What can we learn from the private messaging networks of immigrant communities?

On a fall day last year, a Ghanaian immigrant to the United States tragically lost her life on the tracks at a New York subway station. After dropping her phone, she frantically climbed down on the elevated tracks of the Simpson Street station in the Bronx to retrieve it. I’ve seen a video of her carefully crawling, trying to retrieve the phone minutes before she was struck by a train entering the station.

This story was not immediately covered by any local television, print or digital publication. I didn’t know or speak to any of her family members or witnesses of the event. The only reason I’m aware this occurred was because my mother sent it to me. The context of the event and video was shared with her in one of her WhatsApp groups.

Private digital social networks

My mother is in her late 60s and has been in the U.S. for close to 50 years. She is not on Twitter or Facebook. She doesn’t use Google much and hardly deals with email. However, she knows much more about the Ghanian immigrant communities in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., than I do — someone who used to run a media-tech company focused on the Pan-African community with digitally distributed news. Funerals, christenings, church gossip, job openings, and off-the-market apartment rentals in these cities and known to her.

Much of what she knows is communicated to her through mobile messaging. Digital flyers, videos, memes, photos, and text stories are either directly sent by people in her network or shared with her as a member of various WhatsApp groups. She is clearly getting her news from digital social networks; they just aren’t open and public spaces.

There are likely millions of people with an immigrant background, from a variety of home countries, that fit the user profile of my mother. They all rely on private digital social networks as their main source of community-focused news and information.

What I’m doing at Stanford

I’m here at Stanford University as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow this academic year researching the formation and culture of the private digital messaging spaces made for immigrant communities in the U.S. I’m curious about what else is being shared in these groups. How do these groups form? Who runs these groups and how do new members find them? What kinds of information are shared in these spaces? How can practitioners in journalism, tech, academia, and public policy better reach these communities in these spaces?

If we are able to learn more about the flow and types of information shared in these spaces, we may all be able to provide value and better reach these communities. There is an opportunity to apply messaging technology in new ways in immigrant communities that could improve access to information and our knowledge of community needs and challenges.

How I arrived at this idea

From 2014 to 2018 I was the COO and chief editor of ZNews Africa, which I co-founded. We made mobile app, web and email products that made it easier for people to find stories about the Pan-African community that went beyond war, poverty, and disease.

Our flagship product was a mobile app that was basically a Flipboard for Pan-African news. Anytime I met someone of African descent, especially an immigrant, I would ask them to download our app. After doing this for several years I realized there are a good number of African immigrants who have smartphones but are not comfortable enough with the technology of their devices.

It wasn’t uncommon for me to pitch our app to someone and realize they are unable to download it because they do not have an email address. The Google Play Store requires that you have one to access the store and download apps. This would happen most often whenever I entered a cab in New York and asked my African driver if he would download the ZNews app.

These experiences led me to experiment with approaching digital news distribution differently. Instead of trying to encourage new behavior to fit my news product, I wanted to build something that complemented the current behavior of people.

In 2017 with the help of John Keefe, head of the Quartz AI Studio, I built a JavaScript prototype for an SMS news service targeted at cab drivers interested in African news. They subscribed to the service by texting a word to a phone number. I was able to distribute a short news blurb or image to all subscribers daily.

The most valuable feature was that subscribers could send replies or inquiries to me just like they were sending a message to anyone else and I could respond using Google Voice as the interface.

The potential impact of this work

What if an entire immigrant community had a messaging service that delivered trusted and relevant news clips to their phones? This would also enable users to send commentary and inquiries that would help improve the service. Further, the messaging space would allow users to send inquiries to be connected to resources and people in their own communities for legal aid, language help, health information, and documentation.

Imagine this robust batch of information accessible to everyone with a simple digital message. A text, photograph, meme, chart, or gif could tell a variety of stories in a digestible way that could be shared.

This could start small at first, with real humans responding and eventually an AI system could learn common questions and generate accurate responses. The conversations and news could also be studied to tip journalists to stories that need to be reported or investigated. Reports of biased incidents could be collected and tracked.

Developing a tech-enabled two-sided messaging service would ensure relevant stories could be discovered and critical information could always be widely disseminated. It’s an opportunity to include a demographic that largely works within the analog bubble of their ethnic houses of worship and commerce.

Here’s a chance to use less flashy but reliable tech to deliver value.

Next steps: Collaborators and commentary welcome

Over the next few months, I will have conversations with people in tech familiar with digital communities. I have had some introductory conversations with community folks at Reddit and Slack to help me understand the tech side of these spaces.

I would love to connect with others with experience working with, forming, or studying closed digital communities. I am also joining a few WhatsApp groups to get a better sense of the culture first hand.

If you are a professional in media, journalism, tech, design, policy, or any other space interested in immigrant communities, underserved groups, digital culture, and building things for overlooked and ignored people, I encourage you to send me a note at rainmj@stanford.edu.

Have a statement or a question? Please share in the comments section below.

Michael Rain leverages storytelling and technology to expand the world’s perception of diverse communities. He is the founder of ENODI, a Stanford Knight Fellow, and a TED Resident & Speaker with a TED Talk that has over 1 million views.

Why I Launched ENODI For People With Immigrant Backgrounds

Editor’s note: This article was heavily updated on January 21, 2021.

In 2017, I had the privilege of being selected for the TED Residency to work on my idea worth spreading — ENODI. ENODI highlights the lives of first-generation people and immigrants of African, Caribbean, and Latin descent who identify as Black. We also feature the stories and realities of all first-generation and immigrant people globally.

ENODI’s purpose

The goal of ENODI is to create a digital space that impacts real-world perceptions and narratives of the people with immigrant backgrounds whose identities converge with being Black but are almost never heard from in this context.

I also explore the identities and experiences of all people with immigrant backgrounds who were born and/or raised in a country different than their parents of any heritage.

Using the example of myself, I’m a Black man and Ghanaian-American born in New York City. However, on issues concerning Black people in America, my experience is often overlooked. When people think of Ghanaians, they usually just consider the people living there now, and I’m definitely not the first image of many people’s thoughts on what an American looks like — yet all of these identities define me.

Black immigrants are an afterthought on immigration issues in the U.S. And even when they or their children achieve success and notoriety, such as Colin Powell, Cicely Tyson, Sidney Poitier, Issa Raye, Shirley Chisholm, and others, their immigrant heritage is rarely, if ever, spoken of in most news reporting.

We almost never hear from Afro Latinos in this context, either. The late Gwen Ifill and Jean-Michel Basquiat, along with, well-known figures like Sophina DeJesus, Rosie Perez, Carmelo Anthony, and Jharrel Jerome are usually perceived as one or the other and not both.

As we saw with Naomi Osaka’s U.S. Open win in 2018, her Black Haitian heritage was erased in most news coverage of her success. We’re seeing some movement with Kamala Harris’ Jamaican, Indian, Black, and American identities being generally observed and covered. But we have a long way to go to understand the sum of people who hold multiple ethnic and national identities.

I talk about this in my TED Talk that has been viewed over 1 million times and translated in 28 languages (you can watch it at this link ).

How ENODI developed from a project to a podcast

While the research component to ENODI was launched with my Stanford Knight Fellowship where I focused on the private messaging networks of immigrant communities — the original idea for ENODI was to be a project that was inspired by Helena Price’s Techie’s Project.

I invited guests to TED headquarters in New York and documented our conversations that were to be transcribed and shared. I also photographed a portrait of each guest. As I reviewed our conversations, it was clear that people needed to hear their voices. The text alone did not capture the energy that clearly needed to be felt to fully understand both the humor and heartache of these stories.

I continued inviting people to speak with me, but now for the purpose of publishing the audio. I feature people who are willing to share a range of stories about their lives and their identities.

When you listen to these stories, you will learn about how people live at the intersection of their multicultural identities. You will hear how this has affected their view of the world. Guests speak about their accomplishments, their failures, and their challenges. They share how their experiences have impacted the lives they have chosen to live.

What’s an Enodi?

Enodi is a term I’ve created to define a group of people that meet all three of these points of identity:

1. You are directly from or one generation removed from a country in Africa, the Caribbean, or Latin and South America (i.e. you or at least one of your parents were born and raised in one of these countries).

2. You were born in or immigrated at a young age to a country different from the one at least one of your parents were born and raised. You grew up in this country.

3. You identify as Black, either as determined by the country you grew up in, or in a general or international way.

For example, I am an Enodi, because I was born and raised in the U.S., my parents were born and raised in Ghana and I identify as Black.

You may have been born and raised in the UK, your parents might be from Trinidad. You may be biracial and identify equally with your Jewish and Senegalese heritage and grew up in Canada.

You may have been born in Bermuda, but your parents are Jamaican and Grenadian and arrived in the U.S. when you were five years old like Dr. Jody Dublin (hear Dr. Dublin’s story at this link).

Or you may be Afro Latino, born in the U.S. with Dominican heritage who considers himself Black, like Remysell Salas (listen to Remy’s story at this link).

The ENODI Podcast is available now on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

How to be featured

If you’re an Enodi, I want to hear from you.

If you have an immigrant background and were born and/or raised in a country different than your parents, regardless of your countries heritage, I want to hear from you, too.

If you are interested in being featured kindly submit the form at this link: https://www.enodi.co/be-featured

If selected, we will have a great conversation. We’ll share it with the world. It will be dope.

I encourage you to share and distribute this note with your community and professional networks. Share this with your friends, with your colleagues, with your schools, with any and everyone whom you believe would make a great feature.

Feel free to send a note on our contact page if you would like to be involved. Reach out if you are interested in collaborating, if you have partnership ideas, or if you simply want to say hello and share your thoughts.

Please leave your comments below and let’s start a conversation right here.

Michael Rain leverages storytelling and technology to expand the world’s perception of diverse communities. He is the founder of ENODI, a Stanford Knight Fellow, and a TED Resident & Speaker with a TED Talk that has over 1 million views.

Subscribe and listen to The ENODI Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.