Journal of Greek Media & Culture - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2019

Through field research on Greek second-generation migrants in Italy – a hitherto unexplored and under-represented population – this article examines their use of the Internet in a diasporic and transnational context. More specifically, it explores the ways in which the Greek second generation uses the Internet in order to maintain ties with Greece and seeks to understand the role that the Internet performs in the context of diaspora. Moreover, the diasporic media content on the Internet and the interconnection between online and offline worlds will be analysed in order to assess the impact of the Internet on diasporic networks and interpersonal relationships, especially with reference to critical events such as the Greek debt crisis. The research findings show that the maintenance of ties with the motherland is deeply affected by a mass-mediated imaginary that frequently transcends national space. The ease and frequency with which the Internet crosses borders produce undeniably new ways of imagining the place of origin and create alternatives to the nation state, in terms of emotional belonging and identifying transnationally with other diaspora members.

In the wake of Greece’s economic crisis, expressions and acts of racism have become noticeably more prevalent, particularly in light of the rise of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party. Two significant topics in public discourse that gave rise to expressions of racism were the amendment of the Greek citizenship law, which came into effect in 2010 and was heavily debated in the run up to the 2012 Greek general elections, as well as the perceived increase in immigration at the start of the refugee crisis. By investigating newspaper articles from Greek newspapers of different political affiliations during the period around the Greek general elections of 2012, we intend to provide examples of how racism was constructed in the language of the press at the time and analyse this against the background of the economic crisis in Greece.

How can we conceive the cosmopolitan ideal of travelling and experiencing exotic difference, so much embraced by ‘countercultural’ practices, once it is aestheticized into phantasmagorical dream-worlds? How can we think of people getting wasted due to drug-fuelled, long-lasting dancing without resorting to idealisms of ‘alternate experiences’ and romanticisms about ideal ways of belonging? This article explores psytrance festivals – a cultural product of the Electronic Dance Music (EDM) carnivalesque celebrations, drug consumption (for the most part LSD and MDMA) and euphoric travelling of the 1960s – with an emphasis on cosmopolitanism, aesthetic intimacy and the care of the self. By examining the mobility of Greek aficionados in EDM festivals in Europe, which have gained great popularity since the first decade of the twenty-first century, I discuss the enactment of the chemical celebration in accordance with the sensorial formations, desiring-images and narratives that weave the imagination of psytrance music culture. In contrast with most of the academic literature that views EDM events as a ‘heterotopic’ set-up that facilitates ‘liminal experiences’ – supposedly evidence of the possibility of an out-of-the-ordinary lifestyle as opposed to everyday normativity – I propose to investigate the excesses of consumption and bodily expenditure within metaphors that support psytrance technoaesthetics.