Mobile news apps as sites of transnational ethnic mediascapes

ABSTRACT

Mobile news apps have become increasingly popular all around the world due to the proliferation of mobile communication technologies. Many news apps are transnational in nature, and their users practice what Richard Falk calls ‘globalization from below’ (2014) with their use of transnational ethnic media outlets. By exploring some publicly available data on the top mobile news apps in five countries, I argue in this paper that these apps offer important theoretical insight into the nature of global ethnoscapes as they show audience’s news preferences in relation to language use, nationality, and news organisations, which assist in making their users reterritorialized ‘transnations’. The theoretical implications are discussed regarding the cultural practices of transmigrants, whether be first or subsequent generation immigrants.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobile news apps
• transnations
• immigration
• mobile technologies
• globalisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ahmed Al-Rawi is an Assistant Professor of Social Media, News, and Public Communication at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is the Director of the Disinformation Project that empirically examines fake news discourses in Canada on social media and mainstream media. His research expertise is related to global communication, news, social media, and the Middle East with emphasis on critical theory.

Notes

1 The author made the following selections: Location- Worldwide; Interests- Entertainment – Reading (1) ‘Newspaper’ and (2) ‘Broadcasting News’ and (3) ‘News Magazine’. The total number of audiences on Facebook who expressed interests in the above is 630 million users who are 18–65 years old. Then, the author selected the following regarding audiences’ behaviors- mobile device user- all mobile devices (620 million users). To look into some of the smaller details, the author selected the following devices: Tablets (100 million users), feature phones that are older than smartphones (2.7 million users), and new smartphones and tablets (40 million users). However, Facebook ads manager does not provide figures on the use of older smartphones, so it is not clear what the number of users is. Finally, the news selection above shows that 340 million news users %54.8 are men and 280 million %45.1 are women. In general, Facebook ads manager has been employed in many recent studies to identify audiences’ interests regarding a variety of issues such as news bias, diseases surveillance, migrants’ monitoring, gender gaps, schizophrenia awareness … etc (Araujo et al. 2017; Saha et al. 2017; Zagheni, Weber, and Gummadi 2017; Fatehkia, Kashyap, and Weber 2018; Ribeiro et al. 2018).

2 For unknown foreign languages, the author used Google Search and Translate to understand the nature of the news apps.