Digital Diasporas: How Origin Characteristics and Host-Native Distance Shape Immigrants' Online Cultural Retention

2025-11-21

AI Summary

This study addresses a critical gap in migration literature by shifting focus from assimilation to online cultural retention among immigrant populations. Using Facebook advertising data, we employ econometric models to analyze eight immigrant groups, examining how homeland characteristics and cultural distance between origin and host societies shape digital cultural continuity. Results demonstrate that cultural distance is the primary antecedent of online cultural retention—its effect substantially exceeds that of homeland background. This finding provides the first robust empirical validation of the “cultural mosaic” hypothesis, challenging the classical melting-pot paradigm. By integrating large-scale digital trace data with social-scientific methodology, the study uncovers a key mechanism enabling multicultural coexistence in digital spaces. It advances theoretical understanding of cross-cultural communication and offers evidence-based insights for immigration integration policy and digital platform governance. (149 words)

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Natural Language Processing: Machine Translation, Multilinguality, Cross-Lingual NLP

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Social media analysis through the lenses of networks
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy

Abstract

Immigrants bring unique cultural backgrounds to their host countries. Subsequent interplay of cultures can lead to either a melting pot, where immigrants adopt the dominant culture of the host country, or a mosaic, where distinct cultural identities coexist. The existing literature primarily focuses on the acculturation of immigrants, specifically the melting pot hypothesis. In contrast, we attempt to identify the antecedents of the mosaic hypothesis or factors that enhance (or diminish) the propensity for cultural retention among immigrants. Based on Facebook advertising data for immigrants from 8 countries residing in the USA, our findings suggest that greater host-native distance is linked to higher online cultural retention, and while origin country context is statistically significant, its impact is generally smaller.

Problem

• Identifying factors influencing immigrants' online cultural retention patterns
• Examining how host-native distance affects cultural preservation tendencies
• Analyzing origin country characteristics' impact on digital cultural maintenance

Innovation

• Using Facebook advertising data for analysis
• Measuring host-native cultural distance impact
• Evaluating origin country characteristics influence