Inuit Identity and Technology: An Exploration of the Use of Facebook by Inuit Youth

Abstract

This thesis engages in a broad discussion of technology, communications, identity, and cultural change in the Canadian Arctic. Using an ethnographic methodological strategy, it looks at how a group of Inuit college students in Iqaluit use the online social network Facebook. It was found that Inuit youth are intensive users of Facebook, basically using it to communicate with their communities of origin, to maintain friends and family ties across a vast territory, to access cultural referents on Facebook groups, discuss issues, shape their identity, ask questions, access pictures of the land and recall traditions. In these Facebook groups, there is a cultural memory and remembrance of the past collectively established through the hypertext of Facebook which further shows how technology is incorporated and adapted to a culture rather than being undermined by that technology's incorporation. In this sense, Inuit youth "travel" through Facebook using it for their own purposes such as accessing cultural referents of the land in a multimedia interface. This research also argues, from an actor-network perspective, that Inuit youth are immersed in a culture of connectivity (van Dijck, 2013) through which social life and experiences are increasingly mediated by social network sites. 2 groups 1 (Scobie and Rodgers, 2013). The site is extensively used and has acquired a special presence in the media-scape, and plays an important role in defining Inuit presence on the Internet.Previous literature on how indigenous peoples have used media and communication technologies tended to looked at this relation positively

The new knowledge politics of digital colonialism

“…Communities are much more often connected to pre-existing digital services on the World Wide Web. In the Arctic the most popular use of Internet connectivity is posting and browsing updates on Facebook and other social media sites, in order to interact with family and friends and to connect to the broader world (Castleton, 2014; Wachowich and Scobie, 2010). Unfortunately, relatively little research has yet explored how the epistemic biases of these common digital platforms impact Indigenous knowledge (Young, 2016).…”