A List of Possible Research Topics

To get you started, here’s a list of possible research topics for “Social Software and the Transcultural Mediasphere”. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and I would appreciate your comments and suggestions:

• The migrant blogosphere - Migrants increasingly use blogs to stay in touch with each other, and with friends and relatives at home. Does the increased publicity of blogging enable migrants to overcome subalternity, or does it threaten to expose their precarious existence?
• Multiple voices - Chat and Voice-over-IP telephony have made it much easier to stay in touch with others over long distances. How does this affect migrant and diasporic communities?
• Diasporic networks - Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Orkut and Friendster often strengthen local networks but they also support transcultural and transnational communities. How do these communities constitute themselves online, and what role do they play in community formation and maintenance?
• Moving images - Photo and video sharing sites like MySpace and Flickr have the potential to establish non-stereotypical representations of transnational communities but it seems doubtful that this is indeed the case. Which strategies of representation are at work in new media and how do they affect representations of ‘other’ cultures? And what is the status of cultural production vis-à-vis global media?
• Transnational gamespace - Massively multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft or Second Life create transnational communities, which seem to transcend ethnicity, class, and culture. At the same time, the backlash against ‘Chinese farming’ shows that ethnicity also informs discourses around fair play, intellectual property, and virtual territories.
• Across the border - GoogleMaps, Plazes, Dopplr, etc. create the illusion of a borderless transnational space, while movements through physical space are becoming increasingly more regulated. Which processes shape the hybrid, heterotopic space that emerges from the ‘mashup’ of real with virtual spaces? Is nomadism replaced by cyber-nomadism?