February 2015

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1/02/2015

I have been struggling with starting to write the chapter on the Internet. It has not been easy to organize the mess of qualitative data related to the online activities and experiences of the participants of my study. Although my argument seems to be clear in relation to how the five latino/hispanic immigrant youth are all connected and active online, it has been difficult to refine my critical approach. How can I reveal the peripheral participation they have? How can I show the lack of resources and the lack of effective participation? How can I show that even if their online practices help them to assimilate, they remind limited? One interesting aspect to show is how this tools are helping them to indeed connect to the U.S culture and society and to assimilated in terms of culture and language. However they are missing the opportunities to connect to their home cultures. Is that good? or bad? How about the individualistic practices and uses they have of the web and their networks? It seems they do not totally leverage the power of the networks for helping their families, nor fostering their ethnic identity and cultural resources. In a way, they use the internet to be away from that and do not explore it to connect to those roots. How does that affect what they can do online? How do that affect their agency.

Of course, they are being active online and connecting to many sources of information, also performing identities, and hanging out with their peers. Their peer culture is being fostered. At some moments some of them are also active in terms of civics and politics, but none of those activities are related to their identities as LAtino/Hispanic and Mexican immigrants. How do that influence their agency. They do not talk about that. But I just wonder if that kind of regretting or hideness of their ethnic identity limits what they do online. Also , questions of geography, power, hierarchy and descrimination play here. None of them talks about that, but I wonder if it is there, in the digital space, and is one of the reasons why they do not engage beyond clicking or subscribing to channels. They are also young, and have been online just for some years, in SNS for 2-3 years. They are still learning to be in cyberspaces.