Diasporics have generally favoured the technologies that allow for narrowcasting to target specific audiences over those that provide the means for mass communication.
Diasporic communication networks are sometimes viewed as forming alternatives to the structures of corporate globalisation. Commentators writing from the perspectives of cultural studies and postcolonialism tend to see them as "the empire striking back". The diasporic site becomes the cultural border, Homi Bhabha's metaphorical "third space", lying between the country of origin and the country of residence.
This is the zone of intense, cutting-edge creativity born out of the existential angst of the immigrant who is neither here nor there. She is Abdul JanMohammed's "specular border intellectual" who "caught between two cultures…subjects the cultures to analytic scrutiny rather than combining them". One could cite from just within the South Asian diaspora a growing list of accomplished writers to support these ideas: it would include Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka/Canada), Moez G. Vassanji (Kenya/Tanzania/Canada), Rohinton Mistry (India/Canada), Anita Desai (India/Canada), Cyril Dabydeen (Guyana/Canada), V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad/England), Salman Rushdie (India/England), and Hanif Kureishi (England).
Having little input into the content of dominant national or global media, transnations (cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai's term) have also found new technologies like digital broadcasting satellites (DBS) and the Internet as particularly appropriate in maintaining active links among their far-flung members. Indeed, diasporic groups in North America and Europe were among the earliest to adopt DBS for cross-border transmissions. But at the same time, these very market-based technological solutions, which are enabling transnational communities to overcome structural communication barriers, are also drawing them into the dominant global structures.