Digital Communication and Indigenous Cultural Identity: Emerging Trends, Challenges, and Future Directions

Abstract

The digital sphere has emerged as an increasingly important space in which Indigenous peoples are negotiating their cultural identity, sharing their cultural knowledge, deepening social bonds and opportunities for self-representation. This narrative review critically explores existing research on the intersections of digital communication and Indigenous cultural identity, namely, self-representation, cultural and linguistic preservation, social media engagement, digital knowledge practices, platform power, and new issues in data and digital governance. Reviewed literature highlights opportunities for digital technologies to allow Indigenous communities to develop and share their own stories, to communicate culturally, and to help language and cultural revitalisation, even in spread out geographical locations but the reviews also says that digital participation does not equal communicative power, cultural control or meaningful sovereignty. Platform structures, unequal access, algorithmic systems, commercial interests and broader issues of whose knowledge, who controls knowledge, who circulates knowledge and who governs knowledge all continue to shape indigenous visibility in digital environments. The review thus focuses less on the technologically optimistic readings of digital communication and more on its enabling features as well as its structural tensions and paradoxes - such as the commodification of culture, platform dependency, unequal visibility, and contestations to Indigenous authority over cultural knowledge and digital materials. Informed by research from a range of indigenous and cultural backgrounds, the study posits that the contemporary interplay between digital communication and cultural identity is contested and negotiating representations, participation, visibility and control in a continuous process. The article addresses a central issue within communication scholarship: the difference between digital participation and digital power, and the need for community-driven, culturally enabled and ethically concerned communication strategies to Indigenous digital communication.