Cultural Identity Preservation Through Social Media: Refugees and Community

Introduction

Social media is a part of everyday life for many people around the world. People use social media sites, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to express opinions, connect with people, share life events, and perform identities. Ease of reach and global connectivity make social media immensely influential socially, politically, and culturally for many cultural groups of nationalities, social and economic classes, races, sexualities, and ethnicities. The last group, ethnicities, is the focus of this chapter.

More specifically, the chapter aims to explore how refugee groups utilize social media for purposes of ethnic identity establishment and maintenance. To achieve this goal, one specific ethnic group’s social media utilization is analyzed. The group, called Meskhetian Turks, are refugees, who are scattered in nine countries. Hence, without any physical borders or political systems to unite them, the group’s social media utilization provides an example of ethnic identity’s visibility and strength. To this end, the chapter first provides a framework for ethnicity and ethnic identity, then examines literature regarding ethnicity and ethnic identity in social media, after which two studies regarding Meskhetian Turks are explored. The main objective of the chapter is to examine the influence of social media on ethnic identity formation and preservation, which helps further research on both ethnic identities and intercultural new media.