ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we explore the intriguing case of the internet and new immigrants. Most studies of the social implications of the internet concern settled populations within the borders of a community, city, region, or nation state. New immigrants in contemporary contexts may be regarded as part of a grounded notion of globalization where migration and immigration are part of the process. Movements of populations within and between nation states are flows over spaces that have different implications from the migrations and immigrations of earlier eras, such as that studied by the Chicago School in the 1920s and 30s. New immigrants have options that were difficult at best to create in earlier eras. For example, communication technologies, and especially the internet, can offer ways for the new immigrant to
negotiate pressures toward assimilation (Appadurai, 1996). The ease and contemporaneous nature of communication with the home country is a feature that makes immigration a different experience from what it was in earlier eras. In contrast to settled populations whose
immigrant memories, if any, afford stories in family or community history, internetconnected first-and second-generation immigrants may engage in storytelling practices that speak to the present and future. These stories are constructed and communicated in a dynamic milieu of options for situating identity. Whereas settled populations deploy internet connections for identity exploration and confirmation (Morley and Robins, 1995; Holmes, 1997), even more fundamental considerations of identity are likely in the
new immigrant case. While there is consensus in scholarly circles that linear assimilation models no longer apply (Zhou and Cai, 2002), scholars have not yet fully understood the ways in which new immigrants are appropriating internet technologies to manage the negotiation of identity prompted by the immigrant experience (Hall, 1994). While identity negotiations are impor-
tant in and of themselves, they also have important implications for how new immigrants engage the host country. This connection has been a major theme in the worlds of research and policy. In many host countries, there were serious concerns about societal integration extant at the time of heightened immigration. It is, thus, not surprising that the coincidental occurrences of new communication technologies (especially the internet) and heightened immigration have produced anxiety about how new immigrants will relate to the communities of their host country. In this chapter, we review threads of
evidence that researchers have created in their attempts to understand the role of the internet in the new immigrant identity negotiation process and its implications for civic engagement. As in most attempts to catch a process in mid air, we quickly gain an appreciation of complexity. For example, we cannot assume that the experience of new immigrants to the United States is the same as those of immigrants to France due to their different immigration histories and policies. Similarly, we cannot assume that all immigrants from a country will have the same experience, as there are individual and group differences they bring with them that also affect the nature of the experience in the host country (Myers, 1999). Also, our focus on internet connections leaves us open to myopia as these connections are part of a larger communication ecology of traditional media and
interpersonal communication (Ball-Rokeach et al., 2001; Kim and Ball-Rokeach, 2006). Typologies often serve as early building
blocks of theory. In that spirit, we will present a typology of internet uses as one way of capturing the literature and what it has to say about the range of identity negotiations that new immigrants are creating in their everyday lives. Following a discussion of the internet uses typology with reference to civic engagement concerns, we will extend the discussion to the individual and contextual factors researchers have identified as being implicated in the new immigrant identity negotiation process.
