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12 JEMIE 80 (2013)
Diaspora in the Digital Era: Minorities and Media Representation

handle is hein.journals/jemie2013 and id is 365 raw text is: Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe JEMIE Vol 12, No 4, 2013, 80-99 Copyright @ ECMI 2014 This article is located at: hEMIE/2013/G Diaspora in the Digital Era: Minorities and Media Representation Myria Georgiou* London School of Economics and Political Science This article argues that we need to understand media as spaces where minorities increasingly communicate interests, make claims and mobilize identities. With a focus on diasporic groups, the article looks at the multi-spatial character of communication and mobilization and its consequences for expression and communication of cultural and political belonging. Diasporic groups represent some of the most significant minorities across European nation-states. While living in - and in many cases being citizens of - European nation-states, they also sustain political and cultural connections across boundaries, largely through the media. This article argues that diasporic minority groups use the media in complex ways that feed back into their sense of cultural and political belonging. Only if we examine the diverse and complex ways in which minorities use the media to make sense of the world around them, can we begin to understand the wider significance of media and communications for minorities' cultural and political representation and belonging. Keywords: diaspora; new media; minority audiences; minority representation; identity Celebratory discourses about new media's liberating potential for minorities are now familiar and widespread: policy documents often suggest that in digital platforms, especially in social media, national and ethnic minorities can find spaces of expression away from the constraints of mass media. In a variation of this argument, new media are seen as liberating for minorities but at the same time as threatening to the nation's cohesion. Minorities either turn away or against the nation through their own distinct uses of digital platforms, this argument goes. The hopes and fears technological change attracts are not new and arguments such as the above fall within the utopian and dystopian analyses of the Information Society (Mansell, 2010): technologies can overwhelmingly change cultural and political life with consequences for identity and citizenship. Yet, how much validity or relevance to actual Associate Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science. Email: m.a.georgiou@lse.ac.uk. 80

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