Connected, but to what? A case study of new media, migration, and transnational belonging in global Paris

Arjun Appadurai (1996) locates cross-border migrations of people and media as the 'core' of globalization's complex connectedness. Scholarship at this core has shown that questions of belonging and identity can be closely related to media practices, and that media-production by people living outside of an originating 'homeland' involves strategic and multivalent processes that can lead to new 'hybrid' and transnational identities. However, in the large body of work that has developed at this nexus, a burgeoning group of migrants is almost completely omitted: middle class migrants who, whether as corporate professionals or cultural experience-seekers, or both, go from global city to global city, remaining just a few years in each site and weaving complicated social networks along the way. These people are unique to studies of migration because they are not a bounded 'population' group, are from ethnically and nationally diverse backgrounds, and their movements are characterized by continual migration. Such characteristics are outside the boundaries of traditional research conceptions that categorize migrants by ethnic, religious or national/regional heritage and often imagine a more stable and linear migration wherein people migrate from 'country A' to 'country B' to put down roots in the new land, even while continuing the connections to the homeland or with a Diaspora.This ethnographic dissertation takes the 'global city' of Paris as a case study, to interpret how a population of 'international people' comes together through combined use of online and offline mediated spaces. By accessing web-based groups such as those hosted by 'meet-up.com,' it's possible to move to Paris, not know anybody, and have a social event to go to almost every night of the week. While certainly many people arrive in a foreign city and immediately immerse themselves in the local cohort of their co-nationals, this study focused on those who specifically sought to become a part of a broader 'international community,' by joining web groups thus-named. In the introduction to a collection of essays on contested identities, Caldas-Couthard & Iedema (2008) write: 'For the deterritorialized self, social coherence is pursued through more and more intense and dynamic forms of communication, seeking to create and recreate a sense of interactive place, however temporary' (p. 2). My project analyzes a portal to that temporary community, where the floating self can touch down in a space of belongingCritical studies of migration and media have focused on important efforts to 'provide a voice' to marginalized migrant groups, but most have not taken into account the large and increasingly ethnically diverse population of middle class migrants also moving in transnational space. That privileged migrants remain 'under the radar' attests to the naturalized status of 'elites' both in academic and public discourse, a practice that overlooks an opportunity to develop new and broader frameworks for understanding social changes accompanying increased geographic mobility and the role of media use herein. Interestingly, my interpretations of the Paris international community did not indicate that its participants were 'elite' but rather that they were mainly middle class migrating people whose cultural capital (knowledge of several languages, repertoire of 'experiences' abroad, etc.) allowed them to demonstrate a certain 'elite-ness' that was not materially based.By contributing a new perspective on how new communications technologies shape and are shaped by social practices developed in the transnational spaces of globalization, as well as uncovering modes of belonging, experience, and practice that, while crossing previously-imagined boundaries, are also erecting new ones, this project provides broader understanding of the actual practices that make up a 'global network society.'...