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This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine the textual, institutional, and discursive politics of online media that target, speak to, and are shaped by Indian immigrant cultures. The main emphasis is on the idea of home, and its many reconfigurations online through the concept of the homepage. The book critically evaluates how homepages anchor the ideals and ideologies of belonging online in relation to two dominant imaginaries traditionally associated with the time–space of the home, namely the domestic, familial household and the public, national homeland. The book argues that online media play a crucial role in the ongoing struggles over belonging and citizenship for diverse groups within the Indian American community by representing, reconstructing, and reimagining the Indian immigrant household and homeland (which include India and/or the United States). An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter interrogates the so-called “problematic of homepage nationalisms” in analyses of online media. It argues that the problematic is produced through normative ideas about online media as “global” (which all too often is synonymous with “American”) technologies and cultural nationalism as a quintessentially immigrant or diasporic concern. It examines the politics underwriting the categorization of the global Web and digital diasporas, and links it to the continued undertheorization of “home” in home pages. Using the example of curry as a metaphor for the presence of Indian immigrants in the American software industry, the chapter demonstrates how reading race in narratives that are ostensibly about transnational migration can illuminate the nuances of belonging or being an outsider in the immigrant experience. An interdisciplinary approach that engages the question of “home” at the intersections of race, class, and gender can therefore help redefine the equation between nation and diaspora in examinations of digital diasporas, and help pose the question of nation more purposefully in discussion of the global Web.

This concluding chapter revisits the key arguments developed in each of the four chapters and points to key implications of undertaking a study of home in the age of networks. It argues for a reconsideration of the contours of belonging in contemporary contexts of new media and transnationalism through its specific study of Indian immigrant cultures online. It contends that the question of belonging must be applied more thoroughly to the institutional contexts of online media, for not doing so would neglect a very significant alliance between capital and citizenship in the neoliberal, digital age. Furthermore, in the United States, especially since 2001, immigrants, racial and religious minorities, women of color, and the working class have found themselves at the receiving end of the disciplinary practices of neoliberal states and globalization practices. These institutional contexts shape belonging as much as the textual and hypertextual practices that generate categories of exclusion and inclusion in online media.

This chapter makes the case for what and how we should teach about media in K-12 schools and universities. The author takes a measured approach, advocating the teaching of both traditional media criticism as well as Web 2.0 skills related to content creation and participation. Further, Buckingham urges educators to resist what he calls “techno-fetishism,” or celebrating technology in education for its own sake. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that educators who do not participate in new media culture risk losing the so-called “right to teach” by living in a different society than that of their students.

This chapter examines the possibilities of hybrid models in education that combine traditional models of teacher-student interaction with one-to-many and many-to-many digital models. In hybrid models of education, many tasks formerly performed by a single teacher — lecturing, leading discussions, supervising work, answering questions, grading — can be broken down into separate tasks and performed by different actors. Those tasks that scale effectively — such as basic lectures, presentations of materials, peer-to-peer interactions and projects require minimal direct supervision — can be handled by online media. Other more time-intensive elements of education would still involve the direct interaction of students and teachers in “real” time and space. Although the emerging hybrid model offers new opportunities for educating vast numbers of people more inexpensively, it also transforms the market for teachers, threatens incumbent models of education--particularly in non-profit institutions--and raises important questions about the nature of education itself.

The chapter starts with a brief overview of the study of political personalization online, then focuses on its claims concerning the influence of online platforms on political personalization. It then analyses online personalization by comparing the online presence and activity of parties, party leaders, and prominent politicians from twenty-five democracies, and also the consumption rate of their Facebook pages. High variance at the national levels of personalization online demonstrates that personalization is not a necessary development of politics in the age of online social networks. Levels of online controlled media personalization do not seem to be generally high. Parties are present online more than individual politicians, and in most cases the amount of their output is higher. Online personalization in voters’ behavior—the consumption side—is, however, prevalent. Such personalization is evident in the amounts of the consumption of the outputs of party leaders, but not of other prominent politicians.

Reprinted from legendary cyberspace pioneer Howard Rheingold's classic, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, “Daily Life in Cyberspace: How the Computerized Counterculture Built a New Kind of Place” situates the reader in the context of social media before the World Wide Web. Rheingold narrates how he became involved in The WELL community; details community and personalities on The WELL; and documents user experience with the WELL's conferencing system, including how conversations are created and organized and how social media compares to face to face dialog. Rheingold also explores social media-based dialog in terms of reciprocity; “elegantly presented knowledge”; the tradition of conversation in the Athenian agora; and the value of freedom of expression. Introduced by Judy Malloy.

An early Internet developer takes a personal look back at the 1990 start-up of one of the early social networks, Echo. Horn discusses the challenges she faced building an online community at a time when if people had even heard of the Internet, they thought it was something to do with computers and only of interest to socially challenged geeks. She talks about coming up with ways to deal with all the problems that continue to plague the Internet today: trolls, harassment, bullying, basically all the evils of society. Horn also covers how she got women online when the Internet was 90% male, or large institutions, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, when talk on the net was mostly tech.

The ‘Trojan Horse’ affair did not occur in isolation, but in common with many such ‘defining episodes’ manifested in the guise of a culmination of a number of factors: contextual, cultural and political. One of the defining factors surrounding the event was the way in which it was crafted by the media and manipulated by both the media and the government to such an extent that it became impossible to understand whether this was an education scandal or terrorist threat. In order to examine the event in more detail and to examine why it was so influential in terms of later policymaking, this chapter places the affair within the context of what is known as the ‘mediatisation of education policy’–a field of research that explores and examines the complex ways in which the media influences and shapes policy

In the early 1970s, two decades before the World Wide Web came on the scene, the PLATO system pioneered online discussion forums and message boards, email, chat rooms, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer games, leading to the spontaneous emergence of the world's first online community. David R. Woolley, one of the creators of PLATO's social media features, describes this vibrant but unplanned community, and chronicles the development of the software that unexpectedly gave rise to it on a system that was intended primarily for computer-based education.

While the use of data to refine search for an individual has benefits, when that data is used to allow third parties to target individuals with unrequested advertising and propaganda, and to manipulate behaviour, then its use must be more closely questioned. Misuse of personal data is now a systemic problem online. It is baked into the commercial exploitation of the web, and antitrust and piecemeal regulatory interventions will not be enough to effect change. Only a systemic approach will have the necessary impact. This chapter argues for stricter implementation of the data minimization principle of the GDPR in order to end automated data targeting, along with the development of alternative search engines based on public service, rather than purely commercial principles.

This chapter traces the evolution U.S. news, from the American realism of the nineteenth century to the advent of online media in the twenty-first century. It discusses how the spider of digital media sent images on paper into retreat, leaving printing and paper manufacturing industries in disarray. It details how newspaper stories grew in length from the 1880s to the 2010s. These longer stories reflected changes in content and visual presentation, which changed how news presented people, events, and places. The impact of longer news on content was also counterintuitive. Instead of “human interest” growing, ordinary and working-class people disappeared from news, replaced by groups, officials, and experts. Although audiences presumably preferred local stories, locations moved away from the street address, as references to faraway places expanded. Moreover, news no longer aimed to report events-as-they-happened for the public to process. It explained larger problems or tried to make sense of issues, aiming to interpret events.

The Buddhist Geeks project is an online Buddhist media platform launched in 2007 by two self-identified millennials who wanted to combine their passion for Buddhism with their “geeky skills.” It quickly gained a wide audience for its pioneering explorations into the convergence of Buddhism, technology, and global culture. Through an analysis of the Buddhist Geeks project and a consideration of its replacement, Meditate.io., this chapter explores the impact of technology and digital culture on American convert Buddhism. It draws on discourse analysis, formal interviews with some of the main players of the Buddhist Geeks project, informal interaction with multiple Buddhist Geeks participants, and participant observation at three annual Buddhist Geeks conferences from 2012 to 2015.

This chapter examines the shift in the roles persons play in the news. Studies of newspapers and newscasts show that by the mid-twentieth century, the number of individuals who take action in a news event, or become the victims of those actions in the press, dropped to less than three in the average crime, accident, or job story. Others took their places. A century ago, an official would appear in only one of four stories. However, the number of officials involved in or having direct responsibility over activities in the news has increased steadily until at least one official appeared in almost every news story. Studies of Internet editions for the same newspapers found that the number of officials continued to be large through 2010. Ordinary citizens and unaffiliated individuals continued to appear in stories, but as news grew longer, it replaced more of them. Political stories from the newspapers and their Internet editions are the most pronounced example: officials and others have come to outnumber individual actors.

The Beatles played an important role in the lives of many young people in the second decade of the 21st century. Whether exposed to the Beatles through parents, grandparents, or popular culture, they had not experienced the Fab Four as part of some distant past but as part of their own childhood and growing up. Many colleges and universities now expose students to the Beatles through academic study, making the group an important part of these students’ experience. This chapter illustrates the ways these students have connected with the music of the Beatles and discovered how it can help them cope with and better understand their own lives. As they continue to pass along their love and knowledge of the group, the Beatles’ relevance and popularity will not decline anytime soon. Evidence from online listening and music subscription services reinforce the idea that the Beatles and their music will continue to live on.