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

“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

“…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 and past President of the National Communication Association

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.

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