Synopsis "Diasporic Communication in the Digital Age (in English)"
Dispersed across places for economic, social, educational and political reasons, moving individuals with some links to Nigeria, gradually began forming multivariate clusters around modern, digital, and social means of communication. This trend has been coterminous with the growth of the instantaneous media, leading to some effects in the virtual spaces of negotiating belonging, given a subdued sense of longing, and from where identity and transnationalism are constructed, besides the sustenance of physical contact in absence. The book traces the evolution of the putative Nigerian Diaspora, before locating its contemporary essences in the identified spheres of nationalism, identity, and transnationalism, as probable with the fluid, fast changing, sophisticated and productive communication networks. It captures the online agencies of migrants, travelling, and transnational individuals, with connections to Nigeria (ahead of an imaginable diasporic citizenship), in the digital age of varied realms of diasporic communication. These scopes are expanding through pluralizing spaces of technological and messaging patterns, easing up and closing distances, leading to an apparent uniformity of space, and a simultaneous sense of co-presence. The study looks at these dynamics, through an original Nigeria case, and revealing meanings around diasporic communication and its potential for development.
