Youna Kimfootloose, yet highly networked and connected, diasporic nationalism in a manifestly nomadic
way, yet with a clearly defined national identity of their own choice, not necessarily transformed
by migration.
It is now generally assumed that the Internet, as a de-territorializing and dis-embedding
technology, has become a new global phenomenon, introducing new transnational discourse
and expanding mediated connection, thereby enabling the creation and maintenance of new
transnational subjectivity with the potential for liberating individuals from place-bound
markers of identities, as well as offering a new level of empowerment among transnational
migrants, including subordinate and ethnic minority groups. Transnational mobilization of
individuals today, and such unprecedented and intensive transnational movements, time–
space compressing technological innovations, electronic mass mediation by the Internet, and
instant and regular connections across national borders are thought to represent a necessary
condition for the rise of transnationalistic, multi-stranded social relations in the age of trans-
border crossers (Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt 1999), an explicitly transnational and even
post-national era (Appadurai 1996), and the declining importance of nation and national iden-
tity (Hannerz 1996; Beck 2000). Transnational media flows, accelerated and intensified by the
Internet’s de- territorializing capacity, are situated at the center of these assumptions of trans-
national processes and consequences.
An important question to be addressed arises as to the nature and characteristic, and the
actual content, of the “new transnational spaces” created by Internet mediation and new patterns
of connectivity and its consequences among different diasporic groups under different diasporic
conditions of life. Knowledge diasporas of the upper and the middle classes, with a high level of
education, skills, and mobility, are often held to represent an increasingly transnational outlook,
predisposition, and lifestyle as the very epitome of transnational subjectivity. However, despite
the relatively privileged status, as Asian women in this study attest, they, too, paradoxically come
to learn and have an increasing uncertainty or doubt about how they can meaningfully relate to
the desired place of their migration, of their individual choice and self-responsibility, and how
they can permanently deal with their precarious situation of “never quite belonging” anywhere.
The use of ethnic media, proliferating throughout the Internet, is mobilized to sustain and
consolidate diasporic nationalism in the trajectories of women’s nomadic voyaging (“can live
anywhere”) as there is no yearning for a return and going home again is not a simple choice. The
actual conditions of transnational lives, social relations, modes of interaction, and thus migratory
outcomes on identity can be routinely mediated by the strategic and affective use of mediated
spaces, transnational media networks, and communication channels that are deemed crucial for
a continuous, social, and ontological sense of being and belonging in this global mobility that is
unlikely to end any time soon (see Kim 2011).
Today’s diasporic communities use digital media and communication networks to main-
tain strong ties back to their homelands, while engaging in complex cultural exchanges and
integration issues in host societies. East Asian migrants in Europe find it difficult to integrate
themselves into their host society in the face of social exclusion and banal racism, which does
not respect cultural diversity (Kim 2011). East Asian immigrants construct an independent,
regional identity by consuming “Asian values” via East Asian pop culture, including the Korean
Wave culture, thereby possibly making their integration more difficult and unsustainable in
Europe (Sung 2013). In the United States, many Korean Americans feel that they have been
marginalized and their identity has been simultaneously denied and imposed, while at the same
time East Asian pop culture, including Korean and Japanese media, has become a new source of
shared reference and connection among some East Asian American youths (Park 2013). Culture
and the cultural industries of East Asia are gaining a global profile and are helping to constitute