Serving Hot Tea: Analyzing Narratives of ‘Abroad’ on Glocal Kenyan Twitter/X Spaces

Abstract

Social media reconstitutes the idea of ‘abroad’ as a geographical place, shortens the symbolic distance between borders, and renders the local and global into one almost seamless space. This seamlessness is both metaphorical and symbolic, where happenings on the spatial or geographical ‘abroad’ are rendered through context onto both the spatial and virtual ‘local’. Context via social media and other virtual spaces therefore serves to not only demarcate the local from the abroad, but also serves to at once create a seamless, borderless ‘glocal’ where texts are immediately ‘translated’ and ‘transposed’ into different forms.