Building сommunity and constructing identity on WhatsApp: A netnographic approach

Abstract

The social media serve as a means of expediently connecting people across the world, fostering new connections and friendships among people living abroad. Today, technology, mainly WhatsApp, seems to proffer a new stage for diasporas to engage in diasporic identity and community construction. The study investigates the motivation behind Nigerians living in the United States (diasporas) use of WhatsApp platform for building community and constructing identity online, and how they perceive the platform. The research adopts netnography, a qualitative research methodology suited for online research. This study adopts the aforementioned research method to explore forty five (45) persons on a WhatsApp platform. Besides, the social constructivist theory was employed to guide the study. The theory reiterates how meaning is developed through the interactions of social processes involving people in the environment. Analyzing automatically archived data from the WhatsApp platform, the study discovers that members of the group imagined the platform as a home community. Furthermore, there is a considerable dependence on the platform for homeland and related information seeking, creating national identities, and companionship. The study concludes that the WhatsApp diaspora platform provides its members with a sense of community and a strong bonding that engenders national identity and consciousness. The authors of the study believe that researchers should pay more attention to the study of WhatsApp for diasporic engagement.

Keywords

• diaspora
• social media
• whatsapp