Digital Throwntogetherness: Young Londoners Negotiating Urban Politics of Difference and Encounter on Facebook

Abstract

The question of how we can live together with difference is more urgent than ever, now that more than half of the world’s population live in cities. For example, the majority of London’s inhabitants are ethnic minorities. Following Massey (2005), city dwellers negotiate a situation of intense “throwntogetherness,” as they live in the proximity of ethnic, racial, and religious others. Shifting the dominant focus of media and migration scholarship from transnational communication toward local everyday practices, this article develops the notion of digital throwntogetherness to chart relationships between geographically situated digital identifications and the urban politics of cultural difference and encounter. The argument draws from in-depth interviews with 38 young people living in Haringey, one of the most diverse areas in London, and builds on digital methods for network visualizations. Two Facebook user experiences are considered: transnational networking with loved ones scattered around the world and engagement with geographically proximate diverse digital identifications.

Notes

¹ “BBM” refers to Blackberry Messenger, the smartphone of choice at the time, which purportedly fueled the riots.

² All names are pseudonyms chosen by the informants.

³ Interestingly, the Bagueixe Facebook group seems to be more densely populated as there are four times as many group members than actual registered inhabitants living in the village; local government statistics show the number of inhabitants has decreased from 465 in 1970, to 156 in 2011 (Instituto Nacional de Estatística, 2011).