Localities of Diasporic Communicative Spaces: Material Aspects of Translocal Mediated Networking

Abstract

In recent research there has been a tendency to discuss communicative spaces on the internet but also of other media as marked by “flows” or “virtuality,” abstracting from the materiality of the local. Based on empirical research on the communicative spaces of different diasporas, this article introduces a different perspective: We can neither understand communicative spaces by focusing solely on any single media, or by not relating them to the living localities. Rather, communicative spaces are based on mass-mediated and personal communicative networks and flows that are translocal, which means rooted in the locality of everyday life. Such an approach calls for investigation of the localities of everyday media appropriation as material aspects of translocal-mediated networking. When doing this for Moroccan, Turkish, and Russian migrants three types of localities are distinguished: the “domestic world,” the localities of “elsewhere” and the localities of “somewhere”.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The empirical data that this article is based on was compiled together with Cigdem Bozdag and Laura Suna, whom I want to thank very much for their support.

Notes

1. This formulation makes a very specific understanding of territorialization explicit, in which territoriality is not conceptualized as the materiality of a locality but as the process of constructing a bordered area of different localities, being the material base of the imagined community of a nation.

2. However, I do disagree with Anthony Giddens (1989) who understands a nation state as a locality or locale. This rather seems to be a certain connectivity of localities, while its specificity can be seen in the territorialization of this connectivity.

3. While in early stages of the domestication approach “appropriation” was used to define a certain phase of domestication (Silverstone et al., 1992, p. 21)—beside “objectiviation,” “incorporation” and “conversion,” Silverstone (2006, p. 232) uses “appropriation” later as a general term and differentiates as “dimensions of appropriation” then “commodification,” “objectivation,” “incorporation” and “conversion.” Without discussing this in detail (cf. Berker, Hartmann, Punie, & Ward, 2006), in the following I use the term appropriation in this latter sense of the word.

4. Maren Hartmann (2006) argues additionally that current information and communication technologies are marked by a further level of articulation, that is, the articulation of “symbolic environments,” which she conceptualizes as “triple articulation.”

5. All symbols of transcript can be found at the end of the article. All transcripts were realized close to everyday language.

6. Comparable aspects of the experience of difference in the appropriation of media of origin are analyzed by Robins and Aksoy (2006) and Aksoy and Robins (2000).