DIGITAL BELONGING AND VIRTUAL EXILE: DIASPORIC STORYTELLING IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Abstract

The art of storytelling among diasporic communities has found new life online. This article investigates the interrelationship between digital belonging and virtual exile in shaping contemporary diasporic experiences, with a focus on diasporic storytelling in the age of social media. It argues that digital platforms have modified the production and circulation of diasporic narratives, enabling dispersed communities to articulate identity, memory, and cultural affiliation across transnational spaces. Drawing on interdisciplinary frameworks from diaspora studies, media theory and digital humanitie this study explores how diasporic subjects negotiate presence and absence, visibility and marginalization, and connection and dislocation in online environments. Digital platforms offers diasporic individuals to captivate their lived experiences in multimodal, fragmented and participatory configuration that challenges the rectilinearity of traditional literary forms widely included memory, loss, nostalgia , displacement and belonging. Ultimately, the article positions social media as a paradoxical site that simultaneously facilitates belonging while intensifying new forms of estrangement. On one side social media connects us through online availabiltiy, connections, memories, online storytelling, and on the other hand it is making boundries, creating displacement, fragmentation and producing new forms of surveillance giving rise to conditions of virtual exile.