The role of ICTs in the process of maintaining and creating diaspora

Wikipedia has defined "virtual mobility" as "The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to obtain the same benefits as one would have with physical mobility but without the need to travel". We should acknoledge tha the Internet revolution is transforming the world of communications and like any other revolution; it impacts different groups in different ways. The increasingly important role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the process of maintaining and creating diaspora is considerable. So accelerated movements of technologies, finances, and cultural migrants have generated an understanding of place and community that can no longer be considered in purely local terms.
Appadurai discusses how electronic media, in the context of mass migrations has created: …a new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities…as Pakistani cabdrivers in Chicago listen to cassettes of sermons recorded in mosques in Pakistan or Iran, we see moving images meet deterritorialized viewers. (Appadurai, 1996, p.4) Appadurai also argues that nation can be formed in cyberspace, and often cyberspace serves as the sole means of providing a sense of aspiration and hope to placeless migrant populations. So it is clear that the complex association between diasporic groups and ICTs has led to a concept of e-diasporas that actively utilize ICTs to achieve community-specific goals.
Appadurai elaborates on the “imagined community” to explain that the production of locality is most directly affected by three factors – the nation-state, diasporic flows, and electronic and virtual communities – which are themselves articulated in variable and sometimes contradictory ways that depend on the cultural, class, historical, and setting within which they come together (Appadurai, 1996). Migrants therefore exist in a world of “in-betweenness,” negotiating cultural forms and identities at the crossroads of the nation-state and global diasporas.

Appadurai (1996) explains that along many lines, globalization is constructed via the deterritorialization and place-lessness of many forms of human exchange and communication. He terms these processes “-scapes”, arguing that there is a decentering of movements of humans, images, finances, technologies (Appadurai, 1996). Appadurai (1996) argues that in many social locations throughout the world, especially those characterised by media saturation and migrant populations, ‘moving images meet mobile audiences’, disturbing the stability of many sender-receiver models of mass communication. These situations facilitate “works of imagination,” in which imagined worlds and imagined selves can be created within diasporic communities, both in local contexts and across national boundaries (Appadurai, 1996). The traditional notion of immigrant communities in isolated, localized pockets in different parts of the world therefore simply does not hold true in an age of accelerated media, information production, and ICTs. Instead, the global and local interact at levels of increasing complexity and fluidity.

References:

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
"Diasporic Information Environments: Re-Framing Immigrant-Focused Information Research" in: polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/srinivasan/Research/Proofs/SrinivasanPyatiJASIST7.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special