Diasporic Web Sites: Ingroup and Outgroup Discourse

With the increasing presence of Indian Immigrants in the West, there is a tendency among the diasporic people to use the World Wide Web (WWW) to create a cyber community. One of these pages is used as a starting point to examine critically the ways in which the WWW text speaks simultaneously to an interpretive community of “ingroup” members who have the interpretive history and strategies to make sense of the pages as well as the “outgroup” members who happen to surf into the India‐related pages. Several textual strategies are identified that create this ingroup/outgroup tension, including modes of formatting, use of language, specific selections of images and multimedia elements, and the specific links provided by the pages. These combine to produce the multi‐accentuated stylistic of the page that assists in speaking simultaneously to the two groups.