ADDITIONAL RESEARCH
Henry Mainsah (2011)
The article addresses the question of identities on the web by examining how Norwegian immigrant’s youths use social network sites as spaces of self-expression. An analysis is drawn from selected individual’s profiles authored by 16 to 20 year old youths. During the analysis images were used to analyse how the cultural identities were reproduced or contested in the process of self-presentation. The article explores how the process of identity construction in these online spaces reflects the sort of identity politics played out within the everyday context of the multi-cultural society & how youth position themselves. Norway has become increasingly immerse in a fast growing web-culture manifested in the wide-spread popularity of sites such as; Facebook, YouTube and Myspace. The younger generation today are constructing online personas using text and images – this provides a good point of departure for exploring the significance digital technologies as spaces for identity construction. Cyberspace is not perceived as a neutral space, but rather as one in which relationships of power in daily life are also played out. Within the article the main research preoccupation is to examine to what extent they draw on cultural sources such as; nationality, ethnicity and popular culture, most importantly to what extent their self-created online personas serve as platforms either for reproducing or resisting & transforming the ascribed identities that are usually attributed to immigrant youth through public discourse.
Identity
Stuart Hall (1995) sees that identity as something never fixed, fragmented and always constructed in or through difference. He sees identity as a process that is never complete, always in constant production and multiply constructed across different, often antagonistic discourses, practices and positions. Identities constantly produce and reproduce themselves through transformation and difference. Ethnic minority groupings articulations of ethnicity and identity, one dominating observation are that urban multi ethnic youth cultures tare recognised by cultural hybridity and bricolage. The studies of boundary-transgressing multi ethnic youth cultures coupled with foci on the hybridity of the diasporic condition have opened up more flexible, situated and process-orientated approaches to identity. David Harvey (1996) argues in favour of combining approaches to identity that focus on cultural agency with those that pay attention to macro-structure of power.
Digital Media & Identities in Action
Studies in ethnic minority representation in the structures & content of mainstream media in Scandinavia countries have made two main conclusions. There is a lack of diversity of people within the structures of media, which is reflected in a lack of diversity in media content. Media images of ethnic minorities are largely negative, whereby they are portrayed mainly as a threat. Gullestad (2001) argues that in previous years, discourses on immigrants have been increasingly ethicised, thereby excluding immigrants from the imagined community of the nation. It is in the context that it is important to study the internet in relation to the representation of identity. Zurawski (1996) argues that the web offers new possibilities for self-determination & self-representation. The construction of identities by ethnic minorities can create their own image. Social network sites, for example incorporate an array of multimedia features. This helps to create a wide range of possibilities for self-presentations and digital production. Digital online technologies facilitate a blending of media, genres, experimentation, modification and reiteration which Muziko Ito (2008) describes as a media. Weber and Mitchell (2008:27) argue that the interactive use of new technologies, especially among the young people, can serve as models for identity processes as they tell stories of ‘where I was the’, ‘where we are now’ ‘who I would like to be; and so on. They propose labelling these sorts of cultural production as ‘identities in action’ and argue that such digital cultural production can serve as perfect entry points for studying identity, for it is at least partly through the process of interacting with technologies that identities are tested, experienced and deconstructed.
Mainsah argues that although new digital technologies offer new possibilities for cultural production, it is important to take into account the context in which this takes place. Leung (2005) argues that power relationships exist in the web as they do in daily life, and that the forces that marginalise ethnic minorities in the everyday world also might operate in cyberspace. Expectations of discourses, representations and politics in the Norwegian context to inform the identity work of ethnic minorities online in the same way as they do offline. Although digital media provide new ways for ethnic minorities to represent themselves in Norwegian public space, it remains to be seen how effective these new representations are in challenging the dominant ‘regimes of representation’ (Hall, 1997) that define the relationship between citizenship, nation and belonging in Norway.
The profiles that are analysed within the article are drawn from a Norwegian social network site called Biip (www.biip.no), which is a free social networking site launched in 2005, and the majority of its approximately 280,000 registered members are teens between the ages of 13 and 18. Henry Mainsah selected 20 profiles on Biip owned by young people aged 16-20 of ethnic origin. It is important to note that Mainsah relied solely on online methodologies; the sample is limited only to those profiles where an indication of ethnicity is provided and thus is a demonstrative, rather than a representative sample.
Mainsah states that when creating the profile on Biip.no, one of the first things that users are asked is to create a screen name. His main argument in the case of screen names, as well as other elements of the profile, is that they reflected the users’ knowledge of identity politics played out within the multi-cultural contexts in which they live. The analysis shows that the screens names of ethnic minority youths’ on Biip.no are one of the means used to express identities. Within screens names are embedded meanings that articulate discourses of race, ethnicity and gender. Moinian (2006) points out that it is important to recognise that the choice of screen names may constitute descriptions or depictions of users’ physical appearance, condition or interests as much as their perception of the appropriateness of particular kinds of appearances and interests. This may reveal the ways in which young people position themselves within different social contexts. The implicit and explicit reference to ethnicity and race in their screen names could be seen as an attempt at signalling difference or expressing otherness.
While profiles are constructed through a series for generic forms, there are ample opportunities for users to signal meaningful clues about themselves. Self-introductory messages were one of the significant textual modes of identity construction on the site. For most of the participants, the question ‘where are you really from?’ was central to the process of self-introduction on the site. The self-presentations of the participants are closely connected to their everyday local social environments both at home and in school.
The evocation of autobiographical information is not the only means by which the people in the research sample represented their identities in self-introductory messages on Biip.no. Poetry was another component frequently found in the introductory sections of the youngsters’ profiles. Presenting personal and autobiographical information, other prefers to use poetry and other literary texts to make implicit reference to ethnic origins and cultural orientation.
Such strong articulations of a diasporic identity within a local website cannot be understood without tak9ing into account the nature of identity politics in the local context. When faced with a national discourse that defines her as the other and in essentially negative terms, sometimes the ethnic minority subject tends to turn inwards to reassert ethnic identity and community. Immigrant youths share on social network sites an ascribed outsider status to the dominant national identity through the negative othering discourse that dominates the Norwegian public sphere.
Bibliography
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HALL, S (1995) Black and white TV. In Givanni J (ed) Remote Control. London: British Film Institute, African and Caribbean Unit, 13-28
HARVEY, D(1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell.
ITO, M (2008) Mobilising the imagination in everyday play: the case of Japanese media mixes. In Livingstone S and Drotner K (eds) International handbook of Children, Media and Culture. London: Sage
LEUNG, L (2005) Virtual Ethnicity: Race, Resistance and the World Wide Web. Aldershot: Ashgate.
MOINIAN, F (2006) The construction of identity on the internet: ‘Oops! I’ve left my diary open to the whole world!’ Childhood 13(1): 49-68
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row of shops and look like an ordinary building. It is not until you look at the up to the sky that you see the tiny Islamic symbol at the top of the spiral tower. The first one is the most common one. It is smallest of all mosques we saw today. We almost passed it when we realized that it is a mosque as it looks more like a office, blue windows and a square room, all the windows were blocked ou
t with cardboard and curtains, you could not see in, unless you waited for someone to come out of the door, it wasn’t until this happened that we realized that it was a men’s mosque. There was some Islamic writing on the door, but you could barely see it, unless you walked up to the door, we were unsure of what this said. But passers by said that it was a mosque, but a very small mosque.
n on the side of abandoned buildings are car parks. Some of the other gr
affiti was art; an individual had obviously taken their time to produce a piece of art of the side of the building to express how they are feeling. On observation it was clear that no one had even tried to scrub it away the graffiti, as it is very interesting to look at, it’s a way for people to express how they are feeling in the surrounding area.
we saw was a Turkish mosque; which is not noticeable, it has a grey appearance and sits neatly back into the other buldings, we would not have noticed this mosque if we were not with our gatekeeper, the Turkish mosque was located by little boutique shops.
nd office area of Oslo, waling over the top of the central station. It gave us a different viewpoint of the City of Oslo, which was nice to see. Especially as the sun was going down, we wer
e able to see a new architecture and building project called ‘The Barcode’ which is new, modern and exciting for the City. This
also lead us to opera house, which is amazing, they had built the Opera house on a slight modern slant, but made it so it has modern and traditional Scandinavia in one. The Opera house over looked the ocean; you could see many different parts of the City of Oslo, old and new. Different layers of architecture and the different spaces they had used for different things.
380MC Scandinavia 