How your village is following you everywhere, By Abiodun Adeniyi

First, the village referred to here is the original place, easily identified as your ancestral resting place. It is the place parents told you that you hail from. It could be a place of birth, a place where you grew up from childhood, and where you heard that your forefathers are from. It is also the place where you probably did not grow up, but where your parents, or guardian, refer to as their ancestral home, a place where they originated before inhabiting a new place after migration. This village has nothing to do with geography, location, or size. It may now be a city with a bustling population or a nondescript location nested in the countryside. What matters is that it is a place of emotional connection, where real or imagined association is fostered, or where return, again, whether real or imagined, is anticipated (Anderson, 1983; Boym, 2001).

This metaphorical village is primarily a practical or non-practical beginning point. Practical in the sense of an ongoing relationship with it, or dreamt or suspended domiciliation in the place, and non-practical in the sense of those who have a distant but inherited relationship with the place, as often with second or third generation migrants (Levitt & Waters, 2002). What roles do these villages play in our social, economic, cultural, and political journeys through life? How do they shape and reshape us in everyday practices? And simply put, how is your village following you?

Within this context, too, how do we evaluate movements, or mobility through life places and spaces, and how do we remember or forget about these villages? How do the villages function in the quest for belonging, or the determination of unbelonging? The search for answers to these questions, through intersecting media, reveals the overarching question I have asked in my years as a scholar, first as a student of communication, a teacher of mass communication, a professor of communication, and eventually a professor of communication and epistemic epistemology. To be sure, therefore, the ‘’how the village is following you’’ I am referring to is not the same as how your village people are following you in the sense in which we refer to it in Nigeria. In the Nigerian sense, we are probably referring to the village as the den of sorcery and witchcraft and how they can supposedly manipulate destinies, whether temporarily or permanently.

In this sense, misfortunes are superstitiously traced to people in the village who are anti-progress and uninterested in individual and collective progress, and who are believed to spiritually affect or truncate people’s affairs (Ellis & ter Haar, 2004). Not this one. The one that concerns this research is the real or imagined association with a place as a point of association, a location of belonging, where longing persists. The longing is about nostalgia for it, about emotional ties, or about feelings for it, leading to imaginings of returns, actual returns, either occasionally or at some point in the future (Boym, 2001; Rapport & Dawson, 1998).

A future permanent return is frequently envisaged but rarely materialises, especially depending on degrees of integration in places of residence, usually urban centres, or in distant diasporic cities (Carling & Pettersen, 2014). The village’s process of following the individual always begins with the limitations of the location as a place for fulfilling life dreams. The place in the Nigerian and African context is often underdeveloped, rural, and bereft of opportunities. Citizens interact mainly with nature and define their livelihoods as essentially farming (Adepoju, 1995). Because of limited options, citizens seek opportunities elsewhere, leading to migration and/or ceaseless iteration as they move from one destination to another in the quest for opportunities and fulfilment (de Haas, 2010). In moving, factors such as education, work, improved health services, and better amenities are always the primary considerations.

The mobility, however, does not prevent the emotional ties to the source. The ties also evolve into degrees. It might be stronger at the beginning, but it thins out over time, which is also influenced by the level of awareness of the reasons for migration in the first instance. When realisation is achieved, emotional bonding with home could be reduced, but could be otherwise if less realised, sometimes leading to quicker return. In modern times as well, mediating technologies have increasingly arrived and are becoming more sophisticated in how the geographical boundaries of the village and the translocal or transnational environments of residence have collapsed, merging the two or more places and creating an effective sense of instantaneity, simultaneity, and placelessness for citizens (Appadurai, 1996; Couldry & Hepp, 2017).

Beyond the traditional media of newspapers and radio are digital social media, including platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and X, which migrants use to address the question of the village in tow (boyd & Ellison, 2007; Madianou & Miller, 2012). WhatsApp platforms are especially effective for this, given the opportunity to form groups, sleeplessly chat round the clock, irrespective of distance or location, and enable the formation of town groups and association links, where decisions and deliberations happen to no end (O’Hara et al., 2014). Through text messages, voice notes, and image exchanges, members sustain a connection, contribute ideas for village development, donate money, and volunteer time and knowledge, in what has become a virtual replacement for the physical village square (Horst & Miller, 2006; Brinkerhoff, 2009). With members from the village and beyond, the sense of distance vanishes, giving way to a feeling of co-presence (Licoppe, 2004).

Memories are revived, therefore, while belonging is fostered on the go. The media has, in this circumstance, become a springboard around which meanings are shared across distanciated territories, eventually growing or steadying emotional well-being across the board (Couldry & Hepp, 2017). This emotional well-being might witness fractures sometimes, through conflicts, misunderstandings, or violence in worse cases, but it does not diminish the commonality of psychology amongst participants, especially where the resolution of disputes is ensured. The media remains consistently sustaining and balancing, aided by the pluralisation of channels, and contributes to stabilising migrant focus, enhancing productivity at a distance, and the possible achievement of migration objectives (Madianou & Miller, 2012).

Where objectives are realised, the accompanying village benefits when the migrants remit food to those in need, build homes, or contribute to projects as a mark of belonging (de Haas, 2010). In the case of homes, they are usually symbolic, meant to signify success, even though living in them is hardly practical, save for festive periods or for returning for burials, weddings, or attending festivals (Carling, 2008). Returning there may also be at death, given the Nigerian and African regard of the home as a place of burial, a proverbial final resting place, where a dutiful transition to ancestry is believed to be more realistic (Mbiti, 1990). Importantly, leaving home is no longer the old equivalent of social disappearance, or an equivalent to a long period of absence in which migrants were incommunicado until another physical appearance.

In those days, reliance was more on word of mouth from fellow migrants returning with tales of conditions in distant places (Thompson, 2000). Surface mail, which took days, weeks, or months to arrive, was another alternative. Telephone services in many societies were also fixed-line, scarce, and possibly unaffordable (Fischer, 1992). To learn about a migrant’s condition, a village resident might be dispatched to an urban centre to inquire. In inquiring, an acquaintance will be asked who could then lead to another acquaintance, and on and on, until a trace is made. Supplications are resorted to if outside the country. It is why villagers are arguably less used to appointments.

They visit each other without notice, claiming they have only come to check the host’s well-being, having not seen him/her in a while. Village manners are transported into migrant locations, sometimes leading to taking offence there, when the quest is challenged for not notifying the host. It frequently takes time to recondition manners, but even if the old practice of visiting without notice predominates while the migrants are back in the village. In the past, the argument could also be that there was no way to inform a host in advance of the visit. Mobile telephony, a relatively new medium, has dissolved the excuse, subject to the mindset of a visitor, who might still claim the absence of signal/network, low battery, zero call credit, or outright inability to afford one, and therefore unable to access a host before a visit.

The new, ideal circumstance, regardless, is a modern shift in narrative, where people move but never fully leave because of modern means of communication, enabling the sustenance of connection and a marriage of before and now, yesterday and today, and the past and the present (Urry, 2007). Collective and individual memory, social, traditional, and cultural identities are no longer stationary, fixed, or coordinated. They are flexible, portable, and are rather digital shadows (Appadurai, 1996; Couldry & Hepp, 2017). The new traits help, therefore, migrants’ psychologies, enabling their villages to follow them, whether realistically or in the realms of emotions. But how, specifically, do we put this in context, in the matrix of media and communication, and particularly within the framework of digital mobility, now akin to a suitcase? I will turn to this next.

Table 1: Elements of Villagehood, Mobility, and Diasporic Identity

Section 1.1:

Changes In Technology and the Physics of Moving: Technological Acceleration and the Reduction of Physical Friction in Mobility

Technology is changing at an unbelievable pace. It is not just replacing the human being in everyday practices and activities, but also simplifying them in amazing and thrilling ways (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014). While the celebration of technological infusion into human endeavours continues, it is at once conflating. Communication and messaging processes are tremendously benefiting from these changes, becoming a main avenue for exemplifying the shifts (Castells, 2009). In this matrix rests the way people communicate across distant places. What would usually take weeks or even months to deliver now happens immediately, or in real time, regardless of how far apart the locations are (Giddens, 1990).

For people dispersing across distances, from the villages to the city/urban centres, from the city/centers to diasporic locations, from the villages to diasporic locations or from the city/urban centers and diasporic locations to the city (urban centres), and back to the villages, technology has lubricated the joints and angles of movement, eventually limiting the kinetic energy, the physics of movement (Urry, 2007).

The physical strain, the heavy energy traditionally required, and the anxiety over locating and relocating previously deployed have been minimised by the soft touch of the computer, the flexibility of the screen, and the multiplying features of the devices (Turkle, 2011). Before now, movement involved inertia and friction, literally. Outright breaks with departed places where the fad in time past, because the connection was laborious, time-consuming, and sapping. It requires extensive planning, commitment, and resources, and it also takes a toll on resettling people (Massey et al., 1993). To be relieved, therefore, many people in mobility often resort to it when convenient, or completely jettison it. That has changed in contemporary times with multiple media of instantaneous communication, which enable people to better stay in touch, stay updated on matters, and provide on-the-go information about their own well-being (Licoppe, 2004; Madianou & Miller, 2012).

The social friction of distance is minimised for the softer manoeuvring of the automated systems. Digital presences are now permitted through the electromagnetic spectrum, rather than through kinetic energy (Carey, 1989). The villages, the city/urban centres, that frequently departed in social and economic journeys may no longer be forgotten, departed, or abandoned. They could now be companies, through mobile phones, WhatsApp groups, text messages, voice notes, images, and videos, leading to hugely expansive spaces of interaction through talking, chatting, sharing, voicing, and videoing (Horst & Miller, 2006).

Table 2: The lubrication of Interaction, the Physics of Movement

Geographical locations are nearly immaterial, and distances might even be troubling to fathom, if necessary. In quantum physics, particles can mutually enhance each other when close. One could enable the other, given how supportive their collaboration can be. With modern communication, too, distant people could connect to share emotions, whether good or bad, joyful or sad, through collaborative participation in processes via videos, conversations, and meetings (Wellman, 2001). Again, miles and kilometres can hardly be material. The collaborating or interacting parties appear as close as possible to one another within physical touch. In those circumstances, interacting parties could gauge emotions, evaluate miens, acknowledge mannerisms, grieve or laugh simultaneously, and arrive and depart together, just as it would happen in a physical relationship (Licoppe, 2004). People are physically in a place but emotionally transported into far-flung places. Belonging, therefore, persists through mediation, irrespective of the pangs of physical movement (Couldry & Hepp, 2017).

SECTION 2

Migration as Life Circulation: Rethinking Human Mobility as a Sustaining Social Process

The injection of the human body as a metaphor in the discourse of Migration is not new, only that its one-sidedness is problematic. Problematic because migration has been likened to a dysfunctional foreign object in the body, represented in a dominant narrative as an anomaly and therefore inimical to the overarching system (Bigo, 2002; Huysmans, 2006). Migration, in this frame, is an anomaly, a foreign interference with the stability and sustainability of receiving nations. Diminished in this viewpoint, however, is the fact of migration as a breather from sameness, an enabler, possibly likened to the human body, where elements like water and air are contributory and essential to its well-being. Without them, the body malfunctions, leading to a fundamental dysfunction, a stasis, that could lead to death.

In contrast to perceptions of migration or foreign citizens as unwanted strangers, a disease in the body, the entry of these can be reassessed as entrants required for the receiving systems to maintain balance, achieve and maintain a steady gait, and sustain progress and development (Castles, de Haas, & Miller, 2014). While this paper is mindful of the challenges of migration management in receiving states and the shenanigans of deviant migrants, it argues that migration is coterminous with the value of water, air, and blood to the body and the stability of receiving nations. It therefore calls for a more balanced positioning of the migration narrative within the discourse of mobility, entitlements, and the quest for integration (Carens, 2013).

Using the mixed-method of discourse analysis, including documentary evidence and interviews, it can be argued that the influx of people, especially those from the global south, particularly Africa, into the global north, the western world, particularly, might not, after all, be negative. Rather, it is a phenomenon that enhances the viability of the receiving nations, since the essentials enhance the vitality of the human system (OECD, 2014; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2017).

Migration is often woven around economic poverty and conflict (Massey et al., 1993). The weaving pursues the idea that it is momentary or spontaneous, and that if things were right in source countries, migration may not have occurred. The conception, however, is flawed by historical records of people migrating from one part of the globe to another for reasons other than those above (Manning, 2005). The fact that migration is steeped in history demonstrates its permanence over time and, importantly, as a global phenomenon, frequently occurring between and amongst all classes of peoples and nations, for one reason or more, in the mutual benefit of the whole, whether or not the benefits are equal or otherwise (Castles et al., 2014).

The phenomenon of migration is, by extension, systemic, a process that has defined the world in times past and continues to do so, as opposed to an unusual or exceptional occurrence (de Haas, 2010). The fact that it may not be exceptional or an outlier portrays migration as life-sustaining, an opener, a loud or quiet need for most nations. For the source countries, the need might be for a better life elsewhere, the fulfillment of life expectations, or the search for safety or succour. For receiving countries, it is a source of a desperate workforce ready to fill occupations frequently ignored by natives, in addition to serving as replacements for regular jobs (Dustmann, Frattini, & Preston, 2013). It addresses the hidden benefits of difference, namely the pluralisation of alternatives, the respite from monotony, and the expansion of opportunities, possibly leading to general stability, growth, development, and flourishing in the manner in which life-essentials circulate to sustain and vitalise the human body.

The biologic metaphor emerges in the way social circulation of people, the redistribution of human capital, both high and low, can be akin to how water or air circulates in the body for wellness (Faist, 2010). Migration is invariably a social function, a required tonic for the steadying of entities, rather than a happenstance, emerging from a perennial or momentary dysfunction of one entity. It is about the intermixing of humans, an exchange of people across places, resulting in intermingling and the production and reproduction of fresh facets in systems and societies.

Migration is a flow, ceaseless enough to warrant its conceptualisation as a fact rather than a farce; a wave, powerful enough to condition its viewing as an all-pervasive, permeating force, as against the constant but understandable notion of a crisis, a burden, an invasion, or as a disease that malfunctions the body (Crawley & Skleparis, 2018). Migrants may therefore not be adverse. They are essential components of society. They may not be dehumanised, because they might be valuable for the social reconfiguration of the entity (Nussbaum, 1997). Migrants might not require over-securitisation, as they might be a security (Bigo, 2002), an antidote to boredom, providing a rare chance to evaluate difference, to interact with the other, and to make positive or negative comparisons.

Migrants might not be contaminants, but valid agents of health. Through their agency, social transformation could be evident, if not in host societies, then in their origin, through remittances, knowledge transfers, and contributions to projects (Levitt, 1998; World Bank, 2023). This advances the global redistribution of wealth and opportunities, contributing to peace, hope, and a stable world. Rather than being a menacing affair, therefore, migration could be life-sustaining, system-stabilising, and prosperity-initiating, given the additional facts of the circulation of ideas, the to-ing and fro-ing of peoples, resources, and energies (Faist, 2010).

While not denigratingly biologising people and entities, migration is represented as a model of progress, the survival of systems through circulation, and the production, distribution, and redistribution of phenomena, towards dissecting a dynamic, complex, fluid, and endless occurrence. While, for instance, the human body moves nutrients and oxygen from one part to another, migrants bring knowledge of all hues, labour, and skills, which all combine to shape and reshape the system. In this way, institutions and economies are sustained just as vital human organs are nourished by circulation (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2017). Stagnation results from immobility, just as reduced circulation or its absence in the body is a recipe for illness, pain, or disease.

While a society may not die outright like a human being, it can stagnate or decline if left unattended. It explains why progress is an attraction for migrants (de Haas, 2010), thereby likely leading to greater progress in receiving societies. It is the reason the most progressive nations in the world, easily the Western world, are the most approached by migrants, which might also be directly or indirectly assisting in further progress. This is because migration can be a reason for equilibrium, an answer to labour shortages, a resolution of demographic imbalances (United Nations, 2023), and a management tool for ecological stress.

Migration could be responsible for the transfer of innovation, the renewal and spicing of cultures and traditions, and a veritable source of exchange and redistribution of knowledge (OECD, 2014). Conversely, the absence of migration, or its prevention through impenetrable borders and restrictions on mobility, limits nationalism as much as it clots blood, resulting in stasis.

Economically, there could be an ageing crisis, labour shortages, economic retrogression, the decline of innovation and creativity (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2017). Imagine, for instance, a world without migration. It would mean a world without remittances, which have become an important economic oxygen for many origin countries (World Bank, 2023), and without knowledge transfer and circulation through diaspora networks. It would be a world without brain circulation as opposed to brain drain (Faist, 2010), without a migration system.

History is suffused with trade routes and labour migrations, leading to intermixing (Manning, 2005), the discovery of new peace and fresh comfort by migrants. Without the movements, the world would be uninspiring, static, and probably stagnant. Migration may not be beneficial, but it is valuable in the main. Migration is, in essence, a structural condition rather than an anomaly; a systemic rhythm rather than a crisis, and a driver of adaptation, resilience, and social reproduction (Castles et al., 2014). Halting migration is like halting blood circulation, as both sending and receiving countries need it for survival.

Table 3: Rethinking Migration

SECTION 3

Digital Shadows, Memory, and Algorithmic Belonging

And back to the question, digital shadows presently follow us, and discounting the question of mass involved in the calculation of the force required to shift an object. Voice notes, photos, rituals, and memories are kept in devices, ensuring that objects, equal to the mass in physics, are not left behind, forgotten, or ignored but move with people in their pockets, bags, and boxes, making the departed places to be buffered in real time, even far beyond the village coming simply in tow (van Dijck, 2007). The world is now a witness to speed data packages as a measure of distances between places, rather than the traditional straight-line method. Distances are now a function of data speed capacity, signal availability, especially in underserved areas, or network coverage and subscription (Graham & Marvin, 2001). Forgetting is now a matter of choice, if not just marginal.

In times past, memory was problematic to archive. People were disposed to arrive, restart, and reinvent life afresh (Connerton, 2009). But it is no longer difficult to contact you while you’re on the phone, on social media, or via sound, text, voice notes, or videos. They could follow up with requests, including asking how you are doing, making requests, and telling you who is sick, dying, or dead.

You may therefore not be new to your destination anymore. Your village remains in you, with you, and still after you. Information persists despite translocal or transnational movement. This is because past information is not lost. It only changes position (Appadurai, 1996; Couldry & Hepp, 2017). With the village’s ability to follow migrants through devices, the devices are now being redefined. They are not just distant, inanimate tools. They are not without souls or machines without life. They have them all because, through the devices, the voices of loved ones, including grandfathers and mothers, fathers and mothers, and others, are heard (Turkle, 2011).

Emotions run through them when this happens, possibly making them more coveted, an additional thing to love, and furthering the narrative that the devices are an extension of the human body (Ihde, 1990). In this case, it is the migrant’s body. The devices are digital séances of sorts, as they are deployed to assemble people and commune with them regardless of their location. In relating through the network with the village, the village stays in touch with the migrant not only through a sense of realness but also through imagination (Madianou & Miller, 2012).

The migrants, it is assumed, are there, somewhere, somehow, even if not physically or frequently seen. Worries immediately develop if she/he cannot be reached, or is no longer heard. Relief comes from simply establishing a voice connection, through the phone, in a voice note, or better still, through live images (Licoppe, 2004). When there is an unusual silence from a frequently networked person, concern grows, leading to further inquiries and even searches, which is the regular way in which dying or dead migrants are discovered (Ling, 2008).

Madam Adeshola had only just retired from a government agency. Before then, she had lived alone, in a three-bedroom apartment in upscale Abuja. Madam’s mum spoke with her from the village nearly every day. But day one passed, and she could not reach her.  The mom called and called until day three, and there was still no response. Mum in the village got rightly worried and called Madam Adeshola’s only son in another city, telling him that she has not been able to reach her daughter, his mom. Son also joined the call, and there is still no response. The son made further inquiries from acquaintances, who all said they had not heard from her in days. The son travelled immediately to Abuja, knocked on her door, but there was no response, and had to break the door, where he saw her mom lying dead on the floor.

In this instance, the first sign of her absence was noticed by the village through her mom, even though the neighbours were not far away, an unimaginable reversal of proximity, effected through technology (Wellman, 2001). The devices have turned the way to discover presence and absence, wellness and unwellness, and whether a user is dead or alive.

Like the late woman, the village is no longer detached. It is in the pockets, in the bags, on the tables, chairs, beds, and everywhere the user is, subject to habit (Horst & Miller, 2006). The village update that Madam Adeshola was most familiar with before her passing was through Mom’s. Her algorithmic ancestry was determined by Mum’s age, again implicating the power of a narrator in what is consumed or not (Pariser, 2011). It could as well have been a cousin, a nephew, a sister, or a brother. The person in communication invariably shapes the account of the village in a preferred manner, thereby shaping what the migrant consumes.

Table 4: Digital Mobility, Memory, and the Portable Village

In most cases, verification is absent because of the emotional ties between the talebearer and the migrant (Nickerson, 1998). The flourish of sentiments could reduce the thought of further investigation, making the migrant stick to one, and only source, and regularly consolidating the listeners’ biases. Misinformation and disinformation thrive in the matrix (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017). The impact here might be viewed as marginal, given that it occurs at the interpersonal rather than the public or mass communication level. It, however, reveals another epistemological framework from the power of disseminating information. How?

The migrant who is used to one narrative, on account of emotional ties to the narrator, frequently believes it to be the ultimate truth, and because she/he wants that line of story reinforced, she/he is reluctant to hear another, just so the earlier tale will not be contaminated (Nickerson, 1998). That interpretation becomes his/her line of information, an authoritative source, which might conflict with facts on the ground.

The facts could probably have been reported in credible media, validated by the state, after investigation. Regardless, the migrant is still impervious to correction, rationalising it by possibly alleging mischief, because she/he has heard from an “authentic” village narrator who would not lie,’’ even though the narrator has brazenly done so to prove a point or to reinforce a line of thought. In this situation, ignorance could conflate and expand where there are more people with similar biases. The more there are, the more ignorance reigns in a system (Sunstein, 2001). This sort of ignorance can only be resolved through critical thinking and a sustained public campaign to raise awareness (Kahneman, 2011). It is all the more important if a system requires growth and development founded on an informed citizenry, disposed to balanced, objective, and empirical reasoning, rather than relying solely on the efficiency of word of mouth and single-person narratives that reinforce biases, thereby preventing dispassionate thinking.

And back to the village question, technology constantly prevents the psychic drift of loneliness, alongside cultural erasure, by linking the migrant to roots through a complex web of interaction and preventing the mobile individual from forgetting (Madianou & Miller, 2012). The imagination of home is sustained through updating, continuous contact with people from the origin (Appadurai, 1996). The village is therefore never forgotten, always remembered, and becomes part of the migrant’s internalised belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2011). This internalised belonging is in consciousness, a part of knowing and acknowledging the self through quiet of the past, despite the importance of the present.

The past is significant, offering a migrant a chance to psychologically navigate existence in places of residence, because there was a beginning (Giddens, 1991). The beginning may not be jettisoned simply because the migrant is now in another place, however comfortable it may be. The beginning is conditioning, because it is not a product of self or singular identification, but a shared fact, where friends, relatives, and associates probably know too (Jenkins, 2014). The shared knowledge of an individual’s origin is additionally comforting to the knowers, as it provides social clarity on who the individual is. Where this clarity is absent or confusing, doubts arise about who the person is. But once a background or origin is defined, accountability is ensured, raising credibility and reliability. Identifying the origin as a step toward building a trustworthy relationship does not occur solely at the interpersonal level. It does at the state and public levels, where declarations on origin and place of birth are often requested, in forms or documents that comply with due diligence requirements (Scott, 1998). It once more demonstrates the power of origin, the fact of its potency, in conditioning who a person is and in ensuring traceability.

Section 3.1:

Who You Are

Who a person is, however, varies. The variation is a function of class, ethnicity, gender, religion, region, race, and income group (Weber, 1978). For an upper-class person, a sense of identity might be laden with pride, confidence, and a relatively higher level of comfort than for a lower-class person, whose self-esteem might be challenged by modest possessions (Bourdieu, 1984). Regarding ethnicity, it occurs when an ethnic group is stratified higher than others due to influence, power, historical advantage, or the demonstrated achievements of its members (Eriksen, 2010). These variables might confer a higher sense of self-worth on people in the group than on those outside it. Gender comes with a higher regard for one gender over the other in some circumstances and environments, like in Africa, where patriarchy is still practised in sections (Connell, 2005). Religion is implicated through its being a majority in a particular society, as opposed to others (Casanova, 1994). In the region, it concerns the privileging of one over the other for power or opportunistic reasons, while race refers to playing up differences between major races, including whites and blacks, to gain an advantage (Omi & Winant, 2015).

An income group is similar to a class, but different. While a class might be upper, owing to ascription or power, this does not necessarily mean a higher level of resources. The income group directly concerns greater material wealth or above-average possession of resources. Stratification here is solely based on comfortably higher purchasing power, but class could be higher positioning, not just because of resources, but also because of the privilege of birth or the benefit of political power (Weber, 1978). Being on the favoured side of these binaries could, individually or collectively, boost the sense of self and lead to an origin, or to distancing from the origin; in the latter case, the concerned could be assumed to have first acknowledged the origin before the severance decision is taken.

The two-step process of knowing and choosing not to associate hardly erases the origin still. While those who relate to the origin are positive about it, those who loathe it are seen as somewhat negative about the village. The fact of negativity may not be evidence of erasure, but only another kind of association with the origin (Ahmed, 2004). The first type is those who cherish it, and the second type is those who do not, but can hardly wipe it from their memory. It sticks, as well, and also makes the village follow them, still, even if bereft of their goodwill (Connerton, 2009). For those disposed to severance from village affairs, or more broadly from the constant connection of origin, they might be speaking to the break that the human being sometimes requires.

Table 5: Information & Bias Loop

Table 6: Technology, Identity & Belonging Loop

Section 3.2:

The Past Is Present: Technology and the New Geography of Belonging

The village, the origin, is replete with many traits. Some of these are high expectations from migrants; the pressure of remittance or to build a home, worsened when peers have done so; open judgment on personal issues; indiscriminate invasion of privacy; disregard for class, given the privileging of age as the framework for respectability; and ceaseless and most times needless gossip (de Haas, 2010). These traits could become tiring, sometimes unbearable, and also irritating. Rather than confronting the situation, some migrants might opt for withdrawal as a coping mechanism (Hirschman, 1970). In coping this way, they are probably also creating another kind of distance between them and their origin.

This distance, however, has collapsed with technology, making the physical gap a forgotten affair. The gap before now was due to mobility and the lack of technologies for instantaneous communication. Meanings could hardly be exchanged until physical contact, just as interaction would have to wait. Communion was also delayed. With spontaneity and instantaneity now predominating through modern devices, the question of “away” “ far’’ or ‘’yonder is somewhat irrelevant, given that two, three, or more locations, geographies can overlap (Urry, 2007). The digital village now challenges the physical village, creating multilevel tension not just between the places but also between the citizen and the state (Castells, 2012).

While the state could exert better control over the physical village, doing the same in the digital realm remains tricky because of the hyper-plurality of channels, the wide embrace of networks by citizens desperate for self-expression, and the fact that technologies are not only evolving but also becoming increasingly sophisticated (Couldry & Hepp, 2017). The loyalty of citizens would appear to be more for the social network than for the state, compounded by the new opportunity to boost self-esteem by being part of an opinionated mass (boyd, 2014). In opinionating, the migrants are not just maintaining relevance, but also exemplifying the age. The new age is where the past can no longer be left behind.

The past is present, following devices everywhere, ringing and texting on the telephones, emailing, conversing and sharing images on WhatsApp, Instagram, Face Book and Tik Tok, when people behind in the villages call, text, prompt or write as the case could be, reminding migrants that they could be anywhere else but still present, and could be everywhere and nowhere in particular (Madianou & Miller, 2012). Collective memory and social identity are no longer fixed, physical, or stationary coordinates. It is like a digital shadow, portable and flexible (Hoskins, 2018). In terms of the physics of movement, human mobility is now part of a regular stream of data, rather than locomotion through space (Sheller & Urry, 2006).

The common solitude, loneliness associated with dislocated, travelling, and dwelling people, is now bypassed through communication devices; feelings, emotions, and sentiments are conveyed through these systems, thereby reconciling presence and absence (Turkle, 2011). The past confronts humans daily through voices and images, preventing them from leaving it behind, as was the case before now (van Dijck, 2007). The fact of connecting with a past may not amount to an inability to concentrate in a new place, but simply to the expansion of the place. The place is now joined to the place before to create a larger space for interaction, rather than the previous limitation. The fact of the synergy between the past and the present place implicates a co-terminus, synonymous interaction between the places, an integrated sense of place, where the difference between before and now whittles away (Massey, 1994).

The human is invariably tasked with further work in the process, given the increased sense of interactivity from physical contact with those in the present place and virtual contact with those in the place before (Licoppe, 2004). Belonging expands, therefore, and identity is similarly consolidated for the multileveled chance of interactions enhanced by technology (Giddens, 1991). Important in this circumstance is the additional implication of belonging. Belonging is being a part of and sustaining it. It is performative, not given, desired, and may not be acquired, constructed, or taken for granted (Yuval-Davis, 2011). Belonging is not necessarily a possession in an individual’s hands; we do not just have it. We work to have it. And in the age of social media, it happens through shares, likes, voice notes, and video calls (boyd, 2014).

The performance of these acts registers presence, while the non-performance records absence, which might even become worrisome (Marwick & boyd, 2011). Belonging is steeped in the present trans-local, multi-local space, where people can live in between places, courtesy of the networks (Urry, 2007). With the networks, therefore, belonging is rife, heightening people’s sense of inclusion, participation, relevance, and possibly well-being (Couldry & Hepp, 2017). Its hybrid identity is also possible while people scroll through screens, connecting here and there, virtually mixing from one platform to another and remaining recognisable across most of the places (Papacharissi, 2010).

The recognition ingrains a sense of involvement, and the likely pleasure from not being excluded. The home, origin represented in the village, may no longer be depicted as a physical place or a neighbourhood, but rather as connections, multiple networks, and platforms (Castells, 2009). While individual choices might vary in the degree to which they want to be remembered, the likelihood of disconnection is, however, marginal relative to the likelihood of connection.

How these rights are respected is also crucial, considering patterns of baiting, many of them akin to intrusions, despite legal restrictions, technological applications, and moral expectations (Solove, 2007). Respect for privacy and personal choices varies, depending on individual appreciation of civil and social etiquette and the degree of awareness surrounding it. What matters overall is that while individuals might be vacating the villages, the origins, the place is yet not done with individuals, in so far as the individual remains a social being exposed to the hardly avoidable networks, and the innate need to seek belonging, not just in the quest for identity, but to steady emotions and psychologies in the hyper-complex world of navigating social, economic and political realities (Baumeister & Leary, 1995).

Section 3.3:

Origin As a Patient Follower

The realities involve an origin that remains perpetually a patient and painstaking follower of the parts of individuals. The village is invariable portable through digital mobility, a mediated memory that sustains belonging and signals not just the nature of the contemporary home but a future home likely to grow in redefinition and complexity (Hoskins, 2018). The village follows the migrants across the sleepless networks, through twenty-four hours and seven days every week, in the rekindling of community memory. Though departed, migrants’ paths are rewired to the villagers, their origins and beginning points, creating what appears to be a transnational village (Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004).

In this transnational space, algorithms act as village elders, guiding interactions and infusing sense and wisdom into conduct, while also acting as peers, complementing, shaping, and moderating individual approaches, ensuring they do not inappropriately affect others (Gillespie, 2014). Even when this occurs, users are brought back into line through warnings or sanctions. Common sanctions in virtual spaces include warnings, surcharges, suspensions, and expulsions. The virtual world permits digital séances, where villagers are poised to commune with the dead, the ancestors, through the platforms (Brubaker, Hayes, & Dourish, 2013).

In this regard, they replicate the practice in the physical village world where the dead are assumed to be potent enough to influence daily activities (Mbiti, 1990). The names of the dead are invoked for blessings and for interventions in endeavours to ensure success. The online version happens where the dead are called on platforms, and with a presumption of response and presence, communication is established with the dead. The native language is frequently used for this, following the assumption that it is more connecting, more integrating, and more galvanising (Anderson, 1983). Beyond this, the villages often also spice conversations with native languages, if not spoken entirely.

In doing this, the village is also made to follow them, in addition to the roles the languages play as powerful reminders of origin. While leaving their digital identities through their footprints, the digital spaces also preserve them, even after their deaths, suggesting an afterlife in the digital world (Kasket, 2019). This networked world becomes, therefore, an artefact, a lasting archive where memories of the dead are not only preserved, but where many are remembered for their contributions.

The contributions, both for the living and the dead, regularly remain, popping up at different times, whether required or not (Brubaker, Hayes, & Dourish, 2013). The experience validates thoughts about the openness of the virtual world, where a hiding place is scarce, or practically non-existent, and through which anyone could be traced or tracked (Zuboff, 2019). The tracking could occur in past or present contributions, such as text, voice notes, videos, and images. It may be direct contact or through another individual who knows the person in view. Accountability is in place; safety, care, and concern are also evident. The flip side is overexposure, loss of privacy, and inordinate openness to scrutiny (Solove, 2007).

Also important is that virtual engagement for migrants begins not just from the need to reconnect with the villagers or from the fact that the village follows them, but also from the mind. The mind of an individual naturally ponders, reflecting on something at every moment (Kahneman, 2011). The thoughts, whether reasonable or unreasonable, are now expressible on individual platforms. The platforms are no longer distanced; they are literally embodied and can be used, applied, and manipulated at will (Ihde, 1990). An individual gains inclusion in the process, participating whenever and wherever, without let or hindrance (boyd, 2014). While participation is guaranteed, the quality of participation may not be, given variations in the values of the inputs.

The variation is also a function of age, gender, class, level of experience, and degree of commitment to data expenditure and use (Hargittai, 2010). The inherent liberty of the new freedom, similarly, enables the diminishment of physical absences and helps maintain the continuity of key traits of the village, including being a symbolic geography, an archive of memory, a place for a network of obligations, and a moral community (Appadurai, 1996; Hoskins, 2018). Village is no longer a place, but a presence, because it is now performative, reconstructed, redistributed, and patently portable (Yuval-Davis, 2011). The village is not where migrants leave behind, but is the entire initial epistemology that refuses to leave the migrant. It is yesterday that is integrated with today, the time past entangled in the present (Massey, 1994).

Migration is no longer linear, a simple departure and settlement, but a question of reverse flow of place, the fact of belonging becoming mobile, amidst identities that are co-traveling, co-existing with the migrant (Sheller & Urry, 2006). In the age, therefore, mobility is not just physical, through migration, but also digital through connectivity, emotional through memory and ritual, and through fulfilling obligations, remitting funds, and in occasional return/visits (Madianou & Miller, 2012). The village persists in individuals through social media platforms, including WhatsApp groups, TikTok, Facebook, and phones, where voice notes, family calls, and ceremonies are live streamed.

There, digital co-presence is registered, amidst ambient belonging and a kinship now mediated on platforms (Licoppe, 2004). Implicated in all these are spatial identity, place-making, ritual experience, kinship and community, as well as diaspora and transnational realities. Imagined communities have intensified through the platforms, moving from emotions/feelings to a networked experience, activated by exchanges (Anderson, 1983). Transnationalism is not just from above, but also from below, as social remittances, the transfer of new post-migration experiences into village-related interactions, manifest (Levitt, 1998). As imagined communities become mediated in real time, affective economies also evolve, with emotions conditioning work, financial decisions, and consumption (Ahmed, 2004). 

Table 7: The Portable Village: Technology and the Transformation of Belonging

Section 3.4:

Now, The End of Departure

In another sense, departure could be said to have somewhat ended through the possibilities of networks, because departure is no longer equated with the physical cessation of links, since links can continue even in their absence (Urry, 2007). Departure is no longer tantamount to a rupture, because the village still binds emotionally, is still politically influential, and remains socially active. Migration is not the same as having more, but about stretching, or elongating places, and a reconfiguration of presence.

In this circumstance, the village provides follow-up care through advice and support, as well as surveillance, because of its knack for monitoring not just the progress of the migrant but also the behaviour, or more specifically, policy behaviour, at a distance (Foucault, 1977; Lyon, 2007). Memory eventually becomes an infrastructure for organising identity, and for life decisions and activities such as naming ceremonies, marriages, and burials (Assmann, 2011; Halbwachs, 1992). The mnemonic governance of migrant affairs is enabled on the platforms, while ancestry is made to interact with modern, everyday life (Hoskins, 2018). This is possible because digital platforms have become new village squares, where, for instance, WhatsApp is good for village meetings, Facebook for lineage archives, and TikTok for performative belonging (boyd, 2014; Miller et al., 2016). This all makes the village square algorithmic (Striphas, 2015). While participants are witnessing these, they also have to navigate or resolve obligations, sustain moral discipline, manage social expectations around success and fulfilment, and deal with communal anticipation of personal decisions on marriage, property, and preferred location (Durkheim, 1912/2001; Bourdieu, 1990).

The experiences require management because they are emotionally taxing, while the obligations demand attention, fulfilled or not (Hochschild, 1983). These are similarly woven into their patterns as they return, without really returning physically, by monitoring events online, making voice or video calls, naming children after ancestors, and building houses they would never live in (Carling & Hoelscher, 2013). Added to this flurry are enlisting in hometown associations and exerting voting influence from a distance (Østergaard-Nielsen, 2003). Crowdfunding for village projects and fragments of groups on social media platforms are also evident, alongside cultural practices such as occasional exposure to the local language, food, and dress styles (Brinkerhoff, 2009).

By extension, the new experience has digitally amplified pre-digital networks, created a photo-social media for the extended village family, and exemplified oral tradition as an early technology (Ong, 1982; Miller et al., 2016). In working through the village, the city, diaspora and digital platforms, with digital ethnography on WhatsApp archives and in social media interactions; memory work, through oral histories and personal narratives it was possible to dissect the portable village, which sticks belonging on people on the go, permitting ambient kinship, digital ancestrality and a networked villagehood (Madianou, 2016; Pink et al., 2016). Place becomes elastic with digital spaces, enabling a continuing sense of belonging, circulated identity, and mediated presence (Appadurai, 1996).

Tensions and paradoxes may, however, emerge between rootedness and individual success, between emotional exhaustion and digital connection, and between presence and absence (Bauman, 2000). Individuals may have the village, the origin, but the village, the origin, never leaves them. It never logs out of them. It follows. It remembers them. The question might now be not where people come from, but rather what continually comes with them, as the villages are not behind individuals, but rather around them, within them, and ceaselessly online with them (Couldry & Hepp, 2017). Belonging is no longer geographically but virtual (Castells, 2010).

Section 3.4.1:

Memory, Archives, and the Impossibility of Forgetting

It has been emphasised that the village is no longer just a place but, importantly, a condition of networks. Village compounds are now replicated in WhatsApp groups. The roles of village elders are replaced by influencers and admins. Still to be demonstrated are the questions of memory, the importance of archives seen on the networks, and the impossibility of forgetting. This is given the enormous avenues for the platforms to recall history (Hoskins, 2018; van Dijck, 2007). In this new circumstance, memory is boosted. The gap between the past and the present closes. Individuals’ ability to remember, not to forget, is enhanced (Mayer-Schönberger, 2009).

Apart from the village being a curation of algorithms, the platforms are now deciders of village voices, eventually prompting the question of whether the village is rather engineered and not organic, a digital construct rather than a natural phenomenon (Striphas, 2015; Gillespie, 2014). In the digital spaces, kinship expands into “fam,” “bro,” and “sis,” while lineage structures are replicated in online solidarity, in what is akin to how home is recreated by diasporic communities through interactions (Madianou, 2016). Surveillance thrives in these online communities because everyone knows everyone, and anyone who appears unfamiliar is quickly regarded as a stranger and is required to be identified (Lyon, 2007).

Tension could arise, however, when the village’s care and concern for members becomes control, but memory persists through photos, posts, and voice notes (Foucault, 1977; Hoskins, 2018). The village becomes a cloud-based memory system, where forgetting is not just impossible but nearly erased (Mayer-Schönberger, 2009; van Dijck, 2007). Because it is global, actors are constrained from being called out, given concerns about “what will people say,” even though deviations could emerge from radical members of the group (boyd, 2014). Individuals also belong to fragments of groups related to the village, sometimes making identity layered, conflicting, and disaggregated (Hall, 1996; Madianou, 2016). Roles, however, change in these spaces, and new ones are emerging. In the traditional village setting, a town crier existed, but that role is now taken over by someone who forwards messages or makes contributions from time to time (Miller et al., 2016). Gossip flies at the speed of light, and faster than fact, always (Sunstein, 2009).

Influence is not a function of age or the pressure of elders, as it is in the village. Influence and authority are now a function of the one who controls the group, the most frequent and consequential contributor, or the one who has the loudest voice (Gillespie, 2014; Shirky, 2008). Events can be arranged online, therefore reducing the need to be physically present (Castells, 2010). In contemporary African societies, and using Nigeria as a case, the villages have been literally seized by bandits, kidnappers, and insurgents. They have become epicentres of this destruction and sorrow. Mass killings by militias are frequently recorded (International Crisis Group, 2020). The result is that most urban or diasporic members of the village are always hesitant to visit in person.

The digital participation option has become the most plausible option, given emergent health and safety considerations (Brinkerhoff, 2009). Pseudonyms are common in the digital spaces of the village people, but they still carry substantial reputational weight given familiarity with the bearers (Donath, 1999). For some reason, the people of the village adopt pseudonyms that they tagged their guy’s name with while growing up. These names are separate from their official names given to them by their parents at birth. The etymologies of the names are always imprecise, often a product of their rhythm, and sometimes adopted after famous people or actors (Alford, 1988). When it is animal-like, the lion is most preferred, or the tiger. It confers not just a feeling of belonging on the bearer, but a top place in the communal space of notables (Turner, 1969).

When the name is a corruption of their official name, like Ezekiel, converted to “Easy”, “Ibrahim” turning to “Ibro”, or “Peter” becoming “Piro”, or “Michael”, being called “Mike”, “Gabriel”, “Gab”, “Raphael”, “Ralph”, “Emmanuel”, “Emmy”, “Glory”, “Glo,” “Laminu,” “Lion”, Bukola, “Bukky,” the bearer and the user are more commonly excited, because it shows a greater bondedness, as an unfamiliar person will not use it (Brown & Levinson, 1987). Village does not, therefore, rely solely on screenshots, calls, and notifications; it also allows for a continuous flow of familiarity (Licoppe, 2004). The familiarity ensures that compounds become clouds, implicating the reconfiguration of communities; in WhatsApp, becoming a village square; and in the redefinitions through algorithms and new, emerging social hierarchies (Couldry & Hepp, 2017; Striphas, 2015).

Table 8: From Physical Village to Algorithmic Village

SECTION 4

The Village Without Exit: Belonging, Power, And Persistence in the Digital Age

The question can also be asked whether the village can refuse to follow individuals. This is valid because digital participation is permanent and unerasable (Mayer-Schönberger, 2009). It tends to make exits difficult because of fostered infrastructures of belonging, including alumni networks, family groups, and hometown ties (Brinkerhoff, 2009). The challenge is consequently not one of non-belonging but of the inability to leave belonging behind when things go away (Bauman, 2000). It is also noteworthy that a few participants are active or contributors. Many are monitoring spirits, perpetually keeping quiet and not exiting, creating a problem for discerning whether they are approving, disapproving, or simply being strategically invisible (Nonnecke & Preece, 2000).

They become quiet witnesses, becoming a counterpoise to those whose voices are being heard. Continuous belonging can also be emotionally draining, as participation requires acknowledging events, responding to messages, and making the performative process of belonging to look like work (Hochschild, 1983). Fatigue could set in, further exacerbated by the pressures of digital contributions, crowdfunding, and the moral pressure of being in the digital village of the financial network (Terranova, 2000).

The networks do not just persist; they shift, from Facebook to WhatsApp and from Telegram to TikTok. Each place reconfigures participation, memory, and authority (van Dijck, 2013; Gillespie, 2014). It therefore looks impossible for the village to shift and retain all its details. Something could get missing (Bowker, 2005). What becomes of these things, therefore? The links missing might be more complete in the physical village, which somewhat remains an edge over the mobile virtual places, compared with the fixed physical place of the village, the origin (Casey, 2000). In the digital world as well, there is a temporal collapse. People simultaneously live in multiple times, with the ease of assembling posts and old photos in the present, and the opportunities to correlate the present with the past in live chats, and with the future (Hoskins, 2018).

The village is not defined by cyclical times, limited to seasons, festivals, and ritual periods, but layered and continuous (Castells, 2010). The aesthetics of belonging reveal a performative dimension, with profile pictures publicized during elections, alongside the signaling of identities through hashtags (Papacharissi, 2015). Many groups have customized visual grammar, largely unique to them, and easily identifiable by members (Kress, 2010). Across generations, children inherit their parents’ networks, while family reputations persist within them, which may also lead to digital lineage (Bourdieu, 1986).

People are now born not only into a village, but additionally into a pre-existing datified village (Couldry & Mejias, 2019).

Truth and rumour have another infrastructure in the village, as truth is negotiated on group chats (Sunstein, 2009). Epistemology is a competition between truth told by uncles and influencers and truth curated by algorithms, making the village a site of knowledge contestation (Gillespie, 2014). Another characteristic is reflected in the limitations of online condolences, in which the bereaved believe a physical variant is more effective (Walter, 2015). Virtual condolence messages, just as Zoom funerals and the minimization of celebrations to emojis, are regarded as lacking emotion and as insufficient to compensate for physical presence (Miller et al., 2016).

Digitalisation of processes is, therefore, a witness to how media intimacy can be inadequate (Turkle, 2011). What about exit and exhaustion? This happens all the time, as people might be removed, remove themselves, become fatigued, bored, or simply desire withdrawal (Bauman, 2000). Being removed could be equal to “social death” for the one who is integrated and habituated, or a kind of digital ostracism, leading to mental discomfort, or a feeling of rejection and even a possible depression (Williams, 2007). Involuntary removals are frequently the handiwork of admins, who are now acting as the traditional village elders (Shirky, 2008). The political economy dimension is also important, as platforms profit from interactions, cultural exchanges, and emotions, making the village no longer simply social but extractive, a kind of data mine (Couldry & Mejias, 2019; Zuboff, 2019).

Table 9: The Village Without Exit

Important to note that not all belonging is inherited, because people can also develop alternative “villages” and form intellectual circles, activist networks, and queer communities. Belonging in these situations is not, therefore, imposed but chosen (Rainie & Wellman, 2012). Humour of the village could come from memes, becoming regulatory, jokes turning into corrections and discipline, emanating from sarcasm (Shifman, 2014). Laughter eventually becomes a tool of governance (Billig, 2005). The village could go wrong at times of misidentification, false accusations, and viral information (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017). When this happens, the victim suffers unjustly, while perpetrators are left in regret, face prosecution, and possible sanctions.

The village is therefore not collectively perfect; often running into trouble with the state, it could lead to multiple prosecutions or bring the village into disrepute, notorious for one crime or another (Citron, 2014). And the digital village also has an afterlife, through dead members remaining in chats, the persistence of voice notes and messages, and digital mourning practices (Brubaker et al., 2013). This is not just about the living anymore, but also a forte of those dead yet still alive in the digital spaces, due to the non-erasability of their footprints (Mayer-Schönberger, 2009). The digital spaces make work ties turn strong. Weak ties from afar are reconfigured online and gain strength (Granovetter, 1973). The strength could also go away when the support system on offer becomes like surveillance, the frequent calls for financial assistance become financial pressure, emotional care turns into exhaustion, and the village, as an anchor of identity, becomes constraining (Lyon, 2007; Hochschild, 1983).

Section 4.1:

Further Traits of a Placeless Village

Speed is the hallmark of news in the present times. It is somewhat privileged over accuracy (Virilio, 2006). And it is why news, correct or incorrect, now travels at the speed of light through, for example, a single tweet, and everyone, including those in the village, has seen it (Castells, 2010). This is unlike the past, when news travelled slowly, taking days to arrive. It is now instantaneous and contemporaneous (van Dijck, 2013). It is more so because the village now has at least one digital informant, who may be lurking quietly but sending screenshots, forwarding messages, and reporting back and forth overall (Nonnecke & Preece, 2000).

The village can be physically departed, but not administratively, because the individual remains in the family group, the alumni group, the hometown association group, and friends’ or like-minded groups (Rainie & Wellman, 2012). Leaving these groups can be difficult because individuals do not want to send the wrong signals. This is because leaving might suggest anger, irritation, provocation, or disrespect of the group founder or administrator (boyd, 2014). Many might just stay for the sake of it, so as not to offend sensibilities. Exiting the physical village could therefore be easier than leaving the digital platforms (Bauman, 2000).

The new digital town crier is not the bell-ringing, drum-beating, screaming physical village version, but the dispatch of messages via forwarded messages, viral voice notes, and broadcast lists (Miller et al., 2016). These processes never end, and the traditional closing prayer that signifies the conclusion of a meeting is no longer the case in digital spaces. Activities on there are sleepless, happening at midnight, during work hours, and early in the morning, just anytime, as a 24/7 affair (Crary, 2013). Social pressure now comes from “seen,” where response is expected. Not responding implicates rebellion, indifference, or pride (Licoppe, 2004). In a perfect archive, a witness to simultaneous villages, tension could also inevitably arise when parties in interaction disagree (Hoskins, 2018). Posts are a measure of responsibility, a moral circle for assessing every village person (Durkheim, 1912/2001).

Timelines are now a public moral stage and can culminate in offline matters (Papacharissi, 2015). Belonging is about visible participation that leads to public accountability and ongoing clarity on location, progress, and plans (Couldry & Hepp, 2017). The boundary between gossip and news has disappeared in the new village, as what was once a mere gist can become what is debated as truth, argued as fact, and contested as a basis for reason (Sunstein, 2009). Distance has not necessarily reduced expectations, but rather increased them (Rainie & Wellman, 2012). The absence of a network or signal is not a strong enough excuse for being out of touch, as it is hardly permanent. It is often a matter of fluctuation. If not available now, it could be at another time. A consistent trial would eventually be rewarding. Villages arrive before members can be heard. They could be in the know of things before the individual provides physical explanations, always making the story owner the last narrator (Goffman, 1959).

In this age, digital silence can be more worrisome than physical absence (Turkle, 2011). Before now, being physically absent could be an excuse for silence, but not anymore. Being absent from physical spaces is immediately concerning because every member should be reachable on at least one platform at all times (Ling, 2012). Individuals are now content with the village, a narrative, where engagement is integral, more like a compulsion (Nieborg & Poell, 2018). There are no closing hours in those new digital villages. No dispersal. No amnesia and no dusk. It is ever active, ever alive, and ever bustling, even though to degrees. It all makes the new digital village patient, portable, and permanent (Couldry & Mejias, 2019).

Table 10: From Town Crier to Timeline: Life in the Digital Village

Section 4.2:

When Home Follows You: Networked Belonging & the End of Departure

This lecture has tried to prove that home is no longer a geography but an infrastructure, no longer a place but a relational infrastructure which is programmable, persistent, portable, and preserving (Couldry & Hepp, 2017; Castells, 2010). Belonging within the matrix is now networked, making participation, identification, and inclusion of individuals rarely inescapable (Rainie & Wellman, 2012). Mobility is no longer a precursor to distance, but only an originator of performative, layered presence (Urry, 2007). Physical presence may be absent, but social presence is continuous (Licoppe, 2004). In these circumstances, however, do individuals have the freedom to be left alone? Can you minimise digital exposure? Is belonging coercive? Can people voluntarily disconnect from the village? Should identity remain performative, or can silence, anonymity, and/or personal reinvention be embarked upon (boyd, 2014)? Would it be out of place to have selective presence as an ethical norm?

Finding answers to these questions would further strengthen the arguments, but, in the circumstances, it might be necessary to adopt a community-based digital governance, where the presently loose operational framework can be better harmonised, structured, and administered (Gillespie, 2018). Secondly, what about digital rights and governance? Would it not be better if there were stronger, more effectively implemented data protection laws and regulations for the algorithmic memory system (Zuboff, 2019)? The idea is to prevent the uncontrollable state of information flow, where facts, quality, and accuracy have been replaced with mediocrity, rumour, gossip, the gross invasion of privacy, a culture of maligning, and a system of half-truths, complete untruths, and fabrications, leading to the discourse on misinformation, disinformation, and misinformation (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017). Thirdly, migrants and diasporas are still to be part of the nation’s governance and policy architecture (Brinkerhoff, 2009).

This set of citizens is no longer absent as it used to be. They are ultra-conscious, participatory, reform-oriented, and represent a digitally embedded section of the nation’s population (Castells, 2010). With the growing need for knowledge for development and the exposure of many more developed nations, can the nation not begin to consider a hybrid civic participation system, or a frequent digital town hall, that links the home and the diasporic community (Shirky, 2008)? This appears plausible if, to mitigate the implications of distance, the cost of physical meetings is covered, and to cover citizens who are dispersed across territories far apart. This is closely linked to the new need for digital identity literacy, memory awareness studies, and a more critical understanding of platforms (Couldry & Mejias, 2019). How about improved, deliberate recognition of migrants as physically mobile and digitally anchored, and the initiation of policies that consider dual belonging identities (Vertovec, 2009)? This is simply arguing that, with changes in the realities of our everyday lives, our policies too would have to adapt, if not to encompass new developments.

Fourthly, earlier studies of migration imagine a rupturing and resettlement into a community of people (Glick Schiller et al., 1992). The narrative has now changed. Migration is now a stretch of belonging, and the creation of other avenues of identity (Madianou, 2016). This extends the theories of diaspora studies, networked identity sociology, digital belonging studies, and identity studies (Hall, 1996). The new aspects could expand knowledge of the subject matter, providing further opportunities to develop deeper insights and to productively capture human essences within the frameworks of mobility, migration, and diaspora.

Fifthly, constant connection to digital spaces, to phones, and to social media can frequently lead to fragmented identity and emotional exhaustion (Turkle, 2011; Hochschild, 1983). This arises from activity becoming discontinuous, as the transition is perpetual and the negotiation of social, economic, and political realities becomes ceaseless (Bauman, 2000). The restlessness of individuals as a result, somewhat required in the new world of visible, judgeable, and measurable belonging, may now require the consideration of an antithesis, a slight or minimised reversal in the form of the practice of private belonging (Rainie & Wellman, 2012). By implication, can people not be happy being out of the network? Can individuals not be satisfied with being unreachable, or with privileging their privacy above all else (boyd, 2014)? What has become of the few who are unconnected, de-networked, or de-activated, whether voluntarily or involuntarily (Hargittai, 2002)?

Sixthly, the digital village is real in Africa, given the emergence of social media platforms like WhatsApp as infrastructure, alongside their relevance to family groups (Miller et al., 2016). The groups invariably become cultural archives, arenas for discipline, and spaces for governance (Hoskins, 2018). The rural-urban continuum is reconfigured as the village is no longer behind but is carried along, enforced, and negotiated with individuals (Urry, 2007). With this in mind, would a community regulatory framework, cultural continuity, architecture, and a clearer digital identity not be worth developing? I am arguing in the affirmative once more because of the multi-sided nature of technological innovations, which largely permit hitherto unimaginable possibilities and continue to do so (Castells, 2010). This framework should, however, be ingenious and creative, reflective of African culture and tradition.

Seventh, in the future, artificial intelligence will be able to predict belonging, curate identity, and reconstruct the past (Zuboff, 2019). Forgetting will then become almost impossible, rare, expensive, and just a matter of discretion (Mayer-Schönberger, 2009). Communities will also become hyper-persistent, far beyond the present state, as villages will always be on and belonging will be enforced more by algorithms (Couldry & Mejias, 2019). Eight, to be sure, there are memory rights, the building of inclusive governance with the migrant and diasporic community as active participants, and the need to regulate algorithmic nostalgia (Hoskins, 2018).

Table 11: When Home Follows You

Other than these is the need to include digital identity literacy in pedagogies, the reformation of frameworks for migration, the freedom or normalization of selective disconnection, the encouragement of plural identities (Hall, 1996), in so far as it does not conflict with Africa’s traditions, cultures and the tenets of major religions, aside the permission for the practice of intentional, deliberate belonging, and the conscious curation of personal digital presence (Couldry & Hepp, 2017).

Before now, we left the village behind.  Now, however, the village is with us. Before now, we wondered how we could belong, but now we may not know how to trigger a sense of non-belonging. Before now, we were probably from one place, but now, however, we are from all the places that remember us (Appadurai, 1996). Distance has died, but belonging is now heavier. It is the world we are in now, a world where we move, yet we are constantly within sight and even reach. It is a new world of increasingly hyper-sophisticated communication technologies (Castells, 2010). Continue to enjoy the world and prepare for more, while being assured that your village is still following you. Many thanks for your kind attention.

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