With its capacity to link many people interactively across great distances, the Internet seems to be the ultimate tool for dispersed ethnic groups wishing to sustain identity in an ‘alien’ land and work in solidarity with those facing challenges at ‘home’. Some theorists speak of the creation of diasporic public spheres arising from creative use of Internet technologies. Nevertheless, scholars working in this area rarely embed their analyses within existing work on the public sphere. In the present study I use insights from public sphere theory to evaluate participants' use of a Haiti Global Village forum. After examining Haiti Global Village, I conclude that such forums offer needed space for civic deliberation and provide a valuable infrastructure for networking. Participants' difficulty in translating these assets into an off‐line project, however, highlights the importance of place‐based social ties. Consideration of the experience of other Haitian forums reinforces the importance of such ties.

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Parham looks at the ways in which the Internet shapes the public spheres created by diaspora communities in general, and the Haitian diaspora in particular. She contends that most accounts have tended to generate either a positive response—that the Internet will provide ideal conditions for the flourishing of the diasporic public sphere—or a less optimistic response, concerned that the Internet will encourage a superficial engagement with important issues that require a more grounded response. Although each position tends to rely on some implicit assumptions about how spatial dispersion affects public-sphere activities, it is rare that writers explicitly analyze how varied combinations of on- and offline interaction shape this activity. Parham offers a close reading of existing literature as well as case studies from the Haitian diaspora to name three different types of Internet-mediated publics—representational, network, and vertical publics—that vary in the degree to which their activity occurs online or offline. She concludes that while representational publics largely reproduce pre-Internet forms of communication, network and vertical publics significantly expand the range of interaction and organizational forms that allow ethnic and national communities to flourish in diaspora. These new kinds of publics raise novel challenges and potentials that need to be integrated into existing public-sphere theory.

Early on, as researchers began to pay attention to diaspora communities’ use of the Internet, Arjun Appadurai predicted that the use of this new medium would have a significant impact on community making in dispersal: These new forms of electronically mediated communication are beginning to create virtual neighborhoods, no longer bounded by territory, passports, taxes, elections, and other conventional political diacritics […] and while the social morphology of these electronic neighborhoods is hard to classify and their longevity difficult to predict, clearly they are communities of some sort. (195) Appadurai was especially interested in the use of media to create “diasporic public spheres” that enable diaspora communities to “imagine” themselves in new ways as part of a linked community even as their members live in geographic dispersal. The creation of such mediated public spheres enables participants to “mov[e] from shared imagination to collective action” (8).

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