Virtual intercultural bridgework: Social media,virtual cosmopolitanism,and activist community-building

New media in the age of globalization

Any individuals studying intercultural communication in today’s globalized world must focus on the impact of new media in varying contexts, from fomenting popular resistance movements to bringing corporeally distant events and people into living rooms, offices, and classrooms. Pfister and Soliz (2011) call for intercultural communication researchers to investigate the role of digital media, its multimodal nature, and the new spaces of contact it offers, in the reconfiguration of interaction across and between cultural groups. As Sorrells (2013) states, “clearly, advances in communication technology in the global context facilitate intercultural communication among friends and intimate partners to meet, develop friendships, and maintain contact particularly at great geographic distance” (p. 166). Furthermore, Kyriakidou (2008) argues that “cosmopolitan solidarity” is emerging as a largely mediated phenomenon, while Gajjala (2012) notes that Internet and social media use has been increasing exponentially among indigenous and diasporic people throughout the world for well over a decade. Indeed, Pfister and Soliz (2011) remark that “networked communication technology supports many-to-many communication that blends [intercultural] dialogue and dissemination on a broad scale” (p. 249, italics included).

So when we discuss new media, digital media, cyberspaces, and technospaces, to what are we referring specifically? Arjun Appadurai first conceptualized the notion of mediascapes in the age of globalization. For Appadurai (1996), mediascapes offer means for understanding and locating electronic (and, at the time, print) media as part of transnational and global cultural flows, which shift and change as they crisscross global and local corporeal boundaries, producing and disseminating images and knowledges with less adherence to source and peer review than previously accepted. Indeed, over 20 years later, this notion of mediascapes is even more relevant than Appadurai predicted. As Hull and Stornaiuolo (2010) note,

Especially important for negotiating a complex and dynamic world are capacities for creatively and adaptively making and sharing meanings across modes and media … for imagining others and for imagining others imagining us … for seeing ourselves as social actors with obligations toward others … and for negotiating meaning and interpretations across divergent cultural, linguistic, geographic, and ideological landscapes both on- and offline. (p. 86)

While wireless, digital and cyber technology may be more widely available across cultural and socioeconomic divides than ever before, Gajjala (2012) notes that the connected versus the unconnected no longer characterizes the kind of digital divide experienced in the age of globalization. That is, the question is less one of access and more one of skill. Technology may allow for greater global mobilities, yet also imposes economic and educational disparities, widening socioeconomic gaps among consumers.

Mitter (2012) proposes virtual cosmopolitanism as a means “to argue that the reception of Western ideas in the peripheries, and in colonized countries in particular, was an active process that centered the agency on the colonized” (p. 26). The notion of intersections of virtual cosmopolitanism as spaces for mobilizing social and digital media (such as Facebook, Twitter, online support groups, and online advocacy groups) for trans-local social justice activism must involve not only questions of access, but also of skill. The current essay argues for this positionality, assuming that cosmopolitanization is a mediated process that creates

informational and experiential mobility made possible by global networked infrastructures … that the recognition of global interconnectedness and dependencies … can be seen as fostering postnational solidarities both [through] ritual, everyday consumption and coverage of historically significant extraordinary events. (Kyriakidou, 2008: 125)

While acknowledging the skillset deficiencies present in today’s digital divide, the present work argues for virtual cosmopolitanism as a contact space to grow postnational solidarities across traditional and corporeal cultural boundaries in ways that, if utilized with care and the necessary skill, can bridge nation-state boundaries and recenter peripheral groups’ advocacy agendas. Before elaboration of these processes through the analysis of three case studies, it is necessary to discuss, define, and differentiate this notion of critical, virtual cosmopolitanism from the more traditional approaches of cosmopolitanism-from-above.

Differentiating cosmopolitanism from virtual cosmopolitanism

Defining cosmopolitanism in a concrete manner is as challenging as pinning down a specific definition for the concept of culture. In its simplest form, cosmopolitanism encapsulates the notion of belonging to a larger world than our localities, and simultaneously remaining locally rooted while growing global consciousness. Here, the working definition of cosmopolitanism is derived from the work of Sobré-Denton and Bardhan (2013):

Cosmopolitanism functions as a philosophical net that holds together and helps articulate views from postcolonial and cultural studies, sociology, anthropology and education, and in so doing enables a cosmopolitan intercultural perspective for communicating within conditions of postcolonial globality. (p. 6)

It is important to note here that cosmopolitanism, global/local identities, and civic activism do not necessarily or automatically result from the mere presence of technology and the capability to connect with physically and culturally distant others through the Internet (Spence and Briggle, 2010). Just as mere intercultural contact does not facilitate intercultural communication competence, nor does the technological ability to bridge cultural boundaries necessarily lead to virtual cosmopolitanism. The necessity remains for the global/local dialectical tension described above to incorporate each of the following in order to harness the social justice that virtual cosmopolitanism can potentially offer: desire for social and political engagement (Spence and Briggle, 2010), a critical and activist imagination in the face of (and through the lens of) globalization (Ram, 2008), an ability and desire for emergent grassroots and indigenous activism (Hodgson, 2008), and access to technology and social and cultural capital (McEwan and Sobré-Denton, 2011). With this in mind, virtual cosmopolitanism as a space for social justice and intercultural activism is defined as global intercultural concerns bringing together local and rooted activist networks through social media, where the transnational spread of ideas and resources gains voice and momentum beyond what it could accomplish through mere corporeal localities (i.e. local grassroots activism alone).

As such, cosmopolitan communication must be mapped on postcolonial transitions, in which cultures are (often involuntarily) merged, overlapped, and marked in hybridized ways, and cannot return to previous states. Cosmopolitanism and virtual cosmopolitanism exist in the tension of the global and local simultaneously, where culture is assumed to be dynamic. Now that cosmopolitanism and virtual cosmopolitanism have been defined and contextually situated, next are provided some theoretical definitions of social justice, activism, and consciousness-raising within trans-local and transnational communities.

Social justice, activism, and consciousness-raising

Social justice is often utilized and cited in intercultural communication scholarship as a common goal for critical and postcolonial intercultural scholarship (Sorrells, 2013). While definitions of this construct are many and varied, from a cosmopolitan perspective, social justice can be seen as full participation in global and local elements of society and a striving to balance the benefits and pitfalls

by all citizens, resulting in equitable living and a just ordering of society. Its attributes included: (1) fairness; (2) equity in the distribution of power, resources, and processes that affect the sufficiency of the social determinants of health; (3) just institutions, systems, structures, policies, and processes; (4) equity in human development, rights, and sustainability; and (5) sufficiency of well-being. (Buettner-Schmidt and Lobo, 2012: 948)

Indeed, the ethical component of cosmopolitanism described by Werbner (2008), Appiah (2006), and Sobré-Denton and Bardhan (2013) requires a commitment to social justice at and beyond modernist nation-state levels, “developing skills of thinking, living and acting at the nexus of the global and local by striving for a balance between patriotism and world belongingness” (Sobré-Denton and Bardhan, 2013: 36). This orientation—a cosmopolitan concern with universal human rights—has been cause for critique from a cultural relativist (as well as subaltern) perspective (Ram, 2008), which is one reason the current work advocates for activism at the local, trans-local, and transnational levels. Ethical cosmopolitan activism, which can be particularly marshaled via social media, creates bridges between a social justice focus on the rights of humankind with locally specific, rooted causes of and responses to injustices.

In 1999, Hill and Hewes described cyperpolitics as a new space of grassroots activism, in which citizen activism was predicted to become more widespread—with greater possible consequences and moving at a faster pace. Ram (2008) describes cosmopolitan activism through her analysis of Tamil Dalit women and cosmopolitan modernity, as “social movements whose leadership has been informed by political ideologies that include socialism and feminism … the politics I refer to has fostered an attitude resolutely partisan, aligned with a particular oppressed group (‘the proletariat,’ ‘women’)” (p. 141). In this manner, activism and social justice work together, with social justice as the (sometimes more global) goal and activism as the (local, rooted) process through which to attain that goal. Indeed, Harlow (2012) defines how civic engagement within the social justice framework can work through social media to move activism online and off:

social media have the ability to instantaneously spread messages to the masses, unrestricted by time or space. The emergence of an Internet-based “Activism 2.0” alongside the Web 2.0 provides an opportunity to use the framing approach and social movement theories to explain how an online activism organized by social network sites gave birth to an offline activism that took to the streets. (p. 3)

This kind of movement from virtual to corporeal space (and back again) can be harnessed at the local level as a means of consciousness-raising on a larger scale than previously possible—with some unintended and challenging consequences.

Stuart Hall (2008) describes the interconnectedness of the age of globalization as being overridden by two possibilities: driving the world apart by difference, or homogenization. Language of consciousness has been adopted by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which attempts to shape identity and discourse depending on transnational connection and organization (Ram, 2008). Indeed, the notion of consciousness-raising has been prevalent in social justice activism since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and was adopted by the Women’s Liberation Movement to illuminate critical power imbalances and injustices through personal narrative and story-sharing (National Women’s Liberation, 2013). Clearly, the Internet allows large-scale opportunities for consciousness-raising through social media outlets. The openness and accessibility of social media to anyone who can set up a Facebook or Twitter account allow for widespread movement of information in the form of video, pictures, calls for change, editorializing and contextualizing of issues, and so on. Rapid dissemination of messages, photos, and videos of events spread globally without local context can create powerful social movements. What might be considered paradoxically liberating and treacherous involves the lack of peer review and gatekeeping of information, and in several spaces, lack of control over the mass exposure of such messages either without context or encoded by powerful media systems with a differing context than originally intended (Kyriakidou, 2008). Cosmopolitan solidarity created through consciousness-raising about global disasters (such as the 2004 Tsunami in Phuket and the earthquake in Haiti in 2009) is “heavily dependent on the representational choices and practices of media institutions, the latter being part of the broader cultural context” (Kyriakidou, 2008: 128). Alternatively, consciousness-raising in the form of mobile phone photographs and youtube videos rapidly disseminated (“going viral”) through social media (including events which initiated the Arab Spring) creates the opposite effect—multiple contextual markers or no context at all. While this can be positive, it can also lead to a heightened sense of chaos and a lack of control. While Pfister and Soliz (2011) state that “global turmoil prompts citizens to learn more about each other, and digital media fuel intercultural communication on a scale and of a kind that is a significant departure from the mass-mediated contacts of the several centuries” (pp. 46–47), this knowledge is often shadowy, stereotyped, and only represents partial stories and dialogues.

Cosmopolitan solidarity in an online/offline Guatemalan justice movement

In 2009, a postmortem video from the late Guatemalan lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg claimed that he had been assassinated by Alvaro Colom, the president of Guatemala; this video went viral within hours. From this emerged the fomenting of first an online (through Facebook and Twitter) and then an offline protest calling for justice for Rosenberg and for Colom to be forced to resign. Harlow (2012) explains how,

Turning to online social media like Facebook and Twitter, in much the same way as has been done in Colombia, with peace marches, and Iran, with election protests, Guatemalans began changing their homepage statuses to call for Colom’s ouster and demand justice for Rosenberg. (p. 2)

The Facebook organizers, all educated Guatemalan males in their 20s, created a “networked social movement” (Castells, 2001, as cited in Harlow, 2012). This movement led to at least two Facebook pages, one of which expanded to a pro-justice, antiviolence campaign that continues to stage collective action events (Harlow, 2012: 3), called Movimiento Cívico Nacional (2013), which still has an active Facebook page. Virtually all of the communication on these sites is in Spanish, attracting a large Latin American contingency beyond the physical borders of Guatemala. A United Nations (UN) Council later found that Rosenberg had most likely staged his own death and castigation of Colom due to other circumstances involving revenge for government corruption (Brice, 2010). Still, this example illustrates the power of social media, as in less than a week, 5000 signatures were collected calling for Colom’s resignation, leading to the creation of an independent commission to investigate the circumstances of Rosenberg’s death. Within 3 days, over 28,000 people from across the world became friends of the Justicia Rodrigo Rosenberg Facebook page. Indeed, this online social movement worked to create a sense of community, prompting large-scale protests (of over 50,000 people—nearly twice the amount of regular Facebook users in Guatemala) in Guatemala City on 17 May 2009 (Harlow, 2012).

This use of Facebook as a virtual communal space of social justice was intentional. Harlow (2012) notes that rather than using Facebook as a forum to discuss justice or criticize the government, the savvy organizers and frequent posters used the forum to mobilize an online and offline movement through organizing, posting photos of, and supporting physical protests. Furthermore, Harlow explains that “Facebook’s option for users to ‘like’ or respond to a comment helped generate debate and create a sense of community and collective identity, furthering the likelihood of users participating offline” (p. 14). This sense of community was heightened by posters referring to one another by name and using the informal tú (used for friends and equals) with one another even though they had not met in person. Furthermore, it should be noted that this movement—not unlike that of protest against George Zimmerman’s alleged murder of Trayvon Martin—led to the creation of both a Guatemalan task force and later a UN Council with over 300 investigators from 11 nations (Brice, 2010) to investigate the issue. The sense of grassroots activism (particularly throughout Latin America) also created a strong community orientation, as members felt they had arrived at the site and chosen to join the protests through their own agency and connections. Furthermore, while it bears mentioning that the movement did not last, a broader social justice activism group, Movimiento Cívico Nacional, is still active 5 years after the events which led to its incipience. This indicates that, while the specific social justice movement may have burned out (as such movements are wont to do, according to Kyriakidou, 2008), a larger orientation toward social justice in Guatemala is still desired and focused on through social media.

Public cosmopolitanism, mediated communication and the Turkish diaspora

For the Guatemalan social justice movement, social media extended the reach of its activism from inside the country outward, as well as from inside the virtual world outward to corporeal space. In the following case study, social media works in the opposite direction, collecting those who have scattered transnationally through social media and drawing them together in a virtual space which stands in for a physical location.

According to the 2010 census, Sweden is home to an estimated 67,700 Turkish immigrants; 45,000 of whom were born in Sweden, some of whom migrated voluntarily and some involuntarily (Statistics Sweden, 2013). Christensen (2012) describes the Turkish diaspora in Sweden, a cross-section of who were participants in an ethnographic study of the demographic group:

Turkish labour influx to Sweden, mostly from rural Turkey and mostly from the town of Kulu, started in the mid-1960s … from the 1980s onwards most migrants originating from Turkey were Kurds seeking refuge on the grounds of political persecution, or, to a lesser extent, those migrating for family reunion … transnationalism and transnational ties are embodied, to varying degrees, in the sense of maintaining continuous contact to those left behind in turkey, amongst themselves as migrants living in Stockholm and with others (Turkish or otherwise) living elsewhere. (p. 893)

Christensen argues that this migrant group should be considered cosmopolitan through their simultaneous rooted attachment to their Turkish homeland as a facet of their identity, combined with multiple affiliations to their host culture, to other diasporic Turks around the world, and to other diasporic groups in general:

Their stories and perspectives, their capacity to sustain both in-group commonality and individual difference in their identities, and the nature and boundaries of their social networks and communicative patterns are clearly constitutive of cosmopolitan life-worlds and mental geographies structured by both individual factors and the realities of the transnational migrant settings that they find themselves in. (p. 890)

Christensen illustrates strong intersections between social media and diaspora as playing an enduring role in identity management. The use of digital communication in migration communities allows the creation of a virtual space that serves as a stand-in for offline, corporeal space of a nation or culture.

The neighborhood of Stockholm where most of the migrants (including Turks) reside, Rinkeby, has largely become a space of the “foreign” or “alien,” which leads to further feelings of estrangement from the host population, and a stronger need for ties to other diasporic groups. As such, virtual communities formed through digital media allow for the substitution of corporeal space of acceptance (or the physical nation-state homeland) with a more integrated, cybernetic space. Christensen notes that “some instances of feeling Othered both within the diasporic community and by the larger society leads to a search for alternative means of sociality, particularly using online platforms” (p. 896, italics included). Transnational territorial extensions can be made possible through social media connections, both in terms of pragmatic tasks (such as finding a place to live, schooling, or employment) and social activism (keeping updated with current events from the home-culture perspective and maintaining political and social justice ties to activist groups who have been exiled from the home region).

On the surface, the emergence of such Facebook groups as Isvec’teyiz (“We are In Sweden”), a group with over 900 members, does not seem to advocate for the kind of activism present in the Guatemalan example, above. However, Christensen (2012) describes such groups as involving “reinventions/reclaiming of place as a cosmopolitan discursive tactic and strategic practice to generate ‘open’ spaces of diversity” (p. 899), which can be seen as a rhetorically activist act. As such, these kinds of groups can be said to engage in public cosmopolitanism. Werbner (2008) defines public cosmopolitanism as a political project that brings together those who are “proud and assertive of their ethnic origins and home identities, while recognizing the cultural good of being engaged with a variety of others” who “deliberately bring cosmopolitanism to bear in their engagement with the state and their creative impact on the public sphere” (p. 175). Additionally, these groups emerge on a grassroots level with younger generations of Turkish migrants and larger proportions of younger women. Finally, we turn to a virtual community promoting adolescent literacy education across national and cultural lines.

Critical self-transformation in an online adolescent literacy program

Both case studies described above engage in discussion of virtual cosmopolitanism as it is rooted in real and virtual space within a particular nation-state locale of identification of most of the primary players (e.g. Guatemala and Turkey). This final case study involves a social networking site for youth called Space2Cre8 (2013), which spans multiple physical localities in its mission to build a cosmopolitan pedagogical curriculum for 21^st-century adolescent readers and writers. This site uses what Hull and Stornaiuolo (2010) call transliteracies to “foster youthful capacities to listen and reflect … encourage hospitable interaction … across ‘legitimate difference,’ and promote care for the self and others,” and furthermore, to move texts across communicative and geographic spaces through the use of digital media (p. 87). The Space2Cre8 program began at the University of California at Berkeley, and is an adolescent literacy program for students in grades 7–11 in India, Norway, the United States, South Africa, and more recently, Australia, England, and Taiwan (Space2Cre8, 2013). While the primary language used is English, the web site also utilizes German, Norwegian, and Standard Hindi. According to Hull and Stornaiuolo (2010),

The students collaborate with their local peers and newfound international friends to create and exchange digital artifacts via an online multinational and multilingual network … which they also helped design. In addition to creating and sharing digital stories, digital music, stop-motion videos, animations, and digitized artwork, youth also engage in critical dialogues about common concerns in their everyday lives and respective societies, such as discrimination, school pressures, poverty, and the challenges of media representation. (p. 88)

Similar to the various Facebook pages for Turks living in Sweden, Space2Cre8 allows participants space to negotiate their identities, as well as to gain and share cultural and social capital with students in their age groups across the globe, such as art, script systems, language use, music, video, and other types of digital communication. Indeed, the creators of the group, which developed out of a project called Kidnet, specifically state that they want the project to utilize social networking to build new intercultural, international, and inter-linguistic relationships among adolescents (who are forming identity through experiences at a great rate) through digital communication and “the creation and exchange of arts-based media artifacts” (Hull and Stornaiuolo, 2010: 88).

Digital media activism comes through here in the conscious design and educational goals created by the program’s creators, who intend to create a form of critical self-transformation (Sobré-Denton and Bardhan, 2013) in adolescent participants in this age of globalization. As Hull and Stornaiuolo (2010), drawing from work on critical cosmopolitanism by Delanty (2009), state, such critical self-transformation is tantamount to developing a critical, ethical, activist stance toward the world. In this manner, then, participants are asked to also engage in offline curricular reflection activities, engaging both experiential and reflexive pedagogy to promote Hansen’s (2010) value of valuing in cosmopolitan education. As youth create their own profile pages, they do so with a high level of awareness of the cultural Others who will comprise a large part of their audience (i.e. potential and current friends from other cultures on the site). Through this initial interaction with the site, participants engage in critically and reflexively narrating their own selves, along with their cultural and social capital which is most appropriately shared with culturally different Others, such as music, poetry, texts, artwork, digital videos, and so on. These small moments of connection with other participants around the world within the site create space for larger cosmopolitan community-building through moving the unknown to the known and thus creating a sense of reflective loyalty (Hansen, 2010) to people who might otherwise be thought of as strangers, if they are thought of at all. Students place artifacts and identity markers on the site with a strong sense that they will be shared with people similar to them in age and education-level, but vastly different in cultural understanding. Opening the imagination to encapsulate difference, and finding similarities to bridge those distances through virtual space, engages the youth participants through the development of critical distance, or the ability to consider one’s position in the world through the lens of others (Hull and Stornaiuolo, 2010: 91).

The concluding sections return to the original research question, examine similarities and differences across the case studies, and define several recommendations regarding future directions for virtual cosmopolitanism.

Desire for social and/or political engagement

The Guatemalan social justice movement, Justicia Rodrigo Rosenberg, represents the most clearly activist political agenda of the three case studies. That agenda, while not actually leading to the conviction of President Colom (and indeed eventually being disproven), arguably reaches far wider than the initial controversy of the alleged assassination. Harlow (2012) notes that Guatemala is one of the most impoverished countries in the world, while simultaneously ranking as one of the world’s deadliest countries (pp. 2–3). She further states that 96% of crimes in Guatemala are not prosecuted. In this atmosphere of heightened potential for violence and political corruption, virtual cosmopolitan spaces such as Facebook groups seem to allow for much greater participation, as the proliferation rate of supporters and protesters cannot be traced to any one specific individual. The anonymity offered by social media provides space for a greater surge in activism and voice. The movement of the protests from online to offline illustrates the power of virtual cosmopolitanism to mobilize large groups in the face of corruption and violence.

Social and political engagement are not as clear in the second and third case studies, but they are still present. In the case of the expatriated Turks living in Sweden, social media allows for a marginalized group of immigrants far from home and separated from their host society to connect, share resources, and embody their ethnic identities transnationally. Such groups represent social engagement through technology that empowers members who are segregated and often demonized due to their religious beliefs and how they are represented in the media (Christensen, 2012: 896). The engagement in public cosmopolitanism through social media allows this population to rhetorically transform their positionality into one of strength and solidarity with other transnational migrants.

In Space2Cre8, student participants have the opportunity to represent their own social and political identities and allegiances and learn more about—and therefore gain greater reflexive loyalty to—those political/social issues in other cultures around the world. In this way, the students engage in critical self-transformation that teaches them from a young age both the politics and ethics of self-representation, as well as the importance of ethical engagement with others. While this in and of itself does not necessarily involve social justice activism, it sets the stage for future social and political engagement as well as an ethical and empathetic orientation to humankind.

An activist imagination in the face of globalization

All three case studies represent the harnessing of the notion of imagination through virtual space. In the case of Guatemala, the proliferation and viral spread of Rosenberg’s video, followed by the creation of Facebook pages and the fomenting of offline protests, could not have occurred without the harnessing of the collective imagination and the turning it, in what Kyriakidou (2008) terms cosmopolitan solidarity, toward a particular issue that morphed into a larger social justice movement. This is an example of how social and digital media employed the social imaginary and used it for activist purposes, specifically consciousness-raising about a political issue.

In Stockholm, Turkish diasporic social media groups also utilized social media to create an imagined space. In this case, the social imaginary of such groups creates a space of home and belonging that moves from online to offline connections and relationships among transnational immigrant populations. As Christensen (2012) notes,

While national space (Turkey, Sweden) and urban space (Stockholm) are precisely the containers of ethnic, cultural, geographic divisions, of segregation and ethnically-produced residential concentration (i.e. “migrant neighbourhoods”), imagined and mediated reinventions of place, such as the Facebook groups, that embrace difference as much as similarity, serve the purpose of a cosmopolitan recentering and spatially-enacted ethical recalibration. (p. 897)

This imaginary becomes activist in that it works to uphold the rights of a displaced group within a larger majority that marginalizes them, and as such empowers group members as a space of identity security and collective camaraderie.

For the third case study, imagination holds the key to social networking as cosmopolitan practice. Working from Hansen’s (2010) work on cosmopolitan education, Space2Cre8 provides students with tools through which to reimagine their own identities and to imagine those of culturally distant Others. Through dialogue and the sharing of artifacts and cultural information online, participants broaden their own imaginative spheres to create larger life-worlds. The youth on the site are allowed to reconstruct their profiles constantly, renegotiating their imagined selves based on interactions with imagined others. This engages Hansen’s (2010) and Sobré-Denton and Bardan’s (2013) notions of cosmopolitan pedagogy through teaching with an activist lens, designed to create a social justice orientation through experiential learning.

Emergent grassroots membership

Social media allows for messages to spread rapidly and without a sense of hierarchy: anyone who is a member of the virtual community (a Facebook group, for example) can gain access to information through word of mouth (i.e. liking, tagging, tweeting, commenting, etc.). Harlow (2012) describes this phenomenon as follows: “when it comes to supporting traditional techniques of social movements, whether protests or signature drives, the Internet, unlike any other medium, allows for fast, easy and cheap transnational action not limited by time, space or distance” (p. 5). The entire nexus of the power of social media in the Guatemalan social justice movement was that it circumvented bureaucracy and corruption, taking the issue at hand directly to the people on the ground—or at least, those with technological access. The manner through which group membership can jump national and cultural boundaries can be seen through the swelling of the first Facebook group, Justicio Rodrigo Rosenberg, to 28,000 members in only 3 days—particularly impressive considering that only 1.64% of the population of Guatemalans are on Facebook.

The group membership of social media sites devoted to Turkish migrants living in Sweden is also spread predominantly by word-of-mouth (or text, as the case may be). In particular, the grassroots membership of such groups provides agency for Turkish expatriated women. The kind of monitoring that occurs offline of Turkish women (and other nondominant groups, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgenders [LGBTs]) in the enclave community does not occur in the online groups. Thus, membership can be attained by anyone who has access to technology and learns about such a group; all they must do is ask to join the group. This leads to a stronger sense of agency than might exist in day-to-day, corporeal interactions.

Space2Cre8 is probably the least accessible of the three exemplars, as it is a closed group. However, anyone who hears about the group can go to the web site and ask to become a member, and the site is open to researchers and educators, as well as student participants. However, Space2Cre8 still operates on a grassroots level, in that it provides intercultural experiences to those who might not necessarily have access to such experiences in real life. This group creates a space where participants have the potential to share their experiences with other friends not in the group. Indeed, on the bottom of the about page on their web site, visitors are provided with a contact email at University of California at Berkeley if they are interested in learning more about the program or are would like to start a new member site. This is how Space2Cre8 has grown from its initial offering in only the United States, South Africa, Norway, and India to add in Australia, England, and Taiwan to its already growing network.

Access to technology and social/cultural capital

As Guatemala is a nation with extremely high poverty rates and the level of illiteracy is concordantly high (27%), Harlow (2012) states that “Facebook’s penetration rate is the lowest in the world” (p. 4). Therefore, the relative privilege of those with the social and cultural capital to be able to both access and utilize Facebook activism must be taken into account in discussions of virtual cosmopolitanism and social activism. Indeed, note that the four people to start the movement were all young educated men—with not only access to technology but the knowledge of how to employ it, both in terms of specific directed messages designed to mobilize protest and in terms of the basic technological savvy to be able to create and promote webpages. Additionally, the ability to understand the political problems at hand demands at least a basic understanding of the cultural capital of Guatemala. Again, this requires a certain amount of literacy. In this case, then, virtual cosmopolitanism may not stand up to critiques about elitism and privilege that plague its corporeal predecessor, even while it certainly does take political and social engagement from the virtual to the corporeal space with alacrity, if not temporal sustainability.

Christensen (2012) posits online social media, specifically Facebook pages, as a means for younger, more technologically savvy Turkish immigrants in Sweden to engage in public cosmopolitanism, as well as gender and LGBT acceptance and activism. That is, Facebook and other socially mediated forums give protection and concealment that allows for transcending and transgressing power systems imposed by both Turkish and Swedish traditions. Again, it is possible to see the relative privilege of age, technological access (in terms of ability to utilize technology), and education-levels as speaking to elitist critiques of those who participate in virtual cosmopolitanism. However, the development of online communities to engage in spatial transcendence and accommodate “diverse forms of togetherness and voice and extended possibilities to see the world from a variety of Others’ perspectives” (Christensen, 2012: 902, italics included) speaks of the importance of creating accessible spaces in which to share cultural and social capital as a part of identity management, particularly in the face of acculturative stress.

As in both the previous case studies, a plausible critique to be levied for the third exemplar is that students who participate in Space2Cre8 must have access to technology and have to be enough media-savvy to be able to participate in these online mobilities (although it can be argued that students learn more about the navigation of technology and the assembly of digital artifacts through their participation in the program). However, Hull and Stornaiuolo (2010) note that, for 21st-century youth, technology and media access will only continue to proliferate, as will the opportunities that come with literacy on such platforms: “all children and youth require 21st-century resources, tools, practices, and opportunities … to participate most agentively in their social and economic futures” (p. 85). As such, this virtual cosmopolitan community works to advocate for its own privilege as a necessity in the mediated globalized world we inhabit today. If mediated cosmopolitanism can be critiqued as a tool for the privileged and elite, the authors imply, then this is a form of privilege that members of the globalized world will need to learn how to access, particularly in adolescence.