汕头大学硕士学位论文 以“我是潮州人”Facebook群组为例: 探析在“地球村生态环境”里繁荣的环球村落 Globalised Villages in the Global Village Ecology: An Exploratory Study based on the im Teochew Facebook Group 姓名：Jason Heng Ching Sheng 王锦胜 学号：81002001 所在学院：长江新闻与传播学院 导师姓名：范东升 专业: 新闻学 入学日期：2010.9 答辩日期：2013.5  Abstract Social media has redefined the way people communicate and socialise. Social networking sites like Facebook have achieved what other communication technologies failed, which is to imitate the social environment of the tribal village. This materialises the global village Marshall McLuhan predicted half a century ago. The globalised world is often assumed as the actualisation of global village, but this view is problematic as a village by its defining characteristics cannot be global. It also overlooks McLuhan’s key emphasis that technologies promoting instantaneous oral communication replicate social conditions in a village that favour the “retribalization” of man. On the basis that social media will increasingly encourage non-literate communication and social relationship will become the determining factor of inter-personal connections on the Internet, this study proposes that more and more people will gravitate towards communities online defined by unique and exclusive vernacular cultures. These “globalised villages” will be in the image of the tribal villages from which they derive cultural identity, except that they will not be not confined to a physical location but prosper in the global village ecology. Using a multi-disciplinary approach and netnography (also known as online ethnography) as the method of research, this study examined im Teochew, a Facebook group linked to an overseas Chinese vernacular culture, and positively demonstrated its status as a globalised village and highlighted the ways its members use social media to preserve and promote their tribal identity. By reconciling the im Teochew Facebook group with its online environment and the collective consciousness of its members, it provided clarification into how the opposing concepts of global and village juxtapose in the context of social media. Key words: Global Village, Facebook, Collective Consciousness, Overseas Chinese, Teochew 摘要 社交媒体重新定义了人们沟通和社交的方式。Facebook等社交网站的出现，成功模仿出部落村的社会环境，这是其他通信科技所无法想象的。这证实了马歇尔·麦克卢汉半个世纪前所预言的“地球村”。全球化经常被假定为地球村概念的现实版，可这存在矛盾：村落的特别地方属性不可能是全球性的。这个观点也忽略麦克卢汉强调的另一关键，就是方便快捷口语化的通信技术进步，可以复制的村庄里的真实社交条件，带动人类的“重新部落化”。 承认社交媒体会不断促进非文字交流，以及，社会关系将成为网络人际交流的决定因素这两个前提。本文提出的论点是越来越多人会倾向参与根据独特的乡土文化而形成的在线社群。这些“全球化村落”反映的是它们获得文化认同的部落村。它们的存在不局限于某个地理位置，而繁荣在“地球村”的生态环境里。 通过多学科视角和netnography（在线民族学）的研究方法，本文以Facebook群组im Teochew（我是潮州人）为例，探究与海外华侨乡土文化有关的，在线“全球化村落”之具体情况，并指出其成员如何利用社交媒体保留、推广他们独特的部落身份认同。通过探索im Teochew群组与网络环境和组员集体意识之间的关系，本文试图澄清“全球”和“村”这两个对立概念如何在社交媒体里共同存在。 关键词：地球村、社交媒体、集体意识、 华侨、潮州  List of Figures Figure 1 From tribal villages to civilisations and nations 13 Figure 2 Changes in Regional Connectivity to the US 17 Figure 3 From global economic order to globalised villages 24  Table of Contents Abstract I 摘要 II List of Figures III Table of Contents IV CHAPTER 1: Introduction 1 1.1 First Global, Next Village 2 1.2 Objective and Context of Study 5 1.3 Significance of Study 8 1.4 Structure of the Thesis 9 CHAPTER 2: Literature Review 10 2.1 From Tribal Villages to Globalised Villages 10 2.1.1 Tribal Villages: Vernacular Speakers & Collective Consciousness 10 2.1.2 Civilisations & Nations: Societies of the Literate Man 11 2.1.3 Global Economic Order: World of the Instantaneously Connected Literate Man 13 2.1.4 Globalised Villages: Social Media & the Global Village Ecology 17 2.2 Understanding the Overseas Chinese 25 2.2.1 Overseas Chinese & the Internet 25 2.2.2 The Overseas Chinese Collective Conscious 28 2.3 Research Questions 33 CHAPTER 3: Methodology 34 3.1 Netnography Research Method 34 3.2 Identification & Selection of Community 35 3.3 Community Participant-Observation & Data Collection 36 3.4 Data Analysis & Iterative Interpretation of Findings 39 CHAPTER 4: Findings 41 4.1 In What Ways Can The Collective Consciousness Of A Community Online Be Seen In Its Facebook Group To Show That It Is A Globalised Village? 41 4.1.1 Members Subscribe to a Vernacular-Centred Core Identity 41 4.1.2 Members Are Highly Engaged in Discussions about Vernacular Culture 43 4.1.3 Vernacular Cultural Identity Generate Most Intense Debates 45 4.1.4 Members View Vernacular as Critical to Their Identity 48 4.1.5 Discussions on Community were also Popular 50 4.1.6 Members Have Ambivalent Attitude towards Literate Cultural Identity 51 4.1.7 Participation of Members were Self-Motivated 52 4.2 How Do Members Of A Globalised Village Use The Facebook Group To Preserve And Promote Their Tribal Identity? 53 4.2.1 Members Hold Social Dialogues with One Another 53 4.2.2 Members Use Videos to Communicate in Their Mother Tongue 56 4.2.3 Members Post Photographs to Share about Culture & Community 59 4.2.4 Members Treat Group as Place of Belonging 60 4.2.5 Members Use Group to Build Real Life Bonds 62 4.2.6 Members Help One Another Learn & Discover Their Heritage 63 4.2.7 Members Use Group Wall as a Collective Memory Bank 70 CHAPTER 5: Discussion 75 5.1 Key Findings & Observations 75 5.2 Limitations 78 5.3 Recommendations for Future Research 79 Conclusion 81 Bibliography 82 Appendix 1 92 Acknowledgement 95 Brief Bio 96  CHAPTER 1: Introduction Social media has redefined the way people communicate and socialise. Social media is now established as an essential part of daily life in modern society, and Facebook is the arguably the social networking site. As a testimony to its phenomenal success, Facebook announced on 4th October 2012 that the number of its monthly active users had surpassed the one billion mark (Fowler, 2012). Assuming that every user account belongs to a unique and real person, Facebook’s penetration rate in the world’s population of 7 billion is as high as 14 per cent. This achievement is extraordinarily achieved just only eight years after Facebook was created in a Harvard university dormitory. By comparison Google with its wide range of Internet-related products including its widely-used search engine, web-based email service Gmail and free video-sharing site YouTube, took 13 years to reach the one billion milestone for monthly unique visitors (Efrati, 2011). The outstanding feature that differentiates Facebook from other Internet sites and services is the dedicated online environment it hosts for people to network and socialise with family members and friends across physical boundaries. The ease that Facebook allows this to happen has resulted in more than 140 billion “friend” connections within the site (Fowler, 2012). The decisively social-friendly character of Facebook has resulted in numerous comparisons and correlations being drawn with the global village - the world connected and transformed by instantaneous electric communication foretold by Marshall McLuhan. The role of oral communication and inter-personal relations have increasingly been de-emphasised in human society, since the invention and prevalent use of writing and print as communication medium between people across time and space. However McLuhan believed that the primitive way people relate to one another would be restored and the world be reduced to a “single constricted space resonate with tribal drums” by instant transmission of information in sound and moving images through radio and television, which allows all members of the human family to experience “the simultaneous ‘field’ in all human affairs” (1962, p. 31). For many years, scepticism of McLuhan’s futuristic prediction persisted as few could visualise how it would actually materialise. Thus when Facebook finally allowed people “deemed to be part of a group” to overcome local boundaries and congregate in social networks, it was hailed as the “unanticipated global village” (Quiñones, 2011, p.113). The intimate association of Facebook with “collectivism and common interest” is also deemed to be compatible with the values that define the world McLuhan foretold (Bogost, 2010, p.25). 1.1 First Global, Next Village The global village is widely perceived as the unification of all people across the globe through inter-connectivity from information communication technologies into a single community. This is at best an overly simplistic presentation of the many complexities involved. At the heart of the global village idea are two oxymoronic concepts - “a planet-wide network, encompassing thousands of miles and billions of people” and “small, face-to-face communities” (Gozzi, 1996, p.66). The technical capability to communicate alone does not pull people together into a community. From the sociological perspective a village is more than a community of people living in the same neighbourhood. A tribal village is a society whose members are related by common ancestry (either real or perceived) and marriage. However kinship alone lacks the strength to ensure the cohesion of a community in the long-run, which is derived instead from the homogeneity of its members in values, beliefs, customs and lifestyle developed from the intimacy of daily interaction (Durkheim, 1997). As face-to-face oral conversation is the primary means of communication, the native mother tongue is a central feature of the tribal village culture. This culture is passed down through the generations, giving members of the community a tribal identity that is unique and exclusive. Hence strictly speaking, a village cannot be replicated, and its existence is confined to the physical settlement of its members. On the other hand, the global system has its roots in complex societies that evolved after man discovered writing and learned to “extend” himself via communication over time and distance (McLuhan, 1964). Tribes that acquired literacy grew to become the centres of civilisations and nations. The expansion of these literate societies was dependent on mechanical technologies that empowered them to communicate faster than their rivals, and to sideline or consume other tribes that stood on the paths of their advancement. However, the superiority of literate societies cannot be sustained in the age of instantaneous electric communication when relativity of speed in communication becomes irrelevant. McLuhan (1964) foretold the consequent breakup of the centre-to-margin structures constructed through literacy and the reassembly of their fragments into “an organic whole” representing the “new world of the global village” (p.93). Many people interpreted this metaphoric image as a vision of the world being united under a global system of communications, but McLuhan was explicit about his expectations that instant electric communication will restore the importance of oral communication and retribalize the literate man. This entails the revival of old tribal diversity, which was stressed when McLuhan reiterated in an interview subsequent to the publication of his writings on the global village that the properties of revived village conditions are not uniformity and tranquillity, but greater “discontinuity, division and diversity” (Stern, 1967, p.279). Facebook is sometimes described as the “world's largest online community”. Yet one of its key features is groups that users are able to create or join. Facebook describes these groups as “private space” for users to “share things with the people who will care about them most” (Facebook, n.d.). According to an estimate in 2010 there were more than 620 million Facebook groups indexed by Google (O’Neill, 2010) – an astronomical number even after taking into account spam and disproportionate group usage by a fraction of users. Thus if Facebook is the fulfilment of the global village, the proliferation of these groups show clearly that the materialisation of the global village is not as a worldwide community, but a communication ecology supporting a multitude of small communities with trans-geographic existence. Facebook is part of social media, which broadly defined is "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content" (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010, p.61). Web 2.0 according to O’Reilly (2005) is: “… the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an ‘architecture of participation’, and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.” At the crux of these definitions is the point that the Web 2.0 technologies behind social media are constantly being improvised and changing, and these developments are driven primarily by user experiences. User experiences in turn are determined by the ways people use media to relate to their immediate environments. The advent of social networking sites like Facebook has a new category of online community, the community online. Unlike other types of Internet groups, a community online has a social existence that “extends well beyond the Internet and online interactions, even though those interactions may play an important role with the group’s membership” (Kozinets, 2010, p.64). The growing number of communities online indicates the invasion of “real” society into the formerly separate cyberspace. For certain social media will continue to evolve, and society will for certain continue to expand its presence in the digital domains. While Facebook and similar social media utilities will go on to seek the enlargement of their worldwide user bases, it is clear that they have attained a reach that is already global. The scope for their present and future development is to become more social, and ultimately more “village”. Understanding the nature and characteristics of small communities that form Facebook groups is therefore crucial for comprehending the future of social media and the relationship between society and communication technologies. 1.2 Objective and Context of Study The major development stages of human society arguably result from changes in the way people communicate. In view of the impact of social media on the way people communicate and socialise, as well as its direction of expected development, a revisit of McLuhan’s original writings on the global village half a century ago is timely. The globalised world is often assumed as the actualisation of global village. As discussed, this view is problematic as a village by its defining characteristics cannot be global. This perspective also overlooks McLuhan’s key emphasis that technologies promoting instantaneous oral communication replicate social conditions in a village that favour the “retribalization” of man. This implies the revival of vernacular cultures that had been suppressed by literacy. On the basis that social media will increasingly encourage non-literate communication and social relationship will become the determining factor of inter-personal connections on the Internet, this study proposes that more and more people will gravitate towards communities online defined by unique and exclusive vernacular cultures. These communities online will be in the image of the tribal villages from which they derive cultural identity, except that they will not be not confined to a physical location but prosper in the global village ecology. For this reason, these communities online shall be called “globalised villages”. The objective of this study is to explore a community online linked to a vernacular culture, so as to ascertain its status as a globalised village and understand the way its members utilise social media. On the premise of Facebook being representative of the global village, a Facebook group closely linked to a vernacular culture was identified for examination as a potential globalised village. The Facebook group selected is im Teochew. im Teochew is one of at least 84 Facebook groups (with at least 100 members each) Figure is based on searches conducted on 12 October 2012 using the romanised names (and common variants) of the Cantonese, Hainanese, Hakka, Hokkien and Teochew communities. Groups set up by or dedicated to restaurants are excluded, because of their commercial nature, even though they do promote the culinary cultures of these Chinese vernacular communities. formed by members of the Chinese diaspora Chinese diaspora is defined here as people of Chinese ancestry registered with citizenship and/or residence outside the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau (together known as “Greater China”).. Majority of the nearly 40 million-strong Chinese diaspora are overseas Chinese In common usage “overseas Chinese” and “Chinese diaspora” are used interchangeability. However in this study, the term “overseas Chinese” is adopted to refer specifically to members of the Chinese diaspora who migrated from Greater China in the 1980s or earlier, and their descendents. This is to differentiate them from another group within the Chinese diaspora called the “new migrants”, who left the PRC after the 1980s. Further elaborations on key differences between these two groups of Chinese are given in other sections of this study. who migrated before the 1980s because of poverty, social unrest and war from the southern Chinese provinces of Guangdong (to include Hainan, now a separate province) and Fujian to Southeast Asia, and their descendents. Hundreds of thousands of them were further scattered by racial discrimination and political upheavals in their host countries to North America, Europe and Australia during the 1970s and 1980s. The names of many of the above-mentioned Facebook groups make reference to the mother tongues of the overseas Chinese, of which the five most widely spoken (listed in alphabetical order) are Cantonese 广东话 (in Mandarin: Guangdonghua), Hainanese 海南话 (Hainanhua), Hakka 客家话 (Kejiahua), Hokkien 福建话 (Fujianhua) and Teochew 潮州话 (Chaozhouhua) Names given are based on how these regional vernaculars are commonly known in Southeast Asia. In the PRC Cantonese is known as Yue粤语, Hokkien is known as Minnan 闽南 and Teochew is known as Chaoshan潮汕. Hokkien is also known in Taiwan as Taiwanese 台湾话or Hoklo 福佬.. Some examples of these group names are保衛廣東話聯盟 Alliance to defend Cantonese, The Hainanese Clan, GROUP HAKKA BAR, Hokkian Community and 潮州人2 ~~ TEOCHEW NANG 2. Due to the uniform use of a single set of ideogrammic script in China for thousands of years, the spoken languages of southern China are widely misconstrued as “dialects”. They are known in Chinese as fangyan 方言, which translates as “regional vernaculars”. This reflects more accurately the fact that they are mutually unintelligible with one another, and with Mandarin, the vernacular of northern and western China. Mandarin became the basis of China’s national language Guoyu国语 (later modified into Putonghua 普通话 in the PRC and Huayu 华语 in Southeast Asia) and the standard pronunciation for written Chinese only after 1912. The identity of the overseas Chinese is “a hybrid of three parts: home culture/cultures, host country, and diasporic Chinese community” (Tang, 2004). The most widely recognised “Chinese” composite is based on the Chinese literate culture, which was of limited importance in the lives of the masses over a century ago when illiteracy in China was more than 95 per cent (Chen, 2008). In southern Fujian, it was reported that not more than one in a hundred men and less than one in ten thousand women could read intelligently (Fagg, 1894). To enable Chinese converts to read the Bible and other Christian literature in their own colloquial, 19th century foreign missionaries had to invent surrogate alphabetical phonetic writing systems (Fagg, 1894; Chen, 2008). At the heart of the identities of the overseas Chinese are their regional vernacular-based home cultures. Local cultural traditions in Guangdong and Fujian were intimately tied to a rich variety of non-literate expressions such arts and crafts, architecture, music, songs, culinary culture, customary practices, religious rites. Knowledge of these forms was usually preserved through personal instructions or oral traditions passed on from fathers to sons, mothers to daughters, and masters to disciples. Although many classical tales, history and moral teachings were documented in writing, they were imparted to the masses mainly through story-tellers, stage opera or other forms of performing arts. The chief institutions of social organisations for early Chinese migrants to Southeast Asia, the huiguan 会馆 (clan associations or native-place guilds) and triad societies were founded almost exclusively along linguistic lines. Just as in elsewhere, native speech was noticeably “the real practicing organizing principle” for the Chinese in colonial-era Malaya (present-day West Malaysia and Singapore) (Mak, 1995, p.19). Every Chinese vernacular group was defined by its own set of cultural traits or customary practices, including folk songs, cuisine and dietary preferences, rites of passage and even temperament. The boundaries were so pronounced that the Hainanese men in Singapore would rather remain as bachelors than to marry women of another vernacular origin, and this aversion against inter-vernacular marriage persisted as social norm amongst the Chinese in Malaysia till as late as the 1980s. The continued influence of the regional vernaculars over the overseas Chinese is shown in the popularity of Facebook groups linked to them. 17 of these groups have over 1000 members, with the largest being almost 40,000 strong. A general survey of the member profile pictures and discussion contents suggests that majority of the participants are aged between their 20s and 40s, which is consistent with the age range of below 45 years old for 87.4 per cent of global Facebook users (Insidefacebook.com, cited in Burbary, 2011). Furthermore, the typical membership of these groups consists of people from different geographical locations and countries. Examination of a Facebook group belonging to an overseas Chinese community online is therefore valuable for advancing an understanding of “villages” that prosper in the global online communication environment. 1.3 Significance of Study “Social relations determine how people use the media, not the other way around” (Fishwick, 2004, p.220). In early 2013 the United Nations International Telecommunications Union (ITU) reported that the world to have 6.8 billion mobile communication subscribers, and 2.7 billion Internet users (ITU, 2013). In developing countries mobile-cellular penetration rates stand at 89 per cent, while 31 per 100 inhabitants use the Internet. With communication inter-connectivity fast reaching the ends of its global limits, the new frontiers of development are found in adapting technology to meet the social needs of users and their communities. Topics explaining the transfiguration of the Internet from an information transmission platform to an arena for socialisation and networking, and the contributions of Web 2.0 technologies and social media in this change, have been discussed in great depths. However most of these studies are aligned with technology determinism and the global perspective. In these studies, Internet users are usually examined as individuals for understanding of their motivations and behaviours. However with society exercising unmistakable influence over the increasingly apparent global village, attempts to make sense of social media without comprehension of small communities and their cultures will be proven to be woefully inadequate. This study used the concept of globalised villages to examine a specific Facebook group to understand how the conflicting ideas of global and village juxtapose in social media. In order to achieve this, the social meanings behind interactions carried out in the Facebook group had to be identified and made sense of. This was done using a multi-disciplinary approach covering perspectives from communication theories, Internet studies, sociology, history and other fields, to relate the Facebook group to the vernacular culture and traditional society of its community online. 1.4 Structure of the Thesis This thesis consists of five chapters: an introduction; a literature review; a description of the methodology; an overview, analysis and discussion of the findings; and a conclusion, which includes suggestions for further related research. Note on the Orthography The romanisation system used in this paper for words in Chinese follows the standard pinyin system used in the PRC. A few words in the different vernaculars are given as they are commonly spelled in many English-language publications.  CHAPTER 2: Literature Review This chapter is a review of existing literature on the major development stages of human society determined by changes in communication technologies, as well as the use of the Internet by the overseas Chinese. 2.1 From Tribal Villages to Globalised Villages 2.1.1 Tribal Villages: Vernacular Speakers & Collective Consciousness The tribal village is the primitive form of human society. Its inhabitants are usually tied in kinship network through lineage or marriage. They live close together within a limited geographical space and enjoy enhanced relationships through daily face-to-face oral exchanges. These conversations are multi-sensory experiences involving constant flow of action and reaction and engagement of emotions (McLuhan, 1964). Members of a village community subsequently live in full awareness of one another’s existence, reinforced by a communal bond of interdependence. Every tribal village has its own culture. Culture, according to French political theorist Serge Latouche (1996), is “the response which human groups make to the problem of their social existence” (p.39). From this perspective, culture encompasses all aspects of human activities in the traditional society and is an integral part of its members’ lives. Culture is not necessarily tied to literature or the qualities of being “cultivated”. The preservation and underpinning of local culture through the generations leads eventually into what pioneer sociologist Emile Durkheim (1997) calls collective consciousness, or “the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society” (p.38). Collective consciousness is “society living and acting within us”, and it acts as the counterforce to individual consciousness, which “represents us alone in what is personal and distinctive about us, what makes us an individual” (Durkheim, 1997, p.84). These two forces co-exist, but one being centripetal and the other centrifugal; they cannot increase at the same time. Collective consciousness is completely dominant in a traditional society. It determines what beliefs, actions and behaviour are considered acceptable, normal and moral. Individuals who do not conform are threatened with reprimand, punishment and even ostracism. More powerful than kinship ties, the homogeneity of members regulated by collective consciousness is the source of solidarity in the tribal village. At the core of tribal village identity is the native vernacular. The mother tongue “teaches its users a way of seeing and feeling the world, and of acting in the world, that is quite unique” (McLuhan, 1964, p.80). Every person is also said to be stimulated by “the institutions, customs, and interactions of ideas and especially of language (emphasis added), which, from infancy throughout his life, condition his understanding, his feelings, and his behaviour and attitudes in a manner impossible for a man in isolation” (Halbwachs, 1939, p.812). A more recent study found that babies seem to be able to tell the difference between sounds in their native tongue and a foreign one just hours after they're born (“Newborns Recognize Their Native Language Just Hours After Birth [Study]”, 2013). It is essential for a person to have fluency in the vernacular to partake in the activities of the tribe. Resultantly, the culture of a tribe is usually vernacular-based. 2.1.2 Civilisations & Nations: Societies of the Literate Man The invention of writing gave man a medium, or what McLuhan referred as "any extension of ourselves" (1964, p.7), to communicate beyond the limits of his physical existence. Unlike oral conversations that could only be conducted face-to-face, written communication allows information to be disseminated across geographical boundaries and recorded for a time beyond present. Extended with the communicative prowess to read and write, the tribal man became the literate man. Reading and writing do not come with the burden of instant response to the other party as oral conversation demands. This bequeaths the literate man the freedom and space mentally to visualise his thoughts and make considerations beyond immediate circumstances. He is consequently able to develop point of view perspectives and lineal thinking, leading to the "uniform and continuous and sequential" rationality of literate culture (McLuhan, 1964, p.15). While the village survives as a tight-knit unit held together by the collective consciousness of its members, the literate society seeks continuous expansion from centre to the margins. Literature promotes thinking and ways of life that are alien to the collective consciousness of tribal villages. When a foreign literate culture entrenches itself in a village, it undermines the integrity of the tribe and causes its people to lose their unique and exclusive identity. McLuhan (1964) called this change “detribalization by literacy” (p.16). The ancient civilisations of the Romans, the Chinese, the Indians and the Arabs all claim greatness from cultures tied to systems of religion founded on written scriptures considered sacred. In particular, the Western literate culture was exceptionally powerful in promoting universalism. This is because it uses the Greco-Roman alphabets, which as a system that transcribes phonetic sounds into a simple set of visual codes, was easily accepted as the common written script for linguistically diverse tribes across vast territories. The appearance of print technology in 16th century Europe spurred unprecedented scale of book publication and distribution and accelerated the propagation of literacy. The idea of the nation, which Benedict Anderson (1983) refers as “an imagined political community” belonging to people who “will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them” (p.6), arose for the first time when the vernaculars of political centres became popular print languages that served as “unified fields of exchange and communication” (Anderson, 1983, p.44) for communities that spoke a plethora of tribal tongues. The tribes “exploded” as oral communicators were converted into literate men, who adopted new identities as individuals and citizens in nations unified politically by print languages (McLuhan, 1964, p.57). Emphasis on economic activities caused the influence of collective consciousness in society to wane further as countless thousands made, and continue to make, the rural-urban migration into cities. Here people are no longer valued according to their homogeneity, but their ability to contribute as specialised individuals in economies that thrive on the division of labour (Durkheim, 1997). A graphic summary of early major development stages of human society from tribal village to civilisation and nation as determined by changes in communication technologies is illustrated in figure 1 below: Figure 1: From tribal villages to civilisations and nations. Early major development stages of human society as determined by changes in communication technologies. 2.1.3 Global Economic Order: World of the Instantaneously Connected Literate Man In McLuhan’s estimation, the dominance of literate societies would be overturned by instantaneous electric communication. Particularly, he was optimistic the transmission of audio sounds and moving images through broadcast media would restore the authority of oral communication in society, and lead to the “retribalization” of man and herald the new era of the global village. However several decades after McLuhan’s bold predictions, there were few signs of their actual materialisation. The evaluation of Robert Fortner (1993) on the state of global communications prior to the Internet age concluded that it was more akin to a metropolis than a village. He opined that the global village metaphor was “true only in a limited perceptual sense, but not in actuality” (p.25). This is because broadcast media, despite its technological capacity for instantaneous non-literate communication, cannot replicate pertinent aspects of village social life such as having personal conversations, sharing daily happenings and living in the same environment. Furthermore, broadcast media was centrally and hierarchically controlled by states or profit-driven private companies. This gave entities or persons with socio-political and/or economic influence discretionary powers to distort the flow of information in favour of the higher strata of society at the global level, just as it happened in a metropolis. Broadcast media enabled over-distance non-literate communication, but was boxed in the unidirectional one-to-many transmission paradigm. Because of this crucial feature, broadcast media became in effect a powerful tool for the centres of literate societies to consolidate and strengthen their grip over the tribes on the margins. Hopes of an egalitarian world suddenly surfaced in the 1990s when the Internet became the emergent global communication platform, designed with “no centre, no administration and no owner” (England and Finney, 2002, p.15). Its immediate impact was to break institutionalised media’s stranglehold on information flow. As freely available information websites mushroomed, such as the classified-advertising website Craigslist (Seaman and Zhu, 2012), the journalism industry was befell upon by massive losses in advertising revenues and “near-catastrophic” financial damage (Gillmor, 2011, p.4). However, the Internet was produced from forces of change driving the convergence of the world into a single order and not its fragmentation. Western civilisation had dissected the production, distribution and consumption of material wealth from culture and grouped them into the autonomous sphere of economics (Latouche, 1996). Western civilisation emphasised universalism based on the values of “science, technology, progress” (p.39) and created the modern society, where individuals are unleashed from “the thousand-and-one constraints of traditional society” to compete with one another in endless quests for rewards in a market-like world (p. 45). The pursuit for worldwide free trade by the British Empire in the 19th century and the US in the 20th century, pushed the Anglo-American society to the forefront of this new order, and established English as the international lingua franca (Chiang, 2009). The paramount status of economics in modern society drastically reduced the importance of culture. Culture was eventually commoditised as products bought and sold in consumer markets. With the rise of telecommunication in the 1980s, cultural industries expanded in an unprecedented pace (Latouche, 1996). Direct instantaneous communication using the Internet, achieved at low-cost and across national borders, hastened the pace of the integration of the world into a global economic order, and serious questions were raised about the relevance of the nation-state (Ohmae, 1995; Guéhenno, 1995). Although the Internet was designed to be without a command centre, the English-speaking community in world had a decisive head-start in cyberspace due to the origin of the Internet in the US. 86 per cent of the world’s entire online community of 1.1 million in 1989 resided in the US (Carafano, 2011). This advantage was consolidated with the development of the Internet’s framework and operations with an inherent Anglophile bias (Goggin and McLelland, 2009). These are manifested in the use of Roman script in the Internet uniform resource locators and domain names; the use of the QWERTY keyboard as the input system; coding problems exist with non-Roman scripts as well as optimal search engine results for queries conducted in English. Critically, the concept of the Web was originally conceived as a solution to help academics link their type-written research papers with publications and other contents listed in their citations and references (“Web Content”, n.d.). Through the use of the hypertext, the World Wide Web was created in 1993 as a boundless writing space. Out of the sudden a new-generation literate man was produced. With the ability to publish and distribute instantaneously without restrictions, he possessed power of the transformative effect of print technology that had exploded the tribes on a scale magnified to infinity. With Web 1.0 Internet as their vehicle, English-language users rapidly established unprecedented global dominance. In 1998 the percentage of webpages in the English language worldwide was estimated to be as high as 75 per cent (Pimienta, Prado and Blanco, 2009). This ascendency in cyberspace accelerated the rise of English as the universal medium of the “real” world. Figures in 2004 showed that 80 per cent of science journals worldwide were published in English (Chiang, 2009). Cultural and industry consultant and journalist Rüdiger Wischenbart (2007) revealed that 50 to 60 per cent of all book translations were based on English originals, while translations from other languages to English accounted for only 3 to 6 per cent – an imbalance he attributed to the situation where “translations don't follow cultural ideals, but per lines.” Neither broadcast media nor the Internet materialised the global village dream. Global cultural development trend towards the end of the 20th century were described by scholars with an assortment of labels, such as “cultural imperialism”, “cultural homogenisation”, “Disneyfication”, “McDonaldisation”, or “Americanisation”. Though each term contains a different emphasis, they all refer to the spread of the mass culture produced by the cultural industry belonging to the hegemonic Anglo-American society. The conveniences of Web 1.0 technologies spawned a large number of online communities, whose evolutionary roots are traceable to conceptions in the mid-1980s for “a new kind of professional and technical community” defined “by common membership in a computer communications network” (Hiltz, 1985, p.30). These groups were primarily utilitarian in nature and existed to facilitate information exchange between people with common specific interests, professional backgrounds or specialised needs, commercial transactions, and other practical purposes. Despite the nomenclature, these communities were considered substitute, complement or alternative to actual social communities, but not their extension (Kollock, 2002). When designers of online environments contemplated technical challenges to create the “million person interface” for online communities at the turn of the century, their concern was on catering to the functional and universal needs of multi-cultural, multi-lingual users from all over the globe (Earnshaw, Guedj, van Dam and Vince, 2001). The lack of focus on enhancing social interaction amongst users and satisfying the requirements of specific cultural groups show clearly that Web 1.0 Internet was not the materialisation of the global village. 2.1.4 Globalised Villages: Social Media & the Global Village Ecology During the era of Web 1.0, the US was the unrivalled hub of online information flow in global economic order’s communication structure. A study on information flow between Usenet cultural discussion groups suggested that the intercultural communication patterns in Web 1.0 Internet followed a global hierarchal structured headed by the US, even though the pattern did not conform to a centre-to-periphery “one-world network” (Choi and Danowski, 2002). However in recent years, there are signs that the Internet is devolving from its global hierarchy. This is illustrated by data on the share of international Internet bandwidth connected to the US from all major geographical regions between 2000 and 2011, which show substantial declines in regional connectivity to the US (see figure 2 below) (TeleGeography, 2011). Figure 2: Changes in Regional Connectivity to the US. Source: TeleGeography (October 18, 2011). The State of the Global Internet [PowerPoint slides]. Furthermore, the Internet is also experiencing intense linguistic diversification of contents. The percentage of webpages in the English language fell drastically from 75 per cent in 1998 to 45 per cent in 2007 (which is even considered an over-estimate due to search engine bias), even as other major European languages all made gains in their shares of online contents (Pimienta, Prado and Blanco, 2009). To some extent, this change can be attributed to the shrinking proportion of English-language users on the Internet, who formed only 26.8 per cent of all users as of 31 May 2011 (Internet World Stats, n.d.). They are expected to be overtaken as the largest linguistic group in near future by Chinese language users, who make up 24.2 per cent, while the other top ten online linguistic groups, namely the Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese German, Arabic, French, Russian and Korean, each constitute between 2.0 and 7.8 per cent. The greater force behind the ongoing decentralisation of cyberspace is the change of the Internet itself. Unlike inherently passive newspaper readers or broadcast listeners and audiences, Internet users present themselves “as plural (that is, multiple, diverse, fragmented), as active (that is, selective, self-directed, producers as well as consumers of texts), and as both embedded in and distanced from specific contexts of use” (Livingstone, 1999, p.64). However, their ability to interact through the Internet was constricted for many years by the limitations of Web 1.0 technologies that operated in the “one-to-one” (such as email, FTP applications) or “one-to-many” (website) communication paradigms. Moreover, text-based computer-mediated communication misses critical auditory and physical cues, and social context that enrich face-to-face meetings, even though these are compensated by improvised use of symbols, graphics and visible identity markers (Kozinets, 2010). Many of these restrictions were lifted with the arrival of Web 2.0. Based on the “many-to-many” Internet computing paradigm, Web 2.0 innovations such as file-sharing, blogs, Wiki and tagging (“Many-to-many”, n.d.) equipped Internet users with new capabilities to share, participate and collaborate with other users. Enhancement of web browsers with plug-ins and add-ons for easy upload and display of multimedia contents also supported the distribution of videos, photographs and audio recordings, including user-generated content (UGC). Email correspondence, the principle means of Web 1.0 inter-personal communication, faded in importance. In summer 2007 the market share of visits to web-based email services was eclipsed for the first time by visits to social networking sites and forums (Tancer, 2008). In 2004, the year the phrase “social media” was first used (“Social Media”, n.d.), the newspaper industry of the world entered into decline. The annual rate of growth for global online and offline circulation and advertising revenues of traditional newspaper publishers experienced an unexpected slow-down in 2004, which dipped subsequently to almost zero growth in 2007, and -5% growth in 2008 (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2010). The three hardest-hit countries, namely the US (-20%), Japan (-9%) and the UK (-7%), happen to be societies most advanced in literate culture and Internet use. The loss of 13,500 jobs in American daily newspapers between 2007 and 2009 reduced the number of full-time journalists in the country’s daily newsrooms to a figure last seen in the mid-1970’s (American Society of News Editors, 2010). Contrary to widespread belief that the contractions were triggered by readers switching from paper to online media for news, Pew Research Center (2010) found significantly that in the US increases in the number of online news readers failed to make up for falls in newspaper circulation. In 2008 the reputable New York Times ran a feature series titled the “Future of Reading” that attempted to shed light on the correlation between the long hours young Americans spend on the Internet and noticeable falls in their literacy standards, attention spans and reading time, as well as the effects of these changes. One of the articles noted that anxiety of National Endowment for the Arts (N.E.A.) chairman Dana Gioia over the loss of “sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading” amongst young Internet users (Rich, 2008). However, University of Connecticut Professor Donald J. Leu who researches in literacy and technology was reported to be less concerned after he found that one third of 89 students with below average scores in traditional reading tests actually performed well in Internet literacy assessment. An explanation for the apparent incongruity was given by University of Georgia language and literacy education professor Donna E. Alvermann, who observed that the Internet is causing young people to turn to the use of “sound and images so they have a world of ideas to put together that aren’t necessarily language oriented”. The changes described above demonstrate a “deliteration” effect of Web 2.0 Internet, which is turning people away from the written word, and back to the elements of face-to-face oral communication. Social media had pushed the Internet past break boundary, which McLuhan (1964), citing Boulding, described as where “the system suddenly changes into another or passes some point of no return in its dynamic processes" (p.38). In this paradigmatic shift, the Internet became “the utility of the masses, rather than the plaything of computer scientists” (Wellman, 2010). At the same time, it managed to shed its old literate skin to become an “inherently participatory and collaborative” online environment where millions of people and communities engage in ongoing “global conversations” (Gillmor, 2011, pp. xvi- xvii) “Conversation” here is strictly in the metaphorical sense as the use of text remains at the moment essential in social media. However, the trend of young Americans turning to sound and images to understand ideas and their surroundings, at the expense of falling literacy standards, attention spans and reading time, signals clearly an ongoing retribalization of the literate man. At the centre of this conversion are social networking sites like Facebook, where people can now congregate in personal networks and small communities without concern of geographical distance and relate to one another in a manifold of non-literate ways. Social networking sites have achieved what other communication technologies failed, which is to imitate the social environment of the tribal village. The primary ways that this is achieved is through text conversations, sharing of daily happenings and experiencing of virtual community living. Text Conversations Instantaneous or quick exchange of typically very short text messages is currently the most prevalent method of online communication. This is conducted via a range of Internet utilities like instant messaging, group chats, community discussions, open forums, closed forums, microblogs and social networking sites. Despite the use of text, these communications resemble conversations far more than written correspondences like letters or emails. They tend to be brief and informal. Use of colloquial slang, text-speak, acronyms, abbreviations, emoticons, symbols, misspellings and grammatical errors like miscapitalisation, absence of punctuation marks in sentences are frequently considered accepted. Loretta Fung and Ronald Carter (2006) observed that “an extremely common linguistic manifestation” of text conversation is the “appearance of romanised local languages, adaptations of written language to suit online chat and creative language play”. They labelled it a “hybrid variety” - hybrid in a dual sense of having “interpenetrating spoken and written features”, as well as being “a consequence of linguistic, social and cultural convergence where two cultures meet” (pp.52-53). The preference of Internet users to communicate in text conversation is seen in the popularity of Twitter, the micro-blog service with a limit of 140 words per post that reported 200 million monthly active users in December 2012 (Twitter, 2012), as well its equivalent in China Sina Weibo, which was reported in early 2013 to have more than 500 million registered users (Wee, 2013). Sharing of Daily Happenings Support for multimedia contents in social media utilities has made Internet use more appealing to a far wider circle of people, especially those less literate inclined. In general audio sounds, images and moving pictures capture and reproduce daily life and the real world far more vividly than literate expressions, and their inclusion to online text conversations is often done to enrich or elaborate on the context of discussion. Statistics reveal that video contents are immensely popular with Internet users. Video sites make up 46 per cent of Internet sites with highest web traffic, and are followed by File Sharing and Updates, and Social Media sites with 19 per cent and 2 per cent respectively (TeleGeography, 2011). Top video-sharing site YouTube claims that 72 hours of video are uploaded every minute onto the video-sharing site, where over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month (YouTube, c.2012). Experience of Virtual Community Living Personal pages on Facebook and other social networking sites keep users updated on the latest posts (text, images or videos) and statuses of contacts in their online social networks and communities. Constant monitoring of these media rich contents and related comments gives members of a virtual community an enduring common experience and reminds them of their shared commitments and common identity (Komito & Bates, 2009). The sharing of these updates in a cross-cutting manner within a group also creates an ambient presence akin to the background of daily life in a community (Komito, 2011, pp. 12-13). A research report sponsored by Facebook revealed that people with smartphones in the US check their Facebook pages an average of 14 times each day (IDC, 2013). While mutual monitoring in social networking sites are tied in with low intensity and passive actions like “check messages”, “browse photos” and “look for friends”, it supports connectivity between members of a social community in different locations by enabling them to remain in continuous awareness of one another, and giving them the context to resume active communication even after a period of time (Komito & Bates, 2009; Komito, 2011). The Web 2.0 transformations have aligned the Internet ever closer to the “real” world. Social media interaction has become the substitute for face-to-face sessions denied by separation due to time and location, as well as an avenue for people to develop contacts that lead to real-life meetings (Weinberg, 2009). Similarly social media is now recognised for contributing to users’ real-world community involvement in terms of social benefits and sense of identity, and Internet communities are acknowledged positively as “‘places’ of belonging, information, and emotional support that people cannot do without” (Kozinets 2010, p.15). There is now little difference between the ways people socialise on social networking sites and in real life. Research has found that the average personal network on Facebook has 120 people, although a Facebook user normally actively socialises through the site with a far smaller number of friends in his/her network (The Economist, 2009). Interestingly, the size of the Facebook personal network falls close to the “Dunbar number” of 150, which anthropologist Robin Dunbar asserts is the optimal scale of an individual’s social network set by the limits of the human brain’s cognitive power (Dunbar, 2010). The Internet is no longer seen as an awkward to comprehend communication infrastructure with massive cultural and social effects, but an “expansive interconnected ecology of social systems” understandable through studies focused on “the relationship of the nature of data and the behaviour of online actors” (Web Ecology Project, 2009, pp.1-2). Humans as social creatures crave instinctively to be part of socio-cultural groups and cooperate with fellow members for survival and belonging needs (Gripaldo, 2008). However, they do not link up with others randomly or on universal basis in the global village ecology even if they have the means to do so. The thought or conduct of any individual is received “ready-made, thanks to education, to instruction and to language, from the society of which he is part” (Blondel 1925, as cited in Halbwachs, 1939, p.814). Being thus “programmed”, most people tend to “actively and creatively make use of what the global media system offers them to construct their own local culture and identity” (Van Poecke, 2000, p.128). The research of Marshall Van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson (2005) discovered that people tend to spend more time on the web surfing for information and contacts of interest to them. This behaviour is explained by bounded rationality, or limits to the capacity of information a human can process. As people are allowed to connect with one another with greater ease and precision through advances in information filtering technology such as search engines, they are noted to coalesce with greater tendency into distinct virtual communities. The outcome is the “balkanization” of the Internet into groups visibly predetermines by non-geographic specialised boundaries, such as common interests, status, economic class, academic discipline, religion, politics, ethnicity or family ties. Info-sphere is now abound with de-territorialized communities centred on common interests (Alonso and Oiarzabal, 2010). Along with the multitude of online communities are a growing number of communities online. In addition to globalisation and glocalisation – a term given by sociologist Roland Robertson (1995) to describe the mutual enrichment of global and local cultures (p.34), a recent general trend noted in global cultural transformation in the digital media age is the revitalisation of traditional and other local cultures (Hafez, 2007). These developments combine to suggest that some of the common interest communities are communities online with direct cultural lineage from the old tribal villages. Durkheim (1997) noted the resilience of collective consciousness as a “determinate system with a life of its own” (p.39). This comes from the diffusion of collective consciousness throughout the society it defines, which ensures its survival is not hinged on individual persons but the whole community. Whereas tribes were once “exploded” by print and emphasis on individual consciousness has severely weakened the influence of collective consciousness in modern society daily life, retribalization can awaken the literate man from his individualistic self-existence and re-attach him to the body of his tribe (McLuhan, 1964). Confirmation of this occurrence will come from identification of tribal village collective consciousness in potential globalised villages prospering in the global village ecology. A graphic summary of the recent major development stages of human society from the global economic order to globalised villages as determined by changes in communication technologies is illustrated in figure 3 below: Figure 3: From global economic order to globalised villages. Recent major development stages of human society as determined by changes in communication technologies. 2.2 Understanding the Overseas Chinese 2.2.1 Overseas Chinese & the Internet The use of the Internet by the Chinese diaspora has attracted growing research interest in recent years. An area of focus is the Internet’s contribution to the acculturation of Chinese migrants in their host environments in North America, Oceania and Singapore (Yang, Wu, Zhu, & Southwell 2004; Chen 2005; Campbell & Zeng 2006). Another is how Chinese migrants maintain links with China through frequent use of Internet platforms like instant messaging, Yahoo groups, bulletin board system (BBS), newsgroups and online magazines (Chen 2005; Xie, 2005; Chan, 2006 and 2010; Lam, 2009). Strong support of the Chinese abroad towards Chinese nationalistic discourse is highlighted in a handful of studies. For example, the controversial anti-China protests and rallies during the 2008 Olympic global torch relays sparked intense debates on a website popular with Chinese students and professionals in the US, whose users even organised their own counter-demonstrations (Yang, 2010). Based on observations of similar activities, Sheng Ding concluded that “both domestic and overseas Chinese Netizens tend to embrace the traditional Chinese concept of ‘big family’ in cyberspace” (2007, p.641) and labelled the “Chinese emigrants who utilize the Internet to organize their diasporic communities and to maintain strong sentimental and material links with China” as the “Chinese digital diaspora” (2010, p.3). Significantly, these researches on Internet use by the Chinese diaspora are concentrated virtually on recent migrants. They belong to a group known to scholars as “new migrants” (新移民, xin yimin), who left the PRC to study or work abroad after the liberalisation of relevant policies and laws in the country in the 1980s (Chan, 2010). According to data from the United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2012), the annual number of international migrants from the PRC grew from 376,361 in 1990 to 685,775 in 2010. The profile of the new migrants differs in many ways from the earlier waves of overseas Chinese. They come from different provinces of China and are homogenously Mandarin-speaking (Lee, 2007). In addition, a large section of them have high school, college or advanced professional qualifications (Ding, 2010), which gives them occupational and geographical mobility, and incites them to form voluntary organisations along professional and alumni networks (Liu, 2005; Chan, 2006). The most notable difference between the new migrants and the overseas Chinese is that they subscribe to a pan-Chinese identity forged on the modern PRC state and the official rhetoric and national symbols of Beijing, whereas the communities of the latter identify the native-place village of their ancestors (侨乡, qiaoxiang) as the centres of their cultural identity (Nyíri, 1999, as cited in Chan 2006). The PRC nationalistic identity “tends to play a more dominant role in the identity options” even in the cyber-communities of the new migrants (Chan, 2006, pp.25-26). The new migrants, even for those who lived abroad for many years, continue to identify themselves as Zhongguoren 中国人 (“Chinese national”), and reject being known as “overseas Chinese” or Huaren 华人, the cultural-based term for people of Chinese ethnicity used outside the PRC (Lee, 2007). The idea of diaspora is rooted in the Greek word for the expression, which refers to “a scattering or sowing of seeds” (“Diaspora”, n.d.). The conventional understanding of a diaspora presumes of cultural homogeneity amongst all people originating from a specific geographical homeland. However this does not always hold true. A more exact alternative proposed by Brian Axel (2004) is to consider the diaspora not as “a community of individuals dispersed from a homeland”, but as a “globally mobile category of identification” (p.27), as this shifts the focus from “what is the diaspora context” (p.29) to “who… claims to be the subject of diaspora” (p.32) (emphasis added). Even though the new migrants accept that they have common ethnicity with Chinese from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia, they perceive these other groups as culturally peripheral and disagreeable with their own ideas of “Chinese-ness” (Yu, 2005). On the other hand, a series of interviews conducted with Chinese born and raised, or lived most of their lives in societies outside Greater China disclosed that despite “loud and clear” emotional bond to the Chinese culture and ethnicity, the overseas Chinese have “virtually no emotional attachment” to the PRC in the political dimension of identity and lack “favorable comments about contemporary China” (Wei, 2002, p.365). The new migrants’ objection to be counted within the Chinese diaspora and overseas Chinese’s disinclination to see the PRC as their own reveals a clear gulf separating the two groups. At the centre of the divide is a different conception of China that the overseas Chinese retain. In the past, the people from Guangdong and Fujian did not refer to China as Zhongguo 中国, or the Chinese people as Zhongguoren, but the “Land of Tang” (唐山, Tangshan) and the “people of Tang” (唐人, Tang’ren) (Wilkinson, 2000). Many regional vernacular-speaking overseas Chinese do this till today. These references are traceable to the Tang dynasty (618–907CE), which was the era when literate culture first flourished in the southern coast of China. The Teochew people honour Tang official Han Yu 韩愈 (768-824 CE) as the Lord of Literature 韩文公, in acknowledgement of his contribution in introducing Confucius scholarship into the region. While “Tang” would certainly qualify as a civilisation or national identity, it was insufficiently strong to supersede regional vernacular cultural identities deep-seated amongst the overseas Chinese. This is consistent with McLuhan’s (1964) assessment that the Chinese script, which places importance on meaning and perception in its ideogrammic characters, is less effective in its ability to detribalise than the phonetic alphabet, which stresses on semantic uniformity. However, McLuhan’s appraisal was made without consideration of major reforms to the Chinese written language made after China’s establishment as a republic in 1912. Pronunciation of written Chinese was standardised throughout the country for the first according to Guoyu (and later Putonghua), and Classical Literary Chinese (文言文, wenyan wen) that was the style of formal writing for centuries was displaced with vernacular style writing. Furthermore, the Chinese ideograms were annotated first with the zhuyin fuhao注音符号 set of phonetic symbols and tone marks, and subsequently the Latin script-based guoyu luomazi 国语罗马字 and the hanyu pinyin 汉语拼音 romanisation systems (Chen, 2008). These measures drastically altered the ways the Chinese written language was learned and used, and aligned it closer with the alphabetical system in terms of sponsoring uniformity of individuals and the propagation of nationhood. Conspicuously, studies on members of the Chinese digital diaspora show their strong preference for use of Web 1.0-based utilities. For instance, the websites identified to be most popular with the Chinese digital diaspora, including boxun.com, cnd.org, creaders.org, mitbbs.org, mitbbssg.com, muzi.com and wenxuecity.com, are unvaryingly filled with Chinese language text contents, such as news articles, opinions and bulletin board forum exchanges. Utilisation of images, videos and other forms of multimedia presentations on these sites is negligible or non-existent. This discloses that the Chinese digital diaspora are highly imbued with a literate character, which explains their nationalistic pre-dispositions. Telling apart the different communities within the Chinese diaspora is essential to ensure that research findings for one of them are not used to explain issues related to other groups (Gao, 2009). The new migrants and overseas Chinese are dissimilar communities, or clusters of communities, whose members are culturally heterogeneous and further differentiated by separate experiences in recent history. Previous findings about the use of the Internet by the Chinese digital diaspora should therefore not be presupposed as applicable to the overseas Chinese communities. 2.2.2 The Overseas Chinese Collective Conscious The traditional basic social unit in China is the family clan, and the village was the prevalent form of community until modernisation in recent decades. As late as the 1930s the Chinese society was decisively tribal and national consciousness exercised only limited influence. This was vividly pointed out in the contemporary writing of Nobel Prize Literate nominee Lin Yutang (1943):   “Chinese society is cut up into little family units, inside which exists the greatest communistic cooperation, but between the units no real bond of unity exists, except the state. As China has stood practically alone and unchallenged, even this sense of state, or nationalism, has not been greatly developed. So family consciousness has taken the place of social consciousness and national consciousness in the West. Some form of nationalism is developing, but no one need be alarmed. The “yellow peril” can come from Japan but not from China. Deep down in our instincts we want to die for our family, but we do not want to die for our state” (p.184). Wenhua 文化, the Chinese term for “culture”, reveals the literate (wen 文) foundation of the Chinese cultural identity. The Chinese identity was thus of secondary importance to the vernacular communities in Guangdong and Fujian, for whom the family clan was of utmost important. This applies also to the Teochew “Teochew” is the postal map spelling for the historical Chaozhou prefecture. It is based on local vernacular and remains in use amongst the overseas Chinese. Variant spellings include Teochiu, Diojiu, Taejiu, Tiuchiu and Tiochiu, and the equivalent terms used in Hong Kong and Vietnam are Chiuchow and Trieuchau respectively. community, which is the subject of this study. The homeland of the Teochew people is centred on the Han River delta, in eastern Guangdong. The region was governed during imperial times as the Chaozhou prefecture. This historical administrative unit approximates in geography and culture with Chaoshan, an area that is currently divided into the three prefectural-level cities of Chaozhou, Shantou (more popularly referred outside the PRC by its native name Swatow) and Jieyang. The Teochew people are distinguished by spoken language and culture even from the Cantonese, Hakka and Hokkien Chinese communities living in the same and adjacent provinces. Many expressions of Teochew culture, such as culinary art, gongfu tea culture, ceramic craft, embroidery, wood carving, music and architecture, date from the Tang and Song dynasties (7th to 13th century A.D.) or earlier. The Teochews have strong beliefs in ancestral worship, animism, folk deities, fengshui, Taoism and Buddhism, but are less ardent followers of Confucius teachings compared to the Chinese near the ancient imperial centres. The independent spirit of the Teochew community was summed up by a 19th century British observer who wrote: “The people of this city and department are noted for their independent and turbulent spirit, as well as their enterprise and industry. They rank among those who are sparing in their allegiance to the court of Peking, and seldom yield up the quota of revenue justly due to the emperor” (Blackie, 1868, p.90). Chaozhou prefecture was a place of much banditry, piracy and rebellions during late imperial Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties (Lin & Cai, 2002). This followed after prohibition of private maritime trade by the Ming emperors disrupted its population’s flow of wealth from the export of fine porcelain via the Maritime Silk Road. This initiated migration to Southeast Asia, which continued through Qing as a result of native opposition to Manchurian rule, ceaseless instability and poverty. The exodus peaked in the period between Shantou’s opening as a Treaty Port in 1860 to the founding of the PRC in 1949 (Wu, Ou & Lin, 1989). At present, the number of people of Teochew descent living overseas exceeds 10 million (“Teochew people,” n.d.). Amongst them, more than five million reside in Thailand, and overseas Teochew communities in excess of 100,000 are found also in Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, the US, France, Laos, Canada, and Australia (Du, 1994). Statistically one out of every four overseas Chinese is a Teochew. Measured against the present total population of 13.8 million in the three cities in Chaoshan (Chaozhou Government, 2012; Statistical Bureau of Shantou, 2011; Statistical Bureau of Jieyang, 2011), the diasporic rate of the global Teochew community is higher than 40 per cent. Descriptions in the late 19th century reveal that the population around Shantou was divided into countless autonomous villages, inhabited by people belonging to the same ancestral lineage and living together for many generations (Fielde, 1887). The core importance of the native-place village and the family clan to the identity of every individual is reflected in the customary Teochew practice of making self-introductions with reference to the name of his village and surname (Chen Shengsheng [ Editor-in-charge, Research Centre for Chaoshan History and Culture], personal communication, December 10, 2012). For example a person with the surname Zeng 庄 living in Pengziu蓬洲 would describe himself as a Pengziu-Zeng蓬洲庄 (Note: names in Italics are in phoneticised Teochew) Due to the situation of political anarchy and extreme poverty at the time, the strong identity of the tight-knit clans was frequently the source of intense and endless feuds and violence (Scarth, 1860; Thomson, 1898; Fang, 2000). The relevance of the village-clan identity did not diminish for the Chinese who migrated overseas. For the Teochew people, it was carried even into afterlife, as seen from their practice in Singapore where the spiritual tablets of the deceased were inscribed with the names of the person, his/her family, as well as county and village of origin. Based on information on ancestral spirit tablets belonging to Teochew leaders of Ghee Hin Kongsi (a 19th century Triad organisation in Singapore), obtained from Chng, D.K.Y. (1999). The early Chinese migrants also consciously tried to duplicate the structures of social organisations at home by forming self-help associations along the lines of surname-based ancestral lineage, or native-place loyalties at the village, county or cluster of counties levels (Dujunco, 1994). However, being few in numbers and far way in foreign lands, these initiatives were not always adequate and the overseas Chinese eventually gravitate towards fellow migrants of the same spoken vernaculars to establish the huiguans, which institutionalised systems of mutual support in social welfare and financial assistance. For Chinese migrants living in Southeast Asia from the 19th century to mid-20th century, correspondence via letters was the sole means of communication with their home villages. However this could only be done periodically for most people who were low-wage earners, as they were illiterate and had to hire the services of professional letter-writers. As a result, the huiguans and other vernacular-based self-help associations at their place of settlement became influential centres of community identity. The result was the convergence of the overseas Chinese into communities based on regional vernacular cultures. This is exemplified in the way the Teochews habitually christen their huiguans as “the Association of the Teochew Eight Counties” 潮州八邑会馆 (or a variant dependent on the number of counties represented) (“Chaozhou Huiguan”, n.d.; “Chaozhou Bayi”, n.d.), The gradual change in which the vernacular cultural identity became more important to the overseas Chinese than their village-clan identity was evident on a few occasions in the first two decades of the 20th century when Chaozhou prefecture was badly hit by separate incidences of natural disasters. In contrast to the past when family clans strived to injure one another, the leaders of the Teochew huiguans in major cities in China and Southeast Asia responded to the calamities by pooling aid resources, coordinating relief efforts, and even performing duty of oversights over incapacitated or incompetent local officials (Goodman, 1995). The common experiences of being in diaspora caused the formerly disparate overseas Chinese to develop collective consciousness centred on the regional vernacular cultures, which transcended their village consciousnesses. This form of collectivism is stressed in a popular saying amongst the overseas Teochews, “潮州人，自己人，打死没相干” (transliteration in Teochew: Teochew-nang, gaginang, pah-si bho-siang-gang), which translates as “fellow Teochews, we are one people, nothing will ever change this”. The “gaginang” 自己人 (literally “my/our own people”) identity promoted in the maxim is strictly restricted to the Teochew community and is not even applied to other Chinese. The endurance of this community identity is exhibited in the Gaginang name of a non-profit group registered in 2003 to promote Teochew culture in the US and on the Internet. The isolation of the PRC from the outside world during the 1950s till the early 1980s effectively severed communications between the populations in Guangdong and Fujian and their foreign-based relations. The prolonged political situation also stifled the emergence of Chinese regional vernaculars broadcast media, with the exception of the Cantonese entertainment industry in Hong Kong. The Teochew community was badly affected as Chaozhou prefecture was practically sealed off because of the military standoff between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang in nearby Taiwan (Dujunco, 1994). During this period, the Teochews in mainland China were prevented by political pressure and financial constraint from contacting family members and relatives abroad, even though they were allowed to receive letters and remittances from them (Chen Shengsheng, personal communication, December 10, 2012). Yet even this did not lead to the demise of the regional vernacular collective consciousness. For instance, a study on the Teochew migrant community in Hong Kong in the late 1970s found that it was “separated from other groups by well-defined boundaries” and survived as “the most highly organized ethnic group” in the territory, even though its people faced the pressures of discrimination from the local and other communities (Spark, 1977, p.356). 2.3 Research Questions According to Anderson (2006), “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined” and communities should therefore be differentiated “not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (p.6). The focus of this study is to explore the im Teochew Facebook group as a potential globalised village, so as to understand if and how its members from the overseas Teochew community actively exhibit and retain the collective consciousness of the regional vernacular culture. This study is guided by the following two research questions: RQ1. In what ways can the collective consciousness of a community online be seen in its Facebook group to show that it is a globalised village? RQ2. How do members of a globalised village use the Facebook group to preserve and promote their tribal identity?  CHAPTER 3: Methodology This chapter discusses the methodology and procedures with respect to data collection and analysis in this study. 3.1 Netnography Research Method Netnography, also known as online ethnography, is the method of research used in this study. Ethnography is the “descriptive accounts of non-literate peoples” (Radcliffe-Brown, 1909, cited in Wolcoot, 1999, p.9), as well as “the work of describing culture” with the purpose of understanding the way of life from the native point of view (Spradley, 1979, cited in Du Plooy, 1995, p.115). When adopted into communication studies, ethnography has two foci: particularistic - “description and understanding of communicative behaviour in specific cultural settings”, and generalising - “the formulation of concepts and theories upon which to build a global metatheory of human communication” (Saville-Troike, 2008, pp.1-2). Robert Kozinets (2010) described netnography as an adaptation of “participant-observational ethnographic procedures” for research in online or Internet fieldwork (p.74). Taking into account discernible differences between online and “offline” social environments, it was developed to provide guideline to the contingencies of online community and culture that manifest through computer-mediated communication (p.191). In netnography, online community conversations and other Internet discourses are observed in a naturalistic and unobtrusive manner (p.56.) and the data collected are analysed using an inductive approach (p.118). The five key phases of a netnographic research project are (Kozinets, 2010, pg.61): Definition of research questions, social sites or topics to investigate; Community identification and selection; Community participant-observation and data collection; Data analysis and iterative interpretation of findings; and Write, present and report research findings. The remaining sections of this chapter elaborate on stages ii, iii and iv in this study. 3.2 Identification & Selection of Community Identification and selection of a site for fieldwork is a critical part of a netnographic project. Under usual circumstances, a suitable online community meets the following criteria (Kozinets, 2010, p.89): Relevant – they relate to the research focus and question(s); Active – they have recent and regular communications; Interactive – they have a flow of communications between participants; Substantial –they have a critical mass of communicators and an energetic feel; Heterogeneous – they have a number of different participants; and Data-rich – offering more detailed or descriptively rich data At the start of this study, im Teochew was evaluated and found to have met the necessary requirements for suitability. im Teochew is first and foremost relevant to the research focus and questions of this study. Like the other overseas Chinese communities, the Teochew people are distinctively “tribal” with a culture centred on its regional vernacular. Though the Chinese literate culture is traditionally venerated in Chaozhou prefecture, reports from the late 19th century unveiled the situation where the overwhelming majority of its population, including men of great wealth, were unable to read or write (Fielde, 1887; Fang, 2000). Hence instead of written literature, the essence of the literate culture was transmitted outside the circle of the literati in oral forms, such as spoken proverbs and idioms, folksongs, narrative songs, public story-telling and the theatrical opera. Spontaneity and collective participation are also the characteristics of im Teochew. Although the group created in September 2006 is the largest community in Facebook belonging to the Teochew people with over 2700 members (as of 8 October 2012), it has no obvious leader and does not benefit from the sponsorship of any established social or commercial organisation. Its vibrancy stems from free will contributions of members, who mostly share no visible social linkages apart from possible connection to a collective consciousness. The im Teochew wall shows the group to be alive with activity virtually throughout the year 2012. On average there was at least one new post a day, and free flow of “likes” and comments. The posts were made by a spread of 152 different users. Information from the communication contents and the members’ profiles further reveal the active members to be aged from their late teens to their 50s, and from at least 16 different countries in 4 continents. Some of the members prefer to write in English, others incline towards Chinese. These were signs of the community as active, interactive, substantial and heterogeneous. Data from im Teochew were rich in many ways, not just in quantity. The discussions of its members range from long debates about the Teochew identity, to the sharing of photographs of taken from travels to the Chaoshan region and Southeast Asia, home-made videos, Teochew rap music and the launch of an iPhone app for English speakers of Teochew. The conversations flow in a multi-lingual mix where English, Teochew, Mandarin, Cantonese, Thai, Khmer, Indonesian, French and German were featured in varying degrees. Although text messages were the basic form of exchange, almost two-thirds of the posts contained multimedia contents (including videos or photographs) or URL hyperlinks to external websites or online articles. 3.3 Community Participant-Observation & Data Collection A netnographer fulfils his role as a participant-observer in the community he examines. Opinions differ regarding the extent of a researcher’s participation in the field. However, complete unobtrusive monitoring and data downloading without social contact has the disadvantage of limiting the researcher to a superficial understanding of the community culture (Kozinets, 2010). On the other hand active participation without going to the extent of leading may bring the benefits of allowing the researcher to be visible in the community and to contribute to its members. The researcher in this study is an overseas Teochew and a member of im Teochew since 2008. His normal activity in the community is mostly restricted to monitoring and this was not deliberately altered during the period of study. Using a Facebook account under his personal name, the researcher in the normal discourse of his involvement uploaded 0 post and made 8 comments on the group wall in the entire year of 2012. Some of the comments pertained to providing local information around Shantou where the researcher is based. In addition, the researcher posted 4 times and made 2 related comments using a separate Facebook account under the moniker “Teochew Letters”. Teochew Letters refers to family correspondences sent in the past by overseas Teochews when they remitted their earnings home through a communal industry known as Qiaopi 侨批. The researcher was part of a project team from the Shantou University Cheung Kong School of Journalism and Communications to create the website www.teochewletters.org on behalf of the Research Centre for Chaoshan History and Culture in Shantou to raise public awareness about Qiaopi. The posts and comments made under the Teochew Letters account pertain to publicity for the launch of the website in June 2012, and do not construe a deliberate effort to influence the outcome of this study. Netnographic data consists of three kinds: archival data, elicited data, and fieldnote data (Kozinets, 2010, p.95). This study emphasised on the collection of archival data, which especially valuable in revealing the cultural baseline of an online community because of the wealth of conversational cultural data it contains, such as transcription of posted text, image, and other messages (p.104). In the context of a Facebook group, archival data is found on its wall where members post text messages, photographs (or other graphic images), photo albums, videos or file attachments. Furthermore, the conversations on the wall extent to the “like” button on each post which other members can click to display their approval, as well as follow-up text comments they can make. The text boxes for posts and comments allow unlimited number of words, URL links, Chinese characters, symbols and emoticons. Data collection was undertaken with the aim of bringing together a body of information that is comprehensive, and at the same time of a reasonable volume, so that this study might be carried out to meet its objectives in a feasible manner. The archival data collected was limited to posts uploaded on the im Teochew wall from January 1st to December 31st 2012, as well as “likes” and comments linked to them dating up to January 12th 2013. In total, information for 399 posts, 1136 “likes” and 2059 comments were gathered. The tasks of downloading and saving of data were undertaken in four months from October 2012 to January 2013. Screen images of the posts and comments were captured and saved using the Microsoft Office OneNote software. Owing to large file size, videos uploaded on the im Teochew wall, as well as videos, photograph albums, websites and webpages shared using URL links, were not downloaded, but instead reviewed online and noted down for content and key features. The posts were categorised, coded and indexed on an Excel spreadsheet. Each post was described according to the following details: Serial number of post; Date of post; Name of member who made the post; Category/subcategory of content type; Number of “likes” received; Number of comments received; Type of non-text content media, if any (for example, YouTube link, video, photograph, photo album, externally-linked article, etc); Origin of media content (for example, user-generated-content produced by member, user-generated-content not produced by member, content sourced from commercial media, social organisations, etc.); Written language(s) of the post, if any; and Audio language(s) in video/audio content, if any 3.4 Data Analysis & Iterative Interpretation of Findings To comprehend the culture of a community, a netnographer concentrates on the meaning behind people’s interactions through various technologically-mediated means, rather than the content of their communication. Netnographic data is analysed in a pragmatic-interactionist approach, whereby the unit of analysis considered is not the person, but the “speech act” or “utterance”, such as the posting of a photograph, a video or a URL link (Kozinets, 2010). Every utterance in the online environment is treated as akin to a social act in a social world. The meaning behind each social act is sought to be understood in the context of its appropriate social worlds, both online and offline. In the course of data analysis, there were 4 of the posts that were found to be without text message and their attachments were removed or blocked from public view. As their contents could not be determined at all, they were left out from the analysis. Their omission was assessed to bear negligible impact on the overall outcome of the study, since these 4 posts and the 1 “like” and 3 comments related to them, constitute only a small fraction of activities in the im Teochew community. Meanwhile, there were 19 comments that were ascertained as captions of photographs belonging to the posts. As these were made by the same members who uploaded the photographs, they were counted and analysed not as comments, but as text messages of their posts. In the end, data analysis and interpretation was based on 395 posts, 1135 “likes” and 2037 comments. On average each of post received 2.9 “likes” and 5.2 comments. The posts were examined qualitatively to uncover obvious trends, repetitive patterns and relationships with regards to the content of discussions in the group and the way the utterance were made in terms of language and media used. Upon repetitions of the categorisation, coding and analysis processes, popular topics of discussion in the Facebook group as well as tendencies in its members’ communication behaviour were surfaced. Using the two research questions as guides, the findings were grouped provisionally into themes corresponding to the research questions. These interpretations were then re-examined and clarified during several rounds of data sieving, before the final phase of writing, presentation and reporting.  CHAPTER 4: Findings This chapter discusses with respect to the two research questions, findings from the analysis and interpretation of data from 395 posts made on the im Teochew Facebook group wall in the year 2012. 4.1 In What Ways Can The Collective Consciousness Of A Community Online Be Seen In Its Facebook Group To Show That It Is A Globalised Village? 4.1.1 Members Subscribe to a Vernacular-Centred Core Identity An overseas Teochew holds multiple identities as a Teochew, a Chinese and a member of his/her country of residence and local community. However, during their communications in im Teochew, group members subscribed almost universally to Teochew as their core identity. For instance, there were 16 posts in which members directly made a self-introduction or posted an opening conversational line to initiate themselves into the community. In 11 of these posts the members addressed themselves and/or the other members as “Teochew”, “Teochew Nang” or “Teochew people”, while there were two other representations of “Teochew Chinese from Thailand” and “Diojiu heavy metaler or punk rocker”. Similarly in another subcategory of 33 posts in which members inquired to locate other members living in a specific geographical region or city, 23 referred to “Teochew”, “Teochew Nang”, “Teochew people” or “Teochewnese”. In the remaining 10 posts, there were 9 where the other party was addressed in the generic sense as “anyone” or “you”, and 1 in which the member looked for “Teochew Canadians”. The qualification of one’s identity by nationality, such as a “Vietnamese Teochew”, “Teochew American” or “French-Teochew-Cambodian”, is on the whole not uncommon within group. However, nationality is used a marker to indicate one’s place of residence or family background in the previous generation. None of the Teochew-nationality identities appear strong enough to be the basis of distinct sub-cultures, or to cause fraction within the community. The defunct Chaozhou prefecture is commonly referred after the 1980s as Chaoshan, the contraction of the Mandarin names of its two key cities Chaozhou and Shantou. The Teochew population in the PRC, especially the younger generations, subsequently call themselves Chaoshan people (sometimes translated into English as “Chaoshanese”). Many overseas Teochews are however ignorant and alienated from this variant identity despite the general acceptance of change in their ancestral homeland. This is seen in a conversational thread started by an American-born member. [Excerpt 1a] JKB Names of members are abbreviated to ensure privacy of their identities in this paper. > Teochew people in mainland don't identify themselves as teochew amymore. Rather identify themselves as chaoshan people.why?” The query led to a chain of 53 comments that included explanations about the definition of Chaoshan and reasons behind its adoption. Eventually no person made the case for the Teochew identity to be dropped in favour of Chaoshan. On the contrary, some members, including who disclosed in comments elsewhere that he grew in Shantou until school-age, stated their preference to retain the Teochew identity. [Excerpt 1b] NT > (JKB), in my experience talking to mainlanders, most non-TC people in China seem to only be familiar with the term “潮州人” [“Teochew people”] [...] the only people in the Chaoshan region who ever use the term 潮汕[“Chaoshan”] are the Chaoshan people themselves. JKB > (NT) - yes you are right about non-tc only familiar with潮州人 [“Teochew people”] because I was trying to find them when I was in Beijing haha. I don't know much about who's chaoshan or teochew i don't see much difference. I'm going to continue using 潮州 [“Teochew”] because that is what I am familiar with. (continued…) XFS >  I'll spare you the details. The creation of Chaoshan is entirely politically motivated. I go by Chaoshan in China and Teochew abroad. 4.1.2 Members Are Highly Engaged in Discussions about Vernacular Culture Traditional culture is the manifestation of a tribe village’s collective consciousness. Its emphasis within a community is an important indicator of the collective consciousness being present. In order to gain insight into how significant the members of im Teochew regard their culture, the 395 posts analysed were grouped into five broad categories and further subcategories of discussion contents. These categories are namely: Culture - contents related to various aspects of traditional Teochew culture); Community - contents containing information about contemporary Teochew communities and prominent individuals both overseas and in China; Social Interaction - contents related to activities of members to build social ties with one another on the basis of being fellow Teochews, both offline and online; Chinese - contents related to aspects of the broader Chinese cultural identity, including traditional Chinese festivals, as well as discussions specifically related to the PRC; and Miscellaneous - contents that are advertising/spams, or of miscellaneous nature with no obvious relevance to the Teochew or Chinese identities. A table showing the number of posts in each category and subcategories, as well as corresponding number of “likes” and comments, is included for reference as Appendix 1 of this study. The Culture category was found to contain 113 posts, or 28.6 per cent of all posts analysed. However, these posts garnered 40.7 per cent of all “likes” and 44.9 per cent of comments. By comparison a typical Culture category post received 4.1 “likes” and 8.1 comments, whereas an average Miscellaneous category post attracted just 0.8 “like” and 0.8 comment. Food & culinary culture and vernacular were the two most popular Culture subcategories, with 49 and 31 posts respectively as well as high totals of “likes” and comments. Although there were only 7 posts concerning the Teochew identity, but this subcategory was the most prolific in terms of inciting comments (this is further elaborated in the point following immediate after). The im Teochew members also consider important the Lunar New Year. During the frame of the traditional two-week celebrations, there were 26 postings of group greetings. This reflects a continuation of a convention from the past when this time of the year is regarded by the Teochews as the most auspicious. Aside from regular discourse between members, there were 13 posts in the Culture category belonging to members seeking support or publicity for three projects undertaken outside Facebook. The first project was Teochew Letters (潮汕侨批, Chaoshan Qiaopi). This involved a website (www.teochewletters.org) created by a group of students from the Cheung Kong School of Journalism and Communications of Shantou University to introduce a historical form of family correspondence combined with remittance sent by Teochew immigrants in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong to their families in the Chaozhou Prefecture. The relevant posts publicised the website and shared its short documentary videos. The second project is the creation of an iPhone app known as “What Teochew Say?” Described as “The world's first Teochew language Dictionary and Phrasebook app for the iPhone”, it is a mobile application developed by two US-based Teochews linked to the Gaginang non-profit group to help English speakers to learn or improve their spoken Teochew. Posts were made by its creator and a supporter to raise awareness about fund-raising for the project and the subsequent launch of the app. The third project was a 2013 calendar featuring the traditional Chinese twenty-four solar terms (廿四节气), produced by the Johor Baru Teochew Eight District Association in Malaysia. The calendar was introduced through posts that shared the various aspects of Teochew customs and culture it featured, such as the key dates on the Chinese lunisolar calendar, the tshuk-hue-hng (出花园, chu huayuan, literally “Leaving the Garden”) adult initiation rite, and the Teochew opera. Every one of the posts related to these 3 projects was given at least 1 “like”, and they received on average 7.2 “likes”. Most of the 21 comments related to them were either queries or positive notes of encouragement. These reflected a fair degree of support given to the three projects. This however was not extended to other posts pertaining to traditional Teochew beliefs, customs & rituals, arts & performances, and history. With the exclusion of the posts from the Teochew Letters and the twenty-four solar terms calendar, three subcategories produced together only 18 posts, which averaged low 1.3 “likes” and 1.6 comments. This shows that the overall interest of members did not apply to all aspects of Teochew culture, particularly those that may be deemed to relate more to the past than to modern society. 4.1.3 Vernacular Cultural Identity Generate Most Intense Debates The Teochew identity subcategory had only 7 posts, including 2 that were URL links to online encyclopaedia entries that received no follow-up comment at all. However discussions on issues related to who, or what is a Teochew, in the remaining 5 posts were the most intensely debated in all subcategories. They received in total 316 comments, or 63.2 comments each. One of these posts alone was responsible for 214 comments (or 10.5 per cent of all comments analysed). It began with the view of a member on the need to keep the Teochew blood “pure”. [Excerpt 2a] JS> I know people might think am race when I say this but I too stress the importance of keeping the Teochew blood pure! Sorry for those who might get offended by this. It’s just me. The post triggered an initial conversation amongst several members lasting for about a week. Comments ranged from voices of support, to lamentations over the difficulty to befriend other Teochews in certain locations, disappointment over the fading of the Teochew vernacular and culture due to assimilation into other societies, and lists of desired criteria for potential partners. Scepticism was expressed if Teochew blood is or can be kept “pure”, and some members directed attention instead on preserving the Teochew identity through keeping alive its language and culture. [Excerpt 2b] TML >  Lol. It's kind of hard to determine what "pure" means anyway. Teo Chew people exist all over the world! My parents and their siblings have somehow, for the most part, managed to marry people of Teo Chew origins. There aren't very many where I live, but I hope I'm that lucky one day. I mean, even if I don't end up marrying a Teo Chew guy, I will make sure my children know the language and culture. Another member AA offered a similar view: [Excerpt 2c] AA>  Wherever we may now be; citizens of whatever country. We have sadly left our roots behind in Motherland, never ever to return, for the simple fact that we cannot fit in. We have all become modernised and westernised. We marry people of other dialect groups and other races, we are educated and speak English, American, French, and the lingos of adopted nations, and descendants hardly use our dialect and don't practice our culture. We are slowly but surely losing our heritage. But for those of us who care, we must try our best to preserve whatever that is worth preserving for the sake of keeping our dialect and culture alive for the generations to come. Many months later the thread was revived in response to a separately posted proposal for a Teochew dating site. As evidence of social media supporting the revival of tribal identity, the conversational parties again backed the idea of maintaining purity, but some took offence at inference that those not of “pure blood” deserve less equal status. This is illustrated in the remonstration of a female member, who revealed that she is married to a black man with two daughters, against a suggestion that a hypothetical African baby adopted into a Teochew family would be at most an “honorary gaginang”. [Excerpt 2d] SKC > OMG, people, what are you guys talking about? I am married to a black guy, my daughters do not look like me, they have curly hair, yet they speak teo-chew even better than some of their cousins, so does that mean they are only" honorary gaginang"? What a stupid conversation is this SNL> (SKC): apologies for the labels and sounding elitist - never intended that way... my reference was based on the scenario of being teochew through adoption versus through blood relations SKC> (SNL), thanks for your reply. I have always been proud of being Teo-Chew, because to my mind, our "communauty", our culture has gone through so many dark time in history, and our strength is based on an open spirit that has allowed us to adapt ourselves wherever we are, and to absorb the qualities of any country we live in. If you want to preserve our "culture", you also have to keep that in mind. No need to keep the blood pure, the spirit is all. 4.1.4 Members View Vernacular as Critical to Their Identity In the discussions about the Teochew identity, the view of the vernacular being critical in the Teochew identity was surfaced more than once. A post suggesting the Teochew people to be a “dying species” met several responses that this will not happen as long as Teochews make the effort to pass on their language to the future generations. [Excerpt 3] GN > hahah I dont know anyone who speaks this Ianguage, other than family. i agree QXJY > at least before i die...our species aren’t dead yet... YKT > then you should contribute your effect to keep it alive. ☺ JKB > Nah. As long as I am still breathing, we ain’t dying. Teochew is very much alive especially in Southeast Asia and of course China. SNL > probably more like NEGLECTING our duties to keep the traditions and language intact for future generations to embrace... JKB > True. Its only dying if you Iet it. MT > Word. The dialect is slowly dying unless we pass it on ☺ I have to admit something, when I was a kid i feIt embarassed speaking teochew in public.... even around other chinese that spoke cantonese/mandarin. I disregarded what my grandmother said in passing on our language because I didn’t want to feel Iike an outsider. However, in my college years I began embracing yet! TML > Sadly, my parents don’t understand why I’m so focused on learning Teo Chew. They’re glad I care about it, but they think it’s more important that I maintain my Vietnamese... A separate conversation about the female star of James Bond movie Skyfall Berenice Marlohe possibly having partial Teochew heritage through her Chinese-Cambodian father led to an exchange on the necessity of fluency in the vernacular before a person can be counted as a Teochew. [Excerpt 4] TZK > I doubt she can even speak teochew JS > @(TZK)! She can’t speak niter Teochew or Cambodian lolz! But she can speak French, English, Arab, and Spanish lol TZK > then wat teochew nang is she, she properly can’t say, wa si teochew nang [Note: “wa si Teochew nang” means “I am a Teochew”] JS > @(TZK)! to be honest! I don’t know what kind of teochew she is or what region her dad is from. TZK > wth, like tat stand be counted Teochew? NT > (TZK), many TC people who grow up outside of China know very Iittle TC. Some of them don’t even know where their grandparents come from, or that they are of TC blood, If anyone with a TC background wants to be recognized as a TC, I personally welcome them with open arms—whether or not they can speak the language well. TZK > There is no purpose in like doing tis if u cannot speak the dialect, then wats the use of being from the dialect Although there was in the end no consensus between the two points of view, an appreciation amongst members for a role of the vernacular in the cultural identity can seen from the large proportion of videos they shared having Teochew as audio language. While English was by far the most often used written medium in the group, members posted only 11 out of 75 videos with spoken audio had English as the sole audio language. In contrast, Teochew was the sole audio language in 44 videos and one of two main languages in 7 other videos. 4.1.5 Discussions on Community were also Popular Community is alongside Culture the second most popular category of posts in the im Teochew group. Approximately one third of all posts, “likes” and comments pertain to the Community category. The local community subcategory, which relate to information provided about the various overseas Teochew communities especially in Southeast Asia, accounted for the largest number of posts. Members from Malaysia were most lively in promoting about cultural activities taken or taking place in their neighbourhood, although there were also contributors from Singapore and the US in this aspect. Another key subcategory is related to contents about visits, or planned visits to the Chaoshan region. Besides posts that share travel photographs and videos, there were also queries about travel details, places of interest to visit and ways to locate ancestral villages or relatives, which resulted in a few lengthy conversations. Furthermore, the Community category consists also of posts that highlight Teochew presence in the media. Other than coverage on well-known ethnic Teochew celebrities, sports personalities or politicians, there were also frequent posting of links to contemporary Teochew vernacular entertainment and music videos, which were generally well-received by other members. 4.1.6 Members Have Ambivalent Attitude towards Literate Cultural Identity The most obvious expressions of the im Teochew members’ identity as Chinese are their festive greetings they send to one another on the group wall during the Lunar New Year. Apart from this however, they have at best an ambivalent attitude towards the Chinese cultural identity. With the exclusion of these greeting posts, there were only 16 posts belonging to the Chinese category, forming just 4.1 per cent of all posts analysed. These posts cover to an assortment of topics, such as greetings on the Mid-Autumn Festival and Winter Solstice, discussions about Chinese communities in Southeast Asia and the US, music videos, a Tang-era poem, a random chat about Hainan island being an ancient place of exile, and a URL link to an online English-Chinese dictionary. Overall they attracted low levels of attention, averaging 1.6 “likes” and 1.4 comments per post. Furthermore, the group members identify only remotely with the PRC. Mainland China was the topic of discussion in only 3 posts. One was a call to support China during the 2012 London Olympics, and it received two “likes”. The other two posts of less positive vibes contained links to social media contents from Hong Kong criticising people from the PRC. The only reaction they provoked was a single comment pointing out that the video from one of the links was in Cantonese (and not Teochew). Conspicuously, headline-grabbing news out of the PRC in 2012, including the change of national political leadership and territorial conflicts with Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam, were not mentioned in any discussion. Meanwhile, the im Teochew group appears to have little appeal to non-Teochew Chinese. Analysis of the posts and comments revealed the participation of only two non-Teochew Chinese members. One of them, who declared himself to be a Hakka, posted a single statement observing that “all teachew [sic] speak English in this forum”. The other, who disclosed that he usually identifies himself as a “Chinese”, appears to be active with the Gaginang non-profit group and gave his reason for involvement with the Teochew community online as “i just want to blend in and be accepted…” 4.1.7 Participation of Members were Self-Motivated Member participation in im Teochew can be characterised as open and egalitarian. In all 149 different members were responsible for the 395 posts analysed. The posts in the Culture category, which reflect most directly the collective consciousness of the community, were contributed by 56 separate people. Data revealed that active members were based in a host of countries, including the US, Canada, France, Germany, Serbia, UK, Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Hong Kong and China. Slightly more than a quarter of all posts analysed originated from 6 persons, who each posted more than 10 times. The most prolific member was responsible for 35 posts. However, this group of people do not have obvious linkages with one another outside the Facebook group. Moreover, the majority of their posts were photographs that did not appear to be shared with the intention of trying to dominate or influence discussions within the community. Likewise, there is no sign that the participation of members was directed by any authority within or outside the group. The group has an administrator, who happens to be its founder. During the 12-month period examined, the administrator posted only one video and commented in a number of separate other discussions, but not to the point of exceeding the levels of a normal member. Although there were visible prints of the Gaginang non-profit group and the Johor Baru Teochew Eight District Association on the im Teochew wall, these were mainly to inform about cultural or community events that had or were taking place. Moreover these posts were made by affiliated persons and not through official Facebook accounts of these two organisations. Evidently, communications within im Teochew are primarily spontaneous social actions of individuals. Their self-motivated participation suggests of collective consciousness being the driving force. 4.2 How Do Members Of A Globalised Village Use The Facebook Group To Preserve And Promote Their Tribal Identity? 4.2.1 Members Hold Social Dialogues with One Another By default of the Facebook user interface design, the elementary mode of communication in the social networking site is based on text. 311 posts (or 78.7 per cent of all posts analysed) contained a text message either as part of the main post or as a caption comment made immediately after the post. Typical of text-based computer mediated communication in social media, the vast of majority of these text messages are written in conversational style. They tend to be brief and seldom exceed two sentences in length. The style of writing is often casual, with adherence to grammar, punctuation and capitalisation rules regarded as optional and the use of text-speak and emoticons common. These posts evolve into text conversations when similarly informal responses are made by other members within minutes or many days after they appear on the group wall. An example, with the date and time of each post or comment shown in brackets, is shown below. [Excerpt 5] JG > Ok... I’m honestly saying this one last time... if I opened a Teochew dating site... would you attend? (12 December 2012 at 14:40) MCR > No. because I’m starting one as well...haha jk. (12 December 2012 at 14:58) TLMY > No, because my parents would kill me. I’m only 18. Lol. However, I do like the idea, and I want to know if people would join too. (12 December 2012 at 15:12) MCR > If there was a website to help you find a Teochew wife/husband, would you pay? (12 December 2012 at 15:19) SNL > attend? i’ll volunteer to be contestant!!☺ (12 December 2012 at 16:01) HT > open one noooow pleaaaase…☺ (15 December 2012 at 04:43) JT > wow ☺ (15 December 2012 at 09:56)  AN > depends if there is a ‘friends only’ option? lol, i think it’s weird when the sole purpose is to find dates, just makes me feel awkward, friends first, always. (20 December 2012 at 09:23) Yet “text conversation” is an inadequate description of the rich exchanges on the im Teochew wall as non-text content, such as URL links, photographs (including graphic images), photo albums, videos or file attachments, formed the core message of 258 posts (or 65.3 per cent of all posts analysed). 84 of these posts were even without any text message. With the convenience of social media utilities at their disposal, the use of text is no longer indispensible to communicate in social media. Taking into consideration the preparedness of members to highlight or reinforce their conversational points with multi-media or externally linked contents, the interactions on the im Teochew wall are more appropriately described as “social dialogues”, rather than text conversations. Besides flowing with images and external contents, these social dialogues sometimes also flow in the words of more than one language. English is the primary written medium. It is the sole written language of 199 posts, while there were 32 posts written in Chinese, 5 in French and 1 in German. In 14 posts, the text message was composed in improvised phonetic Teochew Note: An official romanisation system for Teochew was developed in the 1960s by the Guangdong Provincial government. It was modified by GGN into the Peng’im scheme to suit the use of English speakers. However neither system caught on in use with the general Teochew community. . In addition, 60 posts were articulated in mixtures of inputs from two or more written languages or phoneticised vernaculars, including English, Chinese, Vietnamese, phoneticised Teochew, French, phoneticised Mandarin (Hanyu Pinyin) and phoneticised Cantonese. The excerpt below shows an example of a social dialogue in im Teochew that is multi-media and multilingual at the same time. [Excerpt 6] AM > 清心丸 ‘Cheng Sim Yi’ | Teochew-style desserts Top of Form PBBB >  Wow...where can u find something like this? MA >  Yaowarat? KL >  My father love this one  AM >  Saun-Luang, Bangkok THAILAND https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=362615417099506&set=a.362615070432874.99486.118285054865878&type=3&theater เช็งซิมอี๊ | ลือลั่นสะท้านโลกันต์ “เช็งซิมอี๊” เป็นภาษาจีนแต้จิ๋ว มาจากคำว่า “เช็งซิม” ซึ่งแปลว่า “สบายใจ” บวกกับค...See more by: ครูกุ๊กชวนชิม KL >  Thank you! Will find out soon  PBBB >  Thank you so much Amporn! In exception to the case of social dialogues, there were 7 posts expressed in distinct literary style. 2 of these posts were Chinese poems given with English translations, 4 were short written features about traditional Teochew customs and culture from the 2013 calendar produced by the Johor Baru Teochew Eight District Association. The last post was a lengthy elaboration by a member his understanding about the meaning of the place-name “Teochew”. Significantly, 6 of these 7 non-conversational posts did not receive any feedback comment from other members. 4.2.2 Members Use Videos to Communicate in Their Mother Tongue The Teochew vernacular is traditionally represented in writing by the Chinese script, but this relationship has been considerably weakened since pronunciation of written Chinese was standardised according to Mandarin. This may explain why the 32 posts written solely in Chinese received relatively low average of 2.2 “likes” and 1.8 comments. In general, members in community, who predominantly reside in countries where Chinese is not written on the day-to-day basis, are more familiar with the alphabetical system. The use of phonetic alphabets to help them “speak” in Teochew thus became a natural option. The excerpt below illustrates a social dialogue that was carried out virtually entirely in phoneticised Teochew (translations in English given within [ ] brackets). [Excerpt 7] CMF > http://www.wowfashion24.de/ teochew oi, ngia si :-) [Teochew shoes, pretty till dead “Si” 死 (dead or death) is widely used in Teochew colloquial as a superlative, but is regarded by some as an inauspicious expression. ] QTH > Hahaa ching ngia mo ta ngia si [Haha very pretty, should not say “pretty till dead”] CMF > Haha, sorry, ching ngia [Haha, sorry, very pretty] YKT > teo ta ‘ngia zai’!!! [Should say, “absolutely beautiful”!] Phoneticised Teochew was used singularly or in combination with English and/or Chinese to compose the text message of 46 posts. However the use of phoneticised Teochew is largely limited to phrases or short sentences, such as greetings and thanking of other members, making Lunar New Year wishes or describing food items. The occasions when members actually conversed with one another in phoneticised Teochew are rare. This is because most Teochews are unfamiliar with the standard transliteration systems devised for their vernacular and the phoneticised Teochew they use are mostly self-improvisations. Consequently, they are awkward to comprehend when used to convey long sentences. The incompatibility of the Teochew vernacular with text is recognised by members, who turn instead to posting videos with Teochew as the audio language to satisfy their desire to communicate in their mother tongue. One of them was a member who shared a self-produced short video showing him introducing items in his bedroom using Teochew vernacular, and stated explicitly the reason for doing so. [Excerpt 8] VL > Sorry if the music is too loud, I’m always bumping it. Anyways, I made this video because I am not the greatest at typing out Teochew. Hope you guys enjoy it! In total there were 75 videos shared in im Teochew that featured oral conversations or singing. Almost three-quarters of these videos had Teochew as an audio language to varying degree. Teochew was the sole audio language in 44 videos, and used to alongside other languages in 11 others. This shows a bias of the members towards oral communication in their mother tongue. The vast majority of these video (53 out of 55) had contents that pertain to the Culture and Community categories. 19 of them were music videos featuring Teochew folksongs popularised in the 1990s, original compositions by Teochews from Indonesia and the US and a Shantou-based rap group called Afinger Team (一指团体, Yizhi tuanti). The remaining videos cover a variety of entertainment and informational clips, such as cartoon animation, movie, television dramas, features of well-known Teochews, documentaries, reports on Malaysian Teochew community’s activities, lessons on learning to speak Teochew vernacular, and the Teochew Letters project. With the exception of 1 video that was uploaded directly on the group wall and another that was shared via an URL link to Chinese video-sharing site Youku, all the videos were hosted on YouTube. Only 6 of these videos were produced by the im Teochew members, while the rest originated either from commercial and public media sources, or other social media users. These shows that the videos were not created with the im Teochew group as the only intended audience. They also suggest of certain barriers that members experience or perceive in creating their own videos. 4.2.3 Members Post Photographs to Share about Culture & Community Posting photographs is a popular and convenient way of sharing amongst Facebook users. The posts analysed include 82 photograph posts. With the exception of four posts that linked to albums on other Facebook pages, the other photograph posts were albums or individual pictures (including some photographs that belonged in the same series) uploaded directly onto the group wall. 79 of the photograph posts have contents belonging to the Culture and Community categories. They include photographs about Teochew communities in Southeast Asia and Chaoshan, which were uploaded by members who were travelling or live in different parts of Southeast Asia. These images are important in leaving other members, especially those living outside Asia, visual impressions of their larger community and heritage. Traditional food and cuisine is another popular theme for photograph posts. Food-related photograph posts tend to lead to higher than usual engagement levels, as they evoke responses from members recalling about dishes prepared in their family or sharing about how a same dish might be prepared differently in another place. On average, each of the 37 food-related photograph posts received 5.3 “likes” and 6.3 comments. The excerpt below shows as a typical food-related photograph post. [Excerpt 9] LT >  'hair zhou and goa heong' LL >  my grandma makes the best. AN >  A while ago, we asked our local Teochew restaurant if they had any heh jo. They did, and were delicious. JT >  What's the difference between 'hair zhou and goa heong (ngoh hiang'? LL >  is this different from hu kung. excuse me tc typing. does that make any sense? haha if im correct thats fish paste of some sort in a tofu warpping? JT >  Prawn paste + minced pork in tofu wrapping. LT >  HaiR Zhou is generally pRawn paste ball wheReas ngoh hiang is minced pork with cheStnut wrap . Differing from videos that were shared, almost all the photographs (76 out of 82) were produced by the members who uploaded them. This shows that photographs relate directly to the members’ personal experiences with the Teochew culture or community in their lives. 4.2.4 Members Treat Group as Place of Belonging Majority of the members in im Teochew do not have obvious ties with one another outside the group, apart from their sharing of the Teochew cultural identity. This applies even to those who live in the same countries or cities. Yet despite this, group members show no apprehension in expressing good tidings to one another on both traditional Chinese and non-Chinese festive occasions. There was also willingness on the part of some members to take the initiative to induct themselves into the group by posting self-introductions or opening lines to social conversations. The 56 posts from these three subcategories make up over 1/8 of all posts analysed. On some occasions, members showed signs of identification or empathy with one another. This was demonstrated in a message posted asking after fellow group members in Hong Kong after the territory was hit by a severe typhoon: [Excerpt 10] KL > Tropical storm call ‘Vicente’ was hit HongKong hope anyone who live or stay in HK are safe! I’ll pray for you guys! KC > Thank you! I am Malaysian Teo Chew but working in HK. KL > Ur welcome ☺ oh okay so how is everything in HK right now? KC > just thriving after a No 10 typhoon. The extent to which members felt a sense of belonging in a group can be seen in another thread, where a member from Indonesia living in the US confided about missing her times with her family and friends at home (translations when necessary in English). [Excerpt 11] JA > just came back from downtown San Francisco, feel so bored living in United States, miss those chit chat times with my fellow friends and families at this time of the year....eventhough everytime we talk to each other it seems we have a big fight, tua sia pek au...:)))) [Note: “tua sia pek au” means “after a big fight”] JS >  Call me... KT > after tua sia pek au then min ang ang like guan kon ?? [“After the big fight, your faces are then as red as Lord Guan” Guan Gong is the Chinese deity of war, whose idol is often portrayed with a red-coloured face. ] CN > I am teochew nang in San Francisco. Love our dialect..and speak extremely well. Chat in the near future; ) While members do not appear to receive immediate tangible benefits from participation in im Teochew, the emotional satisfaction experienced by some simply from belonging to a Teochew community online was succinctly expressed in the statement made in the post below: [Excerpt 12] AC > this page makes me feel at home! LOVE IT!” 4.2.5 Members Use Group to Build Real Life Bonds While social dialogue on Facebook group wall is evidently engaging enough for members to develop a sense of belonging, it is limited in replicating face-to-face conversations, such as not being perfectly instantaneous, as well as lacking voice and video interaction facilities. The result is various efforts by members to use the wall to organise other forms of interaction outside Facebook. Members affiliated to the Gaginang non-profit group were particularly active in this aspect. For example, they regularly extended invitations to other members to participate in pre-arranged online chat sessions at the Gaginang website. There were also posts to notify about a Gaginang camping retreat and a thanksgiving event held in the US. In similar manner, an im Teochew member from Singapore proposed an “internet Teochew clan outing” for Teochew-speaking Singaporeans in the group. This did not appear to materialise, but the same person subsequently formed a Singapore Teochew Nang 新加坡潮州人 Facebook group, which he publicised on the im Teochew wall. Another way that members try to expand their Teochew social circle is to inquire about other members living in cities or regions where they are located or plan to visit, and to arrange actual face-to-face meetings with them. There are 33 posts of this kind. Excerpt 13 below gives an example of such a post. [Excerpt 13] SS > hii !! any teochew people from boston?Top of Form MT > Teochew boston here! VN >  Me too! JS >  hey I'm close to you! I'm in providence Rhode island right now! NT >  Sounds like this calls for a Boston meetup. Bottom of Form While the intended interactions above are inclined towards social in nature, there were also 5 posts revealing attempts by members to link up with other Teochews for business or professional purposes. Interestingly, one of them was a post by a member urging job-seeking Teochews to apply for positions with “excellent pay” at his company. 4.2.6 Members Help One Another Learn & Discover Their Heritage Many overseas Teochews, notably those who are second or third-generation immigrants, are isolated in daily life from their own culture and community. They possess only vague and fragmented impressions of what it means to be a Teochew or even no knowledge of the vernacular. As a result, the im Teochew Facebook group serves an important resource centre for imparting and receiving relevant knowledge and information. The most direct approach for one to obtain answers is to ask other members, who may be knowledgeable. This is quite often effective due to the large size of the community and the fair number of active members. A type of frequently asked question is “how do you say [a particular noun or verb] in Teochew…” At times even a simple question is met with a number of variant answers, surfacing the plural character of the Teochew vernacular and the influence of other cultures on the overseas Teochew community. This is demonstrated in the exchange below: [Excerpt 14] PM > Help ... how do you say "Maize" in TC ??? In Malaysia the term commonly used is "Jagung" which is Malay !!! ... Sitting down here trying to figure this out ... help me quickly ... somebody ... anybody !!! ... Thanks in advance ....Top of Form NT > huang bhet PM >   thanks ... any other terms ??? ... anyone ??? NSG >  gheg bee TZK > Aiya a lot of time sg and malaysia just borrow malay words like mattress become tilam KC >  kim suen bee Bottom of Form Another group of questions commonly asked revolve around travel to Chaoshan. This requirement commonly arises due to general unfamiliarity of the region as well as the lack of related English language information. The issues raised range from ground travel information, recommendations for places of interest, to the ways to locate one’s ancestral village. Due to fading knowledge on the part of overseas Teochews as well as change and developments in Chaoshan, difficulties sometimes present themselves when specific location information are required, as the relevant excerpts of the conversation below show: [Excerpt 15a] JG > Can anyone tell me how to look for the family tree for those in "Sua Tou"? Does it goes with the surname? KT >  do u know where is ur goh village at sou tou? JD >  Once you find your family village, your village should have a Goh family temple and you will be able to find your generation (what number generation you are) and probably the family tree. (continued…. ) JG >  Thanks KT n (JD), as far as I know we were from Poh Mei Village (hope the spelling is correct) I do not know which generation number I am in but all I know is that my grandpa came from there. (continued….) JG > >KT, I am from Malaysia, Grandpa migrated here when he was young. >(YKT), I know my Grandpa's name but not Grand Grandpa. I think there were some Grand uncles still there but I do not know of any. So do you mean that I will have to travel all the way to the village to check? YKT > It should be good enough to know your Grandpa's name and home village's name. SO your father's home village is which part of 'Shuatao' (Shantou)? (continued….) JG > oK at last I got it in Chinese 潮洲 汕头 浦尾村, I cannot find the map can anyone help. >> YKT well I do not know but my grandpa has his Malaysian citizenship spelt as Ng @ Goh while his friends has it spelt at Ngor/Ngoh hehehe maybe they only used the translation. Guess in the 1930s many do not learn English hehehe TZK >  go google maps sure can find the prefecture, but the village will be very difficult to find (continued….) YKT >  (TZK) JG Sometimes the Goggle map would be able to show your home village in China if you zoom it real big, and provided your home village is not too small. YKT >  JG I try searching for you, and there is no 浦尾，but a 铺尾村，and to be exact, it is under Chaozhou or Teochew instead of 汕头。Its quite near to the Zhaozhou City. KT >  may be it change the name.... or need to find 乡first JG >  Thanks (YKT) and KT for your help. Hmm now I wonder who else I can check with cos both my grands and my dad are no longer here. Well as far as I know its Chaozhou, sautao,浦尾村. (continued….) JG >  Hi all, thanks for your effort and time to help me out. Firstly, I do not understand (read or write) in Chinese. Secondly, I do not even know how to speak TeoChew. Thirdly, I do not know if there is any grands or relative in China at all. I only wanted to know as I wish to let my children understand and know where I came from and which generation I am in. The overseas-based members were unable to help JG locate her ancestral village on Google Map. The search was eventually completed when the researcher (denoted below as “JH”) provided local ground information that was only known because of his location in Shantou and familiarity with its surrounding areas (translations in English given within [ ] brackets). [Excerpt 15b] JH >   "Pou Buay Chung" - this is in Thenghai 澄海 (or Chenghai in Mandarin) county. It is quite a big "village" (maybe over 10,000 people). I passed by there before. I recall the official Chinese character is no longer written as 浦尾 . I'll find out from local friends for you. JH >   汕头(Shantou /Swatow)澄海区(Chenghai/Thenghai District) 埔美村 (Pumei/ Pho-bue village). It is around an hour's drive from Swatow city centre. Let me know if you need more help. YKT >  找Google地图，有个“铺尾村”（潮话拼音是‘PouBuayChung'），在潮州市枫溪一带。你提的澄海“埔美村”，潮话是不是该拼做“Po Mui Chung” ？ [Found on Google Map a “铺尾村” (pronounced in Teochew as ‘PouBuayChung'), near Chaozhou City’s Fengxi area. You mentioned Chenghai’s “埔美村”，is this not pronounced in Teochew as “Po Mui Chung”?] JH >   It is "Pho-Bue", but they substituted 尾 with 美, maybe because it looks better. A local friend confirmed this. Anyway I'm doing my masters in Shantou University, so let me know if help is needed. [Note: 尾 means “tail” and 美 means “beautiful”. Pronunciations for these 2 words in Teochew are relatively close.] Being mostly second or third generation overseas Teochews, the community as a whole lacks clear knowledge about many facets of their own culture. To fill the gap, some turned instead to information from the Internet and media to satisfy their knowledge quest, which were subsequently shared as posts in the group. Several of these sharings from external sources were literature from newspapers (shared as URL links to online articles or photographed images of newspaper cuttings), online encyclopaedias (Wikipedia and Baidu), as well as the Johor Baru Teochew Eight District Association’s official blog and Facebook page. These articles were concerned with topics like the profile of the Teochew people, the history of Teochew communities in Malaysia and Singapore, cuisine and restaurants, and traditional customs, religious rituals, music and performances. They were supplemented by video reports on the cultural activities of the Teochew community in Johor Baru produced by Hong Kong-based Teochew vernacular satellite network ECSTV.com 潮商卫视 (Chaoshang Weishi), as well as posts related to the Teochew Letters and 2013 Chinese twenty-four solar terms calendar projects. Notably, majority of these posts were shared by members from Malaysia and Singapore. The ability of these members to read in Chinese may be the key factor for this, as most of original information was based in Chinese. Perhaps due to the cultural context of these contents, not more than one-third of such posts (12 out of 45) received any comment response from the rest of the community. Apart from directly posting links to information, members also try to help one another learn and discover about the Teochew vernacular culture by recommending useful online resources. It is important as unlike literate culture that has its source from a centre, the vibrancy of a vernacular culture comes from it being a part of the lives of its members. The retribalization process to turn the literate man into a partaker of his vernacular culture requires him to acquire an essential fluency of his spoken tongue. This need is recognised by members, who made available in the group a number of websites supporting the learning of the Teochew vernacular, especially for English-speakers. These sites are: www.mogher.com – a website that describes itself as “both a place to learn about the Chaozhou dialect and a dictionary in the Chaozhou dialect”; An online Teochew dictionary on the website of Gaginang (www.gaginang.org) that allows searches in  Chinese characters, Gaginang Peng'im (a phonetic system devised by Gaginang) or English; www.gateways.sg/~TeochewEnglish/Phrases.asp - a webpage showing the phoneticised Teochew version for commonly-used English phrases; The iTunes page for WhatTCSay, described as “The world's first Teochew language dictionary and phrasebook iPhone App for English speakers!”; and http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php - an online English-Chinese online dictionary In addition language learning resources, there were also other sites made known to help connect the members with the larger Teochew community on the Internet. These other websites include: www.gaginang.org - the website of Gaginang, a US-based non-profit organization that promotes the culture, language, and identity of Teochew people; The Facebook page of the Singapore Teochew Nang 新加坡潮州人 Facebook group; The Facebook page of Hong Kong-based Teochew vernacular television network CSTV (潮商卫视); and MyShantou.org – a blog run by a London-based Shantou native that provides English language news and feature stories of the city written by students from Shantou University’s Cheung Kong School of Journalism and Communication. 4.2.7 Members Use Group Wall as a Collective Memory Bank As a “hybrid variety” like text conversation, social dialogue has the simultaneous qualities of being “live” in the manner of face-to-face meetings and “on record” in the way of written documentations. Posts on the wall of a Facebook Group are positioned chronologically with the newest placed most visibly at the top. Unless deleted by the person who posted it or the group administrator, they can be retrieved through a scroll down and find, or a keyword /member name-based search. These features enable a social dialogue in a Facebook Group to be revisited even a long period after it is halted. The Facebook group interface repositions a post to the top of the wall whenever it receives a fresh comment. A comparison of the order of posts with the dates of their initial posting revealed that members of im Teochew do not only read the latest posts, but they also review and comment from time to time on posts from earlier dates. This applies especially for photograph-posts that tend to be more visible. Because of this practice, the Facebook group wall as the archive of social dialogues becomes also a bank for collective memories, which can be retrieved or enriched continuously to the benefit preserving and promoting a vernacular culture. The social dialogue shown below, which was revived four times over the course of more than five months after the initial post, gives an illustration of how a post can grow to become a body of information and collection of memories. (Translations as required are made within [ ] brackets; date and time of each post/comment given in ( ) brackets.) [Excerpt 16] MLNC > Teochew Braised Duck. With my grandma's recipe from 潮安！ [Teochew Braised Duck. With my grandma's recipe from Chao’an！] ([Top of Form 2 February 2012)  FY >   Teo ann Lou ah. Very nice... [Chao’an, braised duck. Very nice] (2 February 2012 at 18:30) QXJY >  fav...i like... (2 February 2012 at 19:55) MLNC >   Taste really awesome!! I bet u guys will sure like it! (2 February 2012 at 20:07) NS >   lou ah！ [Braised duck!] (9 April 2012 at 16:07) CT >  ho jiak..ho jiak.. [Good to eat…good to eat…] (10 April 2012 at 23:39) JY1 >   remember this, (JY2)!!!  (22 May 2012 at 02:45) JY2 >   Reminds me of home !! (22 May 2012 at 20:34) MLNC > Where r the two Js from? (23 May 2012 at 07:56) JY2 >   Malaysia  (23 May 2012 at 12:14) MLNC >   Is it both of u not in Malaysia now? Where about now? (23 May 2012 at 20:30) JY2 >   We are in m'sia. But not staying with our parents, hence no braised duck anymore  (23 May 2012 at 21:00) QPJ >   Malaysia Johor Bahru have, but need to find. (23 May 2012 at 22:46) PM >   KL/PJ still have a few places selling teo chew lou ark but not as good as home made ... [Kuala Lumpur/ Petaling Jaya still have a few places selling Teochew braised duck but they are not as good as homemade ...] (25 May 2012 at 23:56) JY2 >   Ya I know right  (26 May 2012 at 00:16) MLNC >   Two days ago, I went to a shop call Teo Yeo Coffeeshop near Taman Sentosa, they selling braised duck, but I nvr try as their duck look to white to me (26 May 2012 at 07:41) FY >   There is luo ah shop in Taman sentosa ? I Am going to Johor on Sunday. Will stop by to try [There is a braised duck shop in Taman sentosa ? I am going to Johor on Sunday. Will stop by to try] (26 May 2012 at 09:06) (continued...) WC >  Many of tham selling luo ark but not teochew original luo ark! [Many of them sell braised duck, but not the original Teochew braised duck!] (5 June 2012 at 22:36) TCS >  想起汕头鲁鹅，我和声发真的很想吃！ [Makes me think of the Shantou braised goose, which I really want to eat now!] (6 June 2012 at 17:27) JW >  Wow, similar to my grandfather! I'm from 潮安 too! Which part are you from? [Wow, similar to my grandfather! I'm from Chao’an too! Which part are you from?] (10 July 2012 at 06:40)  QPJ >   My ancestor home is 潮安县风廓乡【now call 郭陇村】 [My ancestor home is in Chao’an county, Fengkuo village, now called Guolong village] (10 July 2012 at 15:03) NT >  I'm loving all these Chinese characters  (10 July 2012 at 15:16)  CHAPTER 5: Discussion This study sought to explore a community online linked to a vernacular culture, so as to ascertain its status as a globalised village and understand the way its members utilise social media. It examined the im Teochew Facebook group by considering the ways that the collective consciousness of its community online is seen in its Facebook group and how members of a globalised village use the Facebook group to preserve and promote their tribal identity. Key findings answering these two questions are discussed in this chapter, along with the limitations of this study and recommendations for future research. 5.1 Key Findings & Observations im Teochew as a community online has unquestionable leanings towards the Teochew vernacular culture. Even its members have different nationalities, and many have never visited Chaoshan, they strongly identify themselves as Teochews. In stark contrast to the Chinese digital diaspora, they show vague sense of attachment to their Chinese identity and the PRC. The social dialogues that unfold on the wall of im Teochew touch mostly on issues tied to culture and community. This can be taken as the orientation of the community since the authority for the administrator(s) of a Facebook group to review and approve posts before they appear is not exercised in im Teochew. Put together, these points convincingly show im Teochew as a globalised village Although the im Teochew members were well-engaged in discussions about their culture, particular in relation to food and vernacular, it is notable that many key facets of traditional Teochew life, such as customary rituals and beliefs, the Teochew opera and tea culture, were given little or no mention in all conversations. On the other hand, many members showed interest in expressions of the global mass culture, such as rap music and celebrity movie starts, and found joy in almost any form of Teochew connection to it. “Consciousness and memory can only be realised by an individual who acts, is aware, and remembers” (Funkenstein, 1989, p.6). The general lack of personal knowledge and experience in the traditional culture of their forefathers highlights its distance from the daily lives of the im Teochew members, of whom many were raised in cosmopolitan environments outside China. In this regard, the community online could have benefited richly from the contributions of members native in Chaoshan had the PRC government not blocked Facebook access since July 2008. Greater participation of members from mainland China could have also resulted in less ambivalent attitudes towards the country. From the 2012 daily activity level of 1.1 posts, 3.1 likes and 5.6 comments, it is clear that im Teochew is not the primary preoccupation of its more than 2700 members. For certain, these people lead other “lives” and possess identities outside their globalised village. Although they have came together as a community online because of a collective consciousness, this collective consciousness is far from dominant as it would be in the settings of a tribal village. Even though the members accept that it is not possible for their community to keep its bloodline pure, they see the Teochew vernacular and culture as the cornerstone of their identity and insist that efforts must be made to keep it alive. This is striking as just a quarter of a century ago, the huiguan, which once symbolised the overseas Chinese vernacular communities’ resilient character, was disparaged in Singapore as “a dying institution” and "the place where only old folks… meet with one other… (and) talk about their miserable old days" (Chen, 1989, as cited in Liu, 1998). This transpired from the decline of the Chinese regional vernaculars under the weight of nationalism in Southeast Asia and the proliferation of Mandarin literacy in the second half of the 20th century. When the PRC began its policies for economic reforms in the late 1970s, then-Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew implored the people in the only Chinese-majority Southeast Asian state not to burden their children with the speaking of “dialect” of “no economic value”, so that they might be free to embrace the “promising language” of Mandarin for the convenience for doing business in China, and (Tan, 1980). The motivation of the im Teochew members, mostly in their 20s and 40s, to protect and preserve their cultural identity shows a mentality shift, arguably supported by social media. If Facebook is the materialisation of the global village, then the Facebook group wall has to be its marketplace. Here members of a globalised village meet and chatter, talking about themselves, asking after one another, exchanging information about newsworthy happenings and people they know about. Tellingly, the sounds of the Teochew vernacular could be “heard” almost everywhere in the marketplace of im Teochew. Despite the obvious preference to write in English and a lesser extent Chinese, there was noticeable effort for the members to heal from the rupture of Teochew vernacular from written text through “utterances” in improvised phoneticised Teochew. The compulsion to communicate in mother tongue can be seen also in the frequent sharing of videos that have Teochew as an audio language. The number of video posts can be conceivably higher when new technologies help to reduce the technical difficulties and processes social media users need to overcome to self-produce and upload motion clips. The active members of im Teochew appear to converge on a common agenda to build their community, even though most of them have never met and they are not directed by any central authority to do so. They act almost in coordination utilising the Facebook group to contribute their personal knowledge, experiences and discoveries about the Teochew culture, replying from questions one another, posting photographs and videos of themselves and their local communities, and sharing useful online information sources and resources. The persuasion for collective action seems to be a common empathy and the desire to help one another fill a void they feel as orphans from their parent culture. Vernacular cultures are traditionally passed on from one generation to the next through the authority and instructions of community elders. However, Facebook being conceived from the “face book” photographic directory listing students, staff and faculty in American universities, assumes all its users as individuals of equal status. The flat pecking order of a Facebook group, where only the administrator(s) is more equal than the rest, is inherently incompatible with the multi-tiered tribal society, in which people are ranked according to their generational seniority in family and clan. The manner which the im Teochew members now try to keep their unity through mutual support in this anomalous “un-village” environment mirrors the way their forefathers acted as community under institutions like the huiguan when they first entered into diaspora. An unintended outcome is the evolvement of their Facebook group wall into a collective memory bank storing the cultural wealth they deposit through their social dialogues. 5.2 Limitations Netnography is useful to describe and understand the communicative behaviour of a community in its specific cultural settings. As it is naturalistic and unobtrusive, the onus to identify and interpret what may be considered socially meaningful and of significance rests on the researcher, whose findings may not always be congruent with the perceptions of community members. At the same time, this study considered only social actions published on the Facebook group wall (i.e. making a post, “like” or comment). It did not take into account other activities that took place outside Facebook, such as the amount of attention members paid to read a post, whether they click on an URL link to an external video or recommended website, or if social contact with other members was actually made in real life. These are also important information for the assessment of the influence of a globalised village since its social existence beyond Facebook. Follow-up research using other methods such as interviews and surveys will be useful in obtaining information that may validate the findings of this study. In this study, the posts in im Teochew were classified according to content type into categories and subcategories, so as to enable key topics of interest to be identified. However conversations are by nature dynamic and they do not follow a specific agenda or an undisrupted linear course. The content of one post may be relevant to multiple subject areas, and the follow-up comments quite often digress also to other topics. For this reason, the percentages and averages used in this study are only of indicative value used to aid discussion. Reclassification of the posts may result in varied interpretations of data, although the researcher believes this unlikely to result in any conclusion that is significantly different. All tribes are intrinsically unique. They have their own cultures, are “exploded” by literate culture to different extent, and are in different stages of retribalization, if at all. Some the ways in which im Teochew show itself as a globalised village may be the result of certain peculiarities of the Teochew culture or the overseas Chinese community, rather than the effects of social media. The findings of this study based on a single community online should not be taken to be applicable to other communities until further research is done. 5.3 Recommendations for Future Research To the researcher’s knowledge, this study is the first to propose the concept of globalised villages and to examine a community online based on the context of its members’ vernacular culture. The scope for related future research is therefore wide open. The phenomenon of globalised villages should be further established through investigations into communities online belonging to other Chinese and non-Chinese vernacular cultures. The presence and activities of communities online centred on literate cultural identities may also be looked to understand social media’s impact on them. By comparison of similarities and differences between the different types of communities online, light can be shed on how existing social media utilities are facilitating, or obstructing, the retribalization process and the emergence of globalised villages. The globalised village is still in its embryonic development and therefore sensitive to social media changes. Social media itself is far from the end of its progress, and likely to experience more breakthroughs to create more village-like communication settings. Already at the time of writing of this study, a number of voice-based social networking applications were launched. They include Vine, which was created by Twitter to enable users to shoot and post 6-second videos; and Digisocial that allow pictures taken with Instagram-style photo filters to be accompanied by voice recording captions and comments. Facebook also updated its mobile Messenger with voice messaging feature and was reported to be preparing for the introduction of voice calling (Schorman, 2013).  The integration of voice into social networking brings the development of communication to its starting point of face-to-face oral exchange. This is a likely game-changer that will level the playing field between vernacular and literate cultures. McLuhan called that the impact of electric communication an “instant implosion”. In reality, the crumbling of the structures of literate society has been discernibly slow and the global village is only still taking shape. The world will remain in the state of transition where tribal village, civilisation, nation, global economic order and globalised villages will co-exist for some time yet. The reaction and response of political, media and commercial establishments to the development of accelerating retribalization, is another area of research of significance. Whether these entities view globalised villages as a threat to be stifled, or an opportunity for them to be part of, could determine the course of development. The recent controversial decision of Google to shut down the popular Google Reader service (Ghosh, 2013) serves a stern reminder that the evolution towards globalised villages is not inevitable as the plug may be pulled if culture is unable to unshackle itself from economics.  Conclusion In a modern world subscribed to technology determinism, the fixation is to understand the progress of human society in a linear development trajectory. McLuhan’s foretelling of a global village was stirred controversy and intrigued because it implied the unfolding of future on a reverse path – a prospect that many people still struggle to comprehend. The body of literature reviewed in this study has show how the world is in a state of unprecedented change since the advent of social media. The user-orientated nature of Web 2.0 syncs with McLuhan’s portrayal of man at the centre and the media only his extension. New communication technologies are enabling ordinary people to find their voices, figuratively and literally, on the global communication platform. This development challenges the relevance of writing as communication medium, and threatens the literature cultures and centre-to-margin structures it supports. This exploratory study positively demonstrated the status of im Teochew as a globalised village and highlighted the ways its members use social media to preserve and promote their tribal identity. By reconciling the im Teochew Facebook group with its online environment and the collective consciousness of its members, it provided clarification into how the opposing concepts of global and village juxtapose in the context of social media. There is no reason to think that the globalised villages of the overseas Chinese are exceptional cases. 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There were 22 posts about the Malaysia Teochew Convention held from 15 to 17 August 2012, which received 23 “likes and 4 comments. 59 96 100 Event information Content related to invitation or information concerning upcoming events and activities of overseas Teochew communities 8 9 9 Visiting to Chaoshan Content containing information related to visiting of the Chaoshan region, such as sharing of travel videos and photographs, and finding of relatives there. 20 76 295 Teochew famous persons Content related to contemporary ethnic Teochew celebrities, sportspersons or politicians 11 43 167 Teochew vernacular media content Posts containing Teochew-vernacular videos and music, or information related to such contents 33 116 123 Sub-total (Percentage of total) 131 (33.2%) 340 (30.0%) 684 (33.6%) Social Interaction Self induction Content related to efforts by individuals to induct themselves in the group by means of direct self-introduction or an opening line 16 52 85 Non-Chinese festive greetings Content related to group greetings made by individuals on non-Chinese festive occasions such as New Year’s Day, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day and Christmas. 10 62 64 Invitations to online chats and groups Content related to invitations extended to fellow Teochews to participate in online chats and other groups 13 19 64 Local contact inquiries Content related to inquiries to locate other Teochews living in specific geographical regions or cities 33 44 130 Business networking Content related to the seeking of professional connections or proposal of business ideas targeting other Teochews 5 21 30 Sub-total (Percentage of total) 77 (19.5%) 198 (18.2%) 373 (18.3%) Chinese Traditional Chinese festive greetings Content related to group greetings made by individuals on traditional Chinese festive occasions, such as the Lunar New Year, Mid-Autumn Festival and Winter Solstice. 30 102 23 Chinese identity & culture Content related to the Chinese identity and culture not specifically related to Teochew 9 5 16 PRC Content related to the contemporary mainland PRC 3 2 1 Sub-total (Percentage of total) 42 (10.6%) 109 (9.6%) 40 (2.0%) Miscellaneous Advertising / spams Content related to the advertising of products or services that do not target Teochews specifically 9 6 7 Miscellaneous Information of miscellaneous nature with no relevance to the Teochew or Chinese identities, such as personal remarks or appeals. 23 20 19 Sub-total (Percentage of total) 32 (8.1%) 26(2.3%) 26(1.3%) Total 395 1135 2037 2 3 117 10