose the guy and we get married and we have a lot of problems in the future, I have no one to complain [to].”

This lack of understanding from her family extends to her professional goals as well. “I don’t have my family’s support. My family support [is] only get married, have a kid, stay home. So when I travel, I have to find excuse… So I have to do research by myself.” Manthita spends about three or four hours a day on the Internet for a combination of email, chat, social networking, and research. The Internet is not Manthita’s only source of media. She reads the newspaper almost everyday, in the US and in France, mainly sticking to the free newspapers available in the subway system. The newspaper provided Manthita with what she describes as one of the most significant moments in her life to date, one that happened the week before our interview.

Manthita is a huge fan of the globally acclaimed singer Beyoncé. “Beyoncé is my idol. Since 1998, I listen to Beyoncé’s songs. The first time she came to France was with her group Destiny’s Child in 1998. I was in middle school but I went with my sister to the showcase. Then, it was my dream to meet her one day. So when I came in 2008 for the first time in New York, I say New York, it’s a place where I can meet Beyoncé.” But during Manthita’s stay, Beyoncé was in Peking for the Olympic games. Manthita returned to Paris without meeting her idol, reigniting her plans only when she came back to New York this year. A week before her return to Paris this time, everything fell into place.

“On Monday, I was in the class, I opened the newspaper and I saw Beyoncé’s picture and the perfume. I read, ‘meet Beyoncé at Macy’s at 5 o’clock pm if you are the first person who buy the perfume.’ But I say, maybe I don’t understand what they wrote on the newspaper. I say no, I can’t believe!” But it was true, and after her class, Manthita bought the perfume and was given the VIP pass to meet her. “On Wednesday I went to Macy’s, at three o clock. At five she came.”

Manthita not only met Beyoncé, but she has a photo from the occasion, one in which the duo is posed close together smiling broadly at the camera against a backdrop covered in the name of Beyoncé’s new perfume and the Macys logo. “She was pretty, she was simple. I put the picture on Facebook. I was very happy.” The picture on Facebook has generated one of the longest comment threads I’ve seen on the network. Many comments are about luck and jealousy, often in the same comment.

I asked Manthita if there are any other celebrities who she feels as inspired by, and the answer was a decided no. Manthita sees Beyoncé as an important role model not only for herself, but in how she has changed popular perceptions of beauty. “The way she is, she’s never scared,” says Manthita. “Before, you know, Beyoncé was a little bit fat, with big legs, everything. Beyoncé show people we can be sexy even though you are little plump. When she grow up, she start to be skinny, but she has a curvy figure and she accept it. So people like Beyoncé, they find Beyoncé sexy, and guys know girls can be sexy with a curvy figure too.”

Global stars like Beyoncé and David Beckham not only create imagined communities that flock to the values and fulfillment of aspirations that they represent, but they actually change societal norms, as Manthita points out. Kathy Davis writes that “the norms which equate the light-skinned, Western look with beauty permeate the relations between white women and women of color, as well as between women and men of color” (Davis, 566). Beyoncé, by presenting a form of beauty that runs contrary to the standards presented not only in global popular culture but specifically in French popular media, opens up a new frontier of aspirations in the global imaginary. Davis argues that women of color are “bombarded with cultural messages” that link “whiteness” to “power” (566). For Manthita, although she doesn’t address this notion directly, this event has been motivating in other areas of her life. “Since this day, I say if you have a dream you have to believe, and one day it’s going to come true! So I’m more positive on this way, like job, opportunity. I have to believe in myself.” The ability to identify with such a successful figure in the global popular sphere is an essential component to Manthita’s quest for a more fulfilling professional and personal life.

Martin: Teaching the Web

I met Martin one Sunday morning in Union Square for a coffee at Cosí, an Italian chain restaurant. He’s a tall man with steel grey curls pulled into a ponytail, a smiling countenance, and a keen eye. Martin is here on a one-year sabbatical to learn English and work in collaboration with AT&T’s labs in New Jersey. A professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Madrid, he usually lives in Madrid and takes regular trips to the coastal resort town of Ibiza, another of his favorite places in Spain.

When we first sat down, I pulled out my audio recorder, which he had agreed to by email. He eyed it, chuckled, and launched into an anecdote about one his favorite activities, going to the beaches in the coastal town of Ibiza in Spain. He particularly enjoys going to nude beaches there, but in recent years, beach goers have begun to bring cameras with them, which made him rethink his hobby. “One day, one of my pictures or videos is going to appear on the website of the university [where he works] or something like that, what is going to happen?” he asked. “I don’t care!” he declared, “I think it better to change, to adapt our minds to this new technology.”

Most of Martin’s friends and contacts don’t possess this open attitude towards being recorded or documented, and he believes this has to do with losing anonymity. “Nobody likes that. Especially if they show that photograph to people that you know…When you are there, nobody knows you so you’re not worried. But if there’s someone that you know…” One of the threats of the emerging media environment is the fear that permanent recordings, whether through images, videos, or audio recordings, can be distributed back to your networks and impact your relationships with friends, family, or work colleagues. It is the latter that has been a huge topic in the mainstream media, with many articles written about personal pictures on social networks like Facebook affecting members’ jobs and professional opportunities.

In effect, the Internet has given us more memory capacity than we know what to do with. We knew how to take photos and keep family albums, press clippings, and other markers of a generally mass-mediated world (a misnomer, since it was professional media outlets or individuals who filtered history and selected the pieces that would endure). But now that any casual photo can be posted online indefinitely, and every tweet on Twitter is about to be archived by the Library of Congress, it’s clear that we are developing a different kind of collective memory, one that does not select for value, quality, or legality. This can be problematic for companies, individuals, and societies. As Bowker describes in chapter two of Structures of Participation in Digital Culture, “the ‘save everything’ mentality of the early days has already been replaced by the ‘save the minimal legal set’ mentality of many companies and individuals today.” (2007, 28).

This applies to the personal life as well, as Martin points out here. People censor themselves not only on Facebook and other online networks, but in their physical lives as well in response to the “document and distribute everything” activities of others. While the performative activities on branded social networks create a set of traces individuals can be more or less satisfied with as a reflection of themselves, the relativity of these boundaries can be seen in occasional reprimands like “TMI” (too much information) and the fact that some people don’t engage in social networking activities at all. In this way, Martin is an exception within his network, as he has made a self-conscious decision to not only allow inadvertent documentation, but to embrace it as another facet of life. Martin was not only accepting of being recorded for this study, he requested a copy of the interview for his own purposes.

Martin identifies strongly with cosmopolitan values. He prefers larger cities because when you enter a new city, “you are from there. So you are not a singular person, you don’t feel that you are from outside. Since the beginning you feel that you are one more, like here [in New York]. After several months, there are so many people like me so you feel like a… another one. But if you go to other smaller places, you feel that you are the foreigner.” We talked about the changes the European Union has wrought throughout Europe, particularly how the borders have opened up for different nationals to work throughout the continent. Martin observed, “Once you are in Spain, there are no borders.” Martin not only calls the developments “fantastic,” but he is working on developing this ideal of openness in his work as a professor at the University of Madrid. While Martin observes that the EU has made Madrid more cosmopolitan, he sees New York as even more so because of its greater diversity, particularly in terms of Asian populations.

This ready embrace of the new reflects the inclusive morality and orientation of the cosmopolite, (in Spanish, cosmopolita) who envisions an imagined community comprised of the entire world. In Martin’s case, he conceptualizes a global citizenry based on sociality or shared cultural and economic values as well as a political structure as is being developed in the EU, but specifically rejects a religious dimension. “Most of the countries [in the European Union] are based on Christian religion. And Turkey wants to be in there. And there are several, like France or…there are some countries that they don’t like Turkey to be in…. But for me it would be great. For an Islamic country to be inside Europe, that would be fantastic. That would be more like America.”

While Martin concedes that there are Christian elements in the US working against cosmopolitan values as well, he believes it is generally more inclusive than Europe at the moment. And he sees Spain moving in a similar direction. “I’m thinking that maybe in the future, Spain is going to be like the California of Europe.” In his view, traditionally, the knowledge center of Europe has been to the north. But because of not only the climate but also open educational structures, Martin sees the possibility of economic opportunities spurring migration of those knowledge centers from the north to the south, creating the potential for Madrid to become much like Silicon Valley.

Martin’s university is part of an EU program for students called Erasmus, which funds EU students to spend a year at a university in another European city to increase social networks and cultural cross-currents within Europe. Martin added that Spain is one of the favorite locations to visit through this program, which is one reason why he is in the US. His university is transitioning to offering programs in the English language medium and following the practices and format of the American college degree system more to make it a more attractive location for European students who want to be competitive when they enter the business world.

Repeatedly throughout this study, I’ve been told that one of the strengths of the American educational system is that it encourages students to more actively involved in their education, engaging in critical thinking and participatory activities like presentations and classroom discussions which leave them better prepared for professional environments. Martin also believes this to be the case and is reorganizing his classes to be more in this vein. “What I want is that students have to talk. They have to make presentations, they have to work.”

Meeting and speaking to Martin was serendipitous because his work in artificial intelligence informs many of the recent and ongoing developments in media. But at the same time, he was interested in this study because it relates to his own work. “Artificial intelligence is related also with philosophy. It’s amazing. Now what we have is a lot of areas, like robotics, knowledge representation, machine learning, like natural language generation, things like that.” The ongoing problem in the field that needs to be solved, Martin says, is to integrate all of these technologies into one solution. This is directly related to how social media is developing, because of how much of the social web is based on artificial intelligence. According to Martin, “when you are using Google, you are using techniques from [artificial intelligence]…. We have individual intelligences, something to recognize characters when you write, something that recognizes automatically your voice, systems that learn your preferences about your music.” Martin describes the Internet as a Knowledge Base (or giant database) that will be endowed with meaning once a semantic model is developed that can connect these various technologies together in a meaningful way. “We don’t have a model of artificial intelligence that integrates it all. We don’t have it yet. But I think in the future, we are going to have something. For me, one of the most exciting advance that we are still in the middle is the semantic web.”

The semantic web is a vision for the next stage of the Internet first put forth by Tim Berners-Lee in 1999, one in which machines take on a greater role in predicting and mediating people’s daily lives. “I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines.” (Berners-Lee 158, 1999). The semantic web model is based on appending machine-readable descriptions of information to information itself, making it possible for machines to make logical operations on the information. In a simple example that has already been realized, a computer would be able to combine travel and weather information in a meaningful way to deliver updates to a traveler about their flight status.

The semantic web is still in its infancy, but is considered by many to be the next revolutionizing development in new media and, I would argue, uses artificial intelligence to bring meaning and structure to the “universe of things” found on the Internet (Shelley 571, 1816). As Percy Shelley argued in 1816, the object is meaningless without imagination operating on it. In effect, without creating an imagination that is capable of making sense of it, we have yet to unlock the potential of the vast database of the Internet. Martin states, “the idea is to learn using the Internet. There are many people researching about how to learn everything, whatever, from the Internet because there you have a huge amount of things.”

Lev Manovich has written extensively about databases, both their role in new media technologies as well as their relationship to the narrative form, stating that database is a “‘symbolic form’ of the modern age” and distinct from narrative in how it informs “new media objects” (2000). Manovich describes new media objects as without “beginning or end; in fact, they don’t have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other.” Manovich adds that “all this further contributes to the anti-narrative logic of the Web. If new elements are being added over time, the result is a collection, not a story. Indeed, how can one keep a coherent narrative or any other development trajectory through the material if it keeps changing?”

If we see narrative as a set of performative actions that make up the city according to Çinar and Bender, or the self as Olav Bryant Smith argues, than we can view the semantic web as the next step in creating a narrative collective imaginary out of the digital sphere of humanity. The role of narrative in learning becomes more clearer when we realize that the semantic web is based on bringing the qualities of language to the Internet. Through Martin’s work and the performative work of others in this study, we can see that database, rather than running counter to narrative, actually forms the basis of all narratives. For objects to be endowed with meaning, it is necessary to draw relationships between the objects in the database and privilege some objects over others through conscious choice—this is the very nature of narrative-making through pastiche activities that happen on social networks, as we saw in Majid’s story. Martin’s work bears this theory out as well. He states that “for the moment, the Internet is very syntactic. [Search engines] don’t understand the symbol, they use the symbol to find the thing.” What semantic web developers are working on is bringing ontological capabilities to our toolkit as we navigate the Internet, using linguistic relationships to build these tools.

As the semantic web develops, it will be important to investigate the affordances William Gaver identified as so integral to the adoption and usage of these new tools (Gaver 1991, 79). Technologies need to be analyzed in the social context of their development and adoption, particularly because of their “standardizing effects” (Hallin and Mancini 2010, 158). If we envision the semantic web as a series of narrative acts, then we must consider point of view, or who is developing these narrative structures and how accessible will they be to individuals from a plurality of social contexts and perspectives. There are already indications of social problems that can arise with artificial intelligence-based technologies, such as with face-recognition software used in digital cameras of all types—there are some that recognize light-skinned faces but have a harder time with dark faces. This can be perceived as a technical problem that favors high contrast faces over low contrast. But it can also be seen as a serious flaw in the testing phase or an essential defect in the algorithm that has excluded a large percentage of the world from being able to use and participate in the technology.

Martin’s keen interest in the subject allowed the interview to range over a variety of other topics. We also discussed what he did to prepare himself for moving to New York, conducting online and offline research to find out how to get integrated. Martin was very targeted in his search. Before he left Spain, he read Spanish-language blogs from people who had visited New York before to find out about resources he might find useful and problems he might run into. He also conducted English-language searches to uncover other resources, which is how he discovered the Center. Martin also turned to the Internet to find potential friends in New York, using Meetup.com to find Spanish culture-oriented groups based in New York. What he found was that the community was mostly Spanish-speaking expatriates of South America or Spain, with a smattering of Americans who were interested in Spanish culture for personal reasons. Many students have talked about the difficulties of meeting Americans, finding that they usually aren’t interested in pursuing friendships with internationals.

Finally, Martin is a musician and wanted to find places to go to both listen to music but also to find other musicians to play with. Although he tried to research jazz clubs online, he found that he wasn’t able to get a good feel for the music scene until he arrived in New York and began asking for word of mouth references and began visiting the clubs themselves. It seems there are still some arenas that can’t be known without personal involvement.

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