NAsia’ Roy Huijsmans, senior lecturer Children & Youth Studies, ISS, The Hague, The Netherlands
Mobile phone use has become a defining feature of what it means to be young. This is no less true in the relatively remote, ethnic minority spaces of the Lao-Vietnamese borderland area that is the focus of this study. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, I investigate the interplay between mobile phones, being young and digital capitalism and how this reconfigures belonging. In doing so, I focus on ethnic minority youth’s appropriation of the mobile services provided by Viettel, the most popular mobile service provider in the study area and owned by the Vietnamese Ministry of Defence. I argue that the nationalism embedded in the digital capitalism of the corporate dimension of the post-socialist state (i.e. Viettel) enters young people’s lives and transforms ethnic minority spaces in profound ways and that a rereading of Anderson’s work in the digital age offers new ground for understanding the formation of nationalism in a distinct generational fashion.