Dismantling Cultural Borders Through Social Media and Digital Communications

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.

"Prof Ngwainmbi has given us another jewel of a work!  this brilliantly edited volume lives up to its title, Dismantling Cultural Borders Through Social Media: How Networked Communities Influence Identity. The inclusion of authors from Brazil, China, Vietnam, Nigeria, Cameroun, the United States, Afghanistan, United Kingdom, and other countries makes the book valuable for domestic and international audiences. Skilfully organized, and masterfully written by outstanding authors, including the editor, the book will make a strong contribution to contemporary and future understanding of identifies in the digital era."

—Molefi Kete Asante, author Revolutionary Pedagogy

“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

“Dismantling Cultural Borders Through Social Media is 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 & Past President of the National Communication Association

“Emmanuel Ngwainmbi has put together the contributions of a group of international scholars who convincingly argue that individual and group identities have been compromised ontologically by the social media using the digital media processes. The contributors show convincingly how new social and cultural practices are constructed by media and information flows in all global communities. Dismantling Cultural Borders through Social Media will contribute significantly to the growing literature in trans-global media flows and popular culture. I feel a book such as this is badly needed in a fast-changing global media landscape and how it is resulting in erasures and compromises of the identities of vulnerable individuals and communities.”

—Srinivas Melkote, Emeritus Professor in Media and Communication, Bowling Green State University, USA. 

“Dismantling Cultural Borders Through Social Media and Digital Communications: How Networked Communities Compromise Identity, a refreshing collection of diverse global contributions, departs intelligently from traditional warnings about social media tribalism to embrace long-undervalued optimism about the capacity of social media to shape new networked communities and to engage populations constructively, especially during health pandemics.  This book is an innovative must-read for all those open to reaching beyond familiar experiences rooted in one or two countries to explore a wide range of civic engagement and communication opportunities that media can invigorate throughout the world.”

—John C. Pollock, Ph.D., Professor, departments of Communication Studies and Public Health, The College of New Jersey, co-editor, “COVID-19 in International Media: Global Pandemic Perspectives” (2021)

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