การวิเคราะห์อัตลักษณ์ความเป็นชาติ และความเป็นภูมิภาคของกลุ่มประเทศอาเซียน: ศึกษากรณีเฟซบุ๊กแฟนเพจ ASEAN Community

Abstract

                  While ASEAN Community will officially emerge in 2020, with the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) becoming the goal of regional economic integration under the motto “one vision, one identity, one community”. Among the diversity of ASEAN member countries, this research questions how ASEAN member countries transform to be one regional identity while they still have their own national identity. The ASEAN Community Facebook fanpage is a virtual community pilot model which reflects the similarity and difference of contexts through content seeding from administrators between national and regional identity. The researcher uses a qualitative research methodology including a content analysis and a data collection from administrators seeding content on the ASEAN Community’s Fanpage on Facebook. The identity is examined through 6 functional dimensions according to the information providing policy of the page which are business, education, culture, environment and relations under four events which related and linked to the interests of ASEAN Community. It comes to conclusion that that regional identity or ASEAN identity can actually occur simultaneously with national identity because the identity is fluid, being adjusted to a context and a situation accordingly to bring benefits. Using  regional identity can reduce tensions and avoid confrontations from the competition in the region. Therefore, it is the essential mechanism for cooperation. ASEAN identity may be defined just as an imagined community which is not established to destroy the national identity; it is used just to create limited boundary from one place to another. To define one’s identity, it depends on the interaction or communication with other people.
                    Identity made people feel that they belong in the same group with other people (self-ascription) and others must feel the same way (ascription by others). An individual can have multiple identities in different dimensions, but to select which identity one must use relies on political, economic, social, cultural benefits which that a person wants to negotiate and achieve.