Cybercommunity and Cultural Identity - A Case Study of GoGoDutch Forum for Chinese in the Netherlands

Abstract

With the trend of globalization, more and more Chinese migrate into other countries for business or family reasons, andbecame a part of the society in which they set up their new lives. In the fast developing digital environment, overseas Chinese’s lives have been impacted by the digital media to a large degree. For instance, the use of Internet gives chance to overseas Chinese to revitalize the Chinese-ness once aboard,and gives forms to their identities. The digital forum is an important example of how new media function in respect to identity construction. This thesis expands a research of the biggest digital forum for Chinese in Netherlands to investigate how the overseas Chinese identity constructs in the cybercommunity.It shows that the overseas Chinese identity (in my case, in the Netherlands) is vitalizedthrough cybercommunities, especially when their so–called “Chineseness” is under attack.