Group Three.

What really struck me about Karim Karim’s “Reviewing the ‘National’ in ‘International Communication’ Through the Lens of Diaspora” was something I only began to realize as I reached the end of the piece. Certainly, the smorgasbord of communication technologies available to transnational diasporic communities today makes maintaining a national identity across national borders easier than ever before. As I read, though, I began to notice something about the works Karim cites—the most recent were published in 2003. A little sleuthing revealed that Karim’s piece is nearly a decade old!

In 2003, a tweet was still the sound a bird made, YouTube was still gibberish, Facebook was still a hobbyist’s project at Harvard and text messaging was just beginning its rise to prominence in the United States. Indeed, Karim’s analysis of the power of the Internet to hold diasporic communities together focuses primarily on chat rooms and web forums, those dirigibles of online communication, doomed to decay in the annals of collective memory. Only eight years later, chat rooms seem as quaint as the telegraph.

As Karim claimed at the time, “the intensification of globalising tendencies seemed to be making nation-states irrelevant.” What can the exponential acceleration of globalization, led by social networks, smart phones and pervasive wireless technologies mean for this assertion? Access and participation must surely have increased in diasporic communities, only multiplying the effect.

As Castells argues, new communication dynamics have changed the glue that holds the nation-state together. Crises of identity, in which people see their nations as increasingly divided into disjointed communities of interest, have given rise to reactionary “project identity movements” to promote a certain cultural idea, a particular type of nationalism. We see this in the rise of nationalist parties in Europe in response to immigration, and even among Tea Partiers here in the U.S.

Certainly, “the transnational spaces [diasporas] have created are leading to a self-reassessment on the part of the nation-state.” Karim’s reading of the situation has only seemed to become more and more relevant as the fracturing of societies due to globalization has intensified.