Media Path to Identity : The Journey of Vietnamese Young Generation Making Sense of Their Identity in the Media Space

Abstract: Recent research has noticed that the picture of the second-generation immigrants negotiating their identity in media space is different and far more complex than the first generation. With their emergence in the new age of digitalisation, the second-generation immigrant is offered more media choices and freedom of access to the two most important cultural sets of host and homeland country to make sense of their identity. This thesis addresses the specific case of how the Vietnamese second generation in Czech Republic constructs identity through the consumption of different media in different stages of their life. A further implication of the thesis is to contribute to the limited study inventory regarding second-generation immigrants and the new emergence of social media that has barely been examined in the past decade. This thesis relies mainly on the source of data from the semi-structured interview with ten informants, who are Vietnamese that were born and raised in Czech Republic. The age of informants varies from 18-30. Here, the focus lies on discovering the dominant media in the time they lived together with their parents and when they moved away from the family environment and lived independently. Moreover, it dives deeper to explore how they choose media and understand the cultural products and meanings embedded in those media that they selected, which can reflect their identity negotiation process. The finding indicates that as soon as they moved away from their parents, their media consumption changed accordingly from consuming mass transnational media to becoming active users of popular social media such as Facebook and Instagram. Moreover, their attitude and perceptions towards transnational media and the image of Vietnam ‘home’ embedded in it also shifted from resisting to reconnecting and pursuing the images of ‘home’ in their own way by their own values.