Dismantling Cultural Borders Through Social Media and Digital Communications: How Networked Communities Compromise Identity

by Emmanuel K. Ngwainmbi (Editor)

Overview

This book explores how social media and its networked communities dismantles, builds, and shapes identity. Social media has been instrumental, sometimes dangerously so, in binding together different communities; with thirteen original chapters by leading academics in the field, the volume investigates how belonging, togetherness, and loyalty is created in the digital sphere, in a way that transcends, and even dismantles, ethnic and national borders around the world.

In tandem, the volume analyses the further threats to identity presented by the ease with which fabricated news and information spreads on social media, resulting in many users becoming unable to distinguish credible data from junk data. Social media is both creative and destructive in its influence on identity, and therefore the growing fake news crisis threatens the very stability of the world’s communities. This book provides relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings in the area, including diverse case studies and analyses of social media experiences in indigenous and urban communities around the world, including China, Africa, and Central and South America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030922146
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	02/18/2022
Edition description:	1st ed. 2022
Pages:	378
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Emmanuel K. Ngwainmbi is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA.

Table of Contents

Section I: Social Networking, Ethnolinguistic Connotations and Interpretations of Identity
Chapter 1: A bird’s eye view of networked communities and human identity
Chapter 2: De-stigmatization and Identity Refactoring of Chinese Online Celebrities: Case of the Chinese Economy
Chapter 3: Social Media as Mechanism for Accountability: Cases of China's Environmental Civil Society.- Section II: Media representations, North Digital Public Cultures and the Global North
Chapter 4: Hate speech and the re-emergence of Caucasian Nationalism in the United States
Chapter 5: How global cyber mediated news networks and social media platforms influenced messages about COVID-19 pandemic: Offering sociological solutions for Marginalized People
Section III: Social Media and ethnic identities negotiated
Chapter 6: How Television news media reinforce racialized representations of Haitian and Colombian migration in multicultural urban Chile
Chapter 7: How social media is dismantling socio-cultural taboos in Afghanistan
Section IV: Media representations in Global South: Discovering new routes for business
Chapter 8: Ethnic Diversity and Human Capital Development in the Digital Age
Chapter 9: Understanding the causes and consequence of COVID-19 Information Crisis in Africa: Defining an agenda for effective social media engagement during health pandemics
Section V: Media Role in Negotiating National Identities
Chapter 10: Negotiating and performing Vietnamese cultural identity using memes: A multiple case study of Vietnamese youth
Chapter 11: Identity Negotiation and Cosmopolitanism in Social Media: The Case of London and Sao Paulo migrant communities
Section VI: Geopolitics and cyber mediated communication initiatives as tools of ethnicity and diversity
Chapter 12: Constructing the Consumer in the Digital Culture: American Brands and China's Generation Z Chapter 13: Ethnic group experiences with social media: The case of the Cherokee/and Native Americans Facebook group
Chapter 14: A Revisit to networked communities and human identity

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Prof Ngwainmbi has given us another jewel of a work! this brilliantly edited volume lives up to its title, Dismantling Cultural Borders Through Social Media: How Networked Communities Influence Identity. The inclusion of authors from Brazil, China, Vietnam, Nigeria, Cameroun, the United States, Afghanistan, United Kingdom, and other countries makes the book valuable for domestic and international audiences. Skilfully organized, and masterfully written by outstanding authors, including the editor, the book will make a strong contribution to contemporary and future understanding of identifies in the digital era."

—Molefi Kete Asante, author Revolutionary Pedagogy

“This beautifully curated volume dismantles cultural barriers in its exploration of Southern perspectives on digital communities, by drawing on Southern voices - either directly (Afghanistan, Brazil, Chile, China, Nigeria, South Africa, Vietnam) or through émigrés in the Global North (UK and US) – in equal measure. Discussion of identity negotiation, in contemporary international network society, offers an ideational feast for professionals and researchers in multiple fields with an interest in social media and identity, ethnicity, diversity.”

—Professor Naren Chitty A.M., Foundation Chair, International Communication & Editor-in-Chief, Journal of International Communication

“Dismantling Cultural Borders Through Social Media is a compelling text that challenges us to interrogate the unique juxtaposition between networked communities and compromised identities. Nowhere else have I seen such an impressive and imaginative commentary on how social media may be devastatingly harmful to our collective sense of self.”

—Ronald L. Jackson II, Author of Encyclopedia of Identity & Past President of the National Communication Association

“Emmanuel Ngwainmbi has put together the contributions of a group of international scholars who convincingly argue that individual and group identities have been compromised ontologically by the social media using the digital media processes. The contributors show convincingly how new social and cultural practices are constructed by media and information flows in all global communities. Dismantling Cultural Borders through Social Media will contribute significantly to the growing literature in trans-global media flows and popular culture. I feel a book such as this is badly needed in a fast-changing global media landscape and how it is resulting in erasures and compromises of the identities of vulnerable individuals and communities.”

—Srinivas Melkote, Emeritus Professor in Media and Communication, Bowling Green State University, USA.

“Dismantling Cultural Borders Through Social Media and Digital Communications: How Networked Communities Compromise Identity, a refreshing collection of diverse global contributions, departs intelligently from traditional warnings about social media tribalism to embrace long-undervalued optimism about the capacity of social media to shape new networked communities and to engage populations constructively, especially during health pandemics. This book is an innovative must-read for all those open to reaching beyond familiar experiences rooted in one or two countries to explore a wide range of civic engagement and communication opportunities that media can invigorate throughout the world.”

—John C. Pollock, Ph.D., Professor, departments of Communication Studies and Public Health, The College of New Jersey, co-editor, “COVID-19 in International Media: Global Pandemic Perspectives” (2021)