The transnationality of mobile media and contemporary racisms: A future research agenda

Abstract

Although there is persistent asymmetry in mobile media access and use the world over, these technologies have become ubiquitous for many people. They have become increasingly central not only to those individuals living in the so-called West, but also to the “next billion users” (Arora, 2019), that is, those of us beyond the West who comprise the majority of the world. Mobile media have consequently played a key role in the transformations that people have experienced in their social relationships. One such relationship is that amongst individuals from multicultural societies and that are entangled with the dynamics of cultural diversity elsewhere in the world. I argue that an important task of future mobile media research would be a deeper exploration into the centrality of these technologies to the contemporary racisms in our society. Here I am talking about a racism of a second order, which perniciously entrenches White privilege across the globe. These contemporary racisms further the dynamic of how “for centuries the world has been divided between the dominated (people of colour) and the dominating (whites) [and how] this has afforded whites a set of insurmountable privileges that go beyond their class or power status” (Aoragh, 2019, p. 5). They do so by naturalizing whiteness as the yardstick with which the humanity of non-Western people is measured. Such contemporary racisms have emerged at the confluence of two racial logics. An often-discussed one is the ever-changing but ever-insistent articulation of White privilege