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

摘要

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".