Navigating the competing narratives in social media : a study of Chinese transnationals’ cultural identity work in Finland

Abstract

This study focuses on Chinese transnationals in Finland and investigates how they navigate the complex media ecology and the competing narratives circulating through social media. The research questions are: what are the features of the social media practice of Chinese transnationals in Finland; how do they navigate the competing narratives; and how do they construct their cultural identity in the navigating process. I adopted qualitative approaches for the study, combing qualitative interviews and online observations. The inter-view topics were mainly from my online observations. I have done totally eight interviews with eight different respondents, asking people’s media use habits, how they identified themselves, as well as their opinions towards the competing narratives about certain hot events. The concepts of transnational migration, polymedia, and digital diaspora were the main theoretical frameworks adopted for discussing the related themes. Bucholtz and Hall (2010)’s identity principles and De Fina (2015)’s identity analysis through narratives were used primarily as the guidelines. The data have demonstrated that: Chinese transnationals use a diverse source of social media, and their media use reflects how they use their media repertoire to manage social relationships. The Chinese diaspora ethnic media via multiple Wechat channels in Finland is growing. Regarding how people navigate the competing narratives, Chinese transnationals tend to use various references to verify and make judgements, and they are tactical about how and if they would express themselves. As for the cultural identity work, Chinese transnationals tend to pre-sent multiple levels of identities: besides a strong Chinese identity, they also manifest identities of being a local as well as being a transnational in-betweener. On the other hand, the findings have also shown that there are various structural limits and obstacles for Chinese transnationals in their social media use as well as in their identity construction. As this study aims to present an all-round picture of the study subject, it explores several topics. As a result, the limitation of this study is that it has not discussed all topics in a very detailed manner. Therefore, future studies of similar topics could prove to be meaningful to focus on one of the topics and analyse in an in-depth way. Nevertheless, this thesis would add insights to the understanding of Chinese migrants in Finland and add to the discussion of Chinese digital diaspora. It also would add new perspective to the study of migrants’ identity by discussing how the transnationals navigate the competing narratives from social media.