Online Communities, Diasporic

Web Sites, Newsgroups, Listservs, and the Creation of Online Communities

It has become more and more common for groups with shared commonalities such as ethnicity or nationality to establish Web sites through which they disseminate information about their groups. The information is often pertinent to the members of the groups themselves, relating, for example, to their experiences. For instance, a Web site maintained for and by expatriate Indians provides anecdotes about Indians who live outside of India. Web sites such as this one offer a safe and comfortable place where people of particular ethnic groups can digitally “hang out” and share their stories, which results in a discussion of their concerns and interests. The Web sites may come to offer a sense of security and support that members of the ethnic groups might be unable to obtain elsewhere. Therefore, from the perspective of security, comfort, and safety, the online communities take on characteristics very similar to those of real-life communities.

Usenet newsgroups and e-mail listservs also support online diasporic communities. For example, the Usenet newsgroup http://soc.cult.korean lets people share in discussions of Korean culture. Unlike Web sites, which anyone on the World Wide Web can access, Usenet newsgroups and e-mail listservs require the members to actively subscribe to the group. With Usenet, members can read and post messages at the shared virtual space; with listservs, the messages are sent and received as e-mails. Active participants in these newsgroups and list-servs often become very familiar with one another, as would be expected in the case of members in real-life communities.

These virtual spaces populated by people with common interests are similar to traditional communities. Some of the key characteristics of members of online communities are shared interests, a shared level of trust, a desire to participate actively in online conversations, and the lack of a need to be geographically close to other members of the community in order to maintain the sense of community. Among these, the fourth criterion makes online communities unique and means that online communities are uniquely suited to mobilize for the benefit of members of ethnic groups who are dispersed because of migration or immigration.

Diaspora in the Digital Age

The fact that geographic proximity need not be a condition for maintenance of an online community is of particular significance for diasporic communities. Often, the diasporic condition is characterized by a sense of disorientation and uprooting, since the people who move lose the sense of community that was available [Page 1020]in their place of origin. There is often not a large enough community of migrants in the destination location to let the migrants reconstruct the community they have left behind.

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