Media enable a (re)imagining of new political subjectivities at a time when old conceptions of belonging and citizenship are constantly being contested. While allowing for greater democratization of the public sphere in which individuals can now express opinions and engage in conversations, the lack or difficulty of regulation is causing the rise or reification of political communities based on narrow and exclusivist understandings of identity. People are empowered and regaining a voice but are at the same time divided, through misleading information, indoctrination, as well as narrow and constraining debates. In Ethiopia, as elsewhere, digital media more than others offer the lens through which to interrogate local and diasporic narratives about history, memory, historiography, nation-building, and national identity. Debates over such issues as ownership and belonging (native versus immigrant) are part of a broader—at times raging—conversation about being, becoming, and belonging in a nation that is changing in ways that are simultaneously liberating and disempowering. This chapter uses social media discussions, from home and in the diaspora, on Ethiopia to explore questions of history, politics, and belonging in the age of intolerant nativism and contested globalization.

A Brief Note on Methodology

A study of an intensely polarized media environment, social media in particular pose their own challenges. This, to some extent, has to do with how one chooses which issues, narratives, social media sites, and personalities to explore, as well as and why these choices have been made. Any attempt to produce knowledge on such a complicated and constantly evolving subject requires methodological rigor in the collection and analysis of data. The research for this chapter begins with the following hypotheses: that Ethiopia's social media sphere (that is, social media discussions on Ethiopia from within and without) is considerably diverse; that it is constantly evolving; and that it is increasingly polarized. These evolving features of the social media landscape are reflective in many ways of a similar development within other domains of the Ethiopian media sphere.

My sampling strategy was developed accordingly to show the complexity and dynamism of Ethiopian, specifically diaspora-based, social media on the one hand and its growing polarization on the other. I used Facebook as the principal social media platform where the vast majority of online conversations on Ethiopia occur. I also engaged Twitter, which is another, albeit less common, platform for Ethiopian online conversations.