• Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences,
• External knowledge institution

• Academic

• Governance,
• Migration,
• Digital,
• Demographics

Rethinking belonging in the Era of Social Media: Migration and Presence

This paper takes as its starting point the work of Adbelmalek Sayad (2004), and especially the notion of immigration as the trauma of dou- ble absence. In his influential account, Sayad (2004, p. 141) argues that migration creates a rupture and introduces disorder in the per- son. Sayad's sociology of migration uses 'double absence' as the key to explain that Immigrants who leave their home country create a social, personal and political vold at home; in addition, they occupy a kind of liminal space in their host countries, where they are not full members. This metaphor of double absence is apt in capturing the dynamics of migration and its effects on belonging. However, eager to show the deficits of migration, Sayad may have neglected the different ways in which immigrants seek to either com- pensate for their absence or to make their presence felt, by acquiring a new sense of belonging or keeping old ones. In addition, since the time of Sayad's research in the mid-1980s, drastic changes in media technologies have led to a redefinition of presence in ways that make It less dependent on physical location (Meyrowitz 1985). The explosion of social media, understood as social precisely because of their ability to connect people, led to a renewed problem concerning the issue of presence: How is the binary of absence/presence redefined in practice by Immigrants? How might this affect their personal, social and polit- Ical lives and especially their sense of belonging? Finally, how do new forms of presence articulate belongings to new forms of collectivities, such as networks? What kind of networks emerge concomitantly with social media presence and use? This paper will examine such questions and attempt to provide some answers in what follows.

Media