Digital discords and digital othering: How social media practices in the diaspora mimic the home-grown social inequalities among the Indian migrants in Germany

Abstract

Media play a pivotal role in the construction of transnational social fields, immigrants’ experiences in host countries, and diaspora formation. This is specifically true for contemporary migration, in which social media through digital platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp increasingly play transformational roles by acting as a link between the immigrants’ onsite activities and their online practices. In light of this, this study focuses on the newly emerging diaspora of Indian immigrants in Germany, who arrive as international students and European Union Blue Card holders. Our objective in this paper is to examine their transnational media consumption practices and understand how the online-onsite interface informs the formation of an emerging Indian diaspora in Germany. Through fieldwork conducted in multiple German cities with a strong presence of Indians, this paper argues that social media enables the digital transportation of domestic social biases, identity politics, and other political divides quicker than earlier, thereby creating more fragmentation and ambivalence in the diaspora from its inception. Social media practices of newly arriving and evolving immigrant communities like the Indians in Germany already mimic the social inequalities played out in their home countries, contributing to the perpetuation of othering and social marginalization across the transnational social fields and within the diaspora. We call this “digital othering” produced by “digital discords” witnessed in transnational media consumption that migration studies must pay attention to.