5. Digital media & Family Relationships (Wilding--kinship)

Welcome to Week 5 of the subject. Your essential reading this week is Raelene Wilding et. al.  "Digital media and the affective economies of transnational families". The main point of this article is that digital media are important in creating transnational families. But the way that they are important is through enabling emotional connections. These emotional connections are deeply cultural. In other words, cultures prescribe what people should feel and when physically distant.  People direct these emotions through digital technologies to create transnational families. In other words, culturally defined emotions are channeled through digital technologies to create families 

Recap

In Section 1, we introduced anthropology and considered how anthropologists approach the digital. Anthropology is, first and foremost, focused on cultural and social aspects of being human. So in Section 2, we focused on the way digital technologies interrelate with our sense of self. We particularly focused on the idea that social media allow for a dividual self to develop. The focus of Section 3 was how people form communities or collectivities online. We started by considering the classical definitions of "community" and then moved on to digital or virtual communities. One thing that emerged from Boellstorff’s study was how the virtual community in many ways adheres to the same principles as off-line communities. In Section 4, the analysis drew on another idea of self– – the neoliberal self. Gershon argued that this self develops through the use of Facebook. In Section 4 we also turned to relationships between people. Gershon showed us how the use of Facebook was fraught for heterosexual US college students who are seeking monogamous relationships. Now in section 5, we consider other ways to analyze relationships. The topic, in particular, is kinship relationships. The concepts we deploy are "multimedia", "polymedia" and "ambient co-presence".

Kinship & Mutuality of Being

Before we consider the issues of digital technology, we should first consider kinship and mutuality of being, which are covered in my blog on kinship. You should focus on the idea of "mutuality of being" because it is crucial in this week's essential reading.

Digital Kinning

Anthropologist Loretta Baldassar has expanded on the anthropological concept of kinship by looking at 'digital kinning'. This is a part of a research project on aging migrants conducted with La Trobe's  Raelene Wilding. Baldassar and Wilding highlighted the role of communication technologies in maintaining support networks for older migrants in Australia across distance. Data they gathered for their research on 'digital kinning' are drawn from a qualitative project conducted in Australia (2016-19) with over 150 older migrants (55+) born in nine countries comprising ethnographic interviews and observations to examine:

- participants’ histories of migration

- experiences of ageing

- proximate and distant support networks and uses of technology.

Their ethnographic examples illustrate the key dimensions and benefits of ‘digital kinning’ for older migrants in aged care including to support the access of older migrants to:

1) essential sources of social connection and support
2) maintenance of cultural identity
3) protection of social identity, including across distance. 

Access to affordable and reliable digital communication tools is, therefore, very important for these older migrants. Nevertheless, they argued that this digital access receives little attention from policymakers and health practitioners.

Multimedia 

Multimedia refers to using multiple 'mediums'--video, sound, text, pictures--on an Internet platform by producers-users (they are often the same thing on multimedia). It's always been around--Television is a 'multimedium'. However, it's use on computers and the Internet has interested researchers. You can take a video of yourself using a smartphone, post it on Twitter, write some text in a caption and share it. Digital anthropologists see multimedia as crucial in the 'curation of the self' and in developing social relations. As Gershon points out, for example, you can exhibit your tastes and interests, demonstrating what is sometimes called "cultural capital". However, multimedia, according to Madianou and Miller (2012) doesn't address the reasons why people post different material in different 'social media'. 

Polymedia 

The concept of "polymedia" is supposed to answer this issue. According to Madianou (2016, 186):

Polymedia theory understands media as part of a composite environment in which each medium is defined relationally to all other media. In the past, when people relied too heavily on a single technology such as letters, the particular properties of the technology or medium shaped interactions in specific ways. For instance, the time lag of letters meant that ‘news’ was always several weeks old. The temporality of letters caused frustration among letter writers (Madianou and Miller 2012). By contrast, when users have access to dozens of different applications, platforms and devices, they can easily exploit the qualities of each to compensate for the limitations of other platforms. Polymedia shift the emphasis from discrete technologies or platforms to media environments. Rather than focus on the properties or affordances (Hutchby 2001) of specific technologies, polymedia shift our attention to how users navigate media environments and choose platforms from a range of communicative opportunities.

The concept of "polymedia" addresses why we choose one form (or multiple forms) of media over another form. 

For example, why do we have multiple accounts of social media? Why do we have a Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, LinkdIn, WhatsApp, Skype, Google blog accounts? Why do we choose one over the other or have multiple Facebook ones perhaps? The answer is that we use different social medial for different purposes. Researchers feel that emotional attachment is crucial in the choice. By this, we mean a person might value her relationship with her father because she uses WhatsApp to keep in contact. She is attached to her father and her father prefers to use WhatsApp over Facebook as explained in Miller & Horst's book Polymedia. Researchers feel that other reasons might explain what's going on. Your father and mother might be divorced. You don't tag your father on your Facebook at all because your mother will see and Facebook is more important for your mother. She maintains her emotional wellbeing by connecting to her social network (high school friends, colleagues, extended family, etc.) 

Multimedia vs Polymedia 

Winarnita explains the difference between mutlimedia and polymedia as follows: Anthropologists Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller (2012) argue against the use of the term “multimedia.” They suggest that it fails to capture the essence of the communicative environment afforded by smartphone devices, which they believe is more accurately termed “polymedia.” As Miller and his colleague Heather Horst explain, polymedia encompasses “expanding media and communicative ecologies that consider the interactivity between new media and the importance of the emotional repertoire” (Horst and Miller 2012, 19). The analysis of this pioneering group of migration and digital technology studies scholars goes beyond the constraints imposed by each individual “multi-medium” to emphasise the social, emotional, and moral consequences of choosing between those different media (Madianou and Miller 2013). Let's consider how Winarnita has deployed the concept of "polymedia" to analyze Indonesian families in Australia.

Polymedia: Example from Australia

Winarnita (2019) analyzed Internet usage among female skilled migrants in Australia. These migrants have multiple accounts for different aspects of their lives. This enables them to manage family and other relationships, for example:

Dewi has a Twitter account where she posts work-related content only, she has a Facebook account for family, friends, and acquaintances.

She has a closed Facebook group for her close female friends who are young mothers like her to share migrant mothering stories and anecdotes.

She has different privacy settings for her posts and makes several different groups for these posts, family, close friends, and 'friends' who are her 800+ acquaintances.

She would upload selected family photos from her closed 60 members (extended family and friends) Instagram photo album account on to Facebook for special occasions such as Birthdays and Anniversaries.

She rarely puts pictures of her children on Facebook only on her Instagram account.
She has several WhatsApp group one with her sibling and father, and a separate one for her sibling and mother as her parents are divorced.

She would not post anything about her father on Facebook or Instagram as Facebook in particular, is the social media account her divorced mother uses the most to connect with family, friends and gain a sense of well-being post-divorce.

She tries to limit putting photos of her young children on Facebook to the 800+ 'friends' as her close circle of migrant mothers on Facebook disapprove of this practice and see it as 'endangering' the child's well being and against their mothering values.
She also tries to be a 'good daughter' by posting photos of her family with her mother on special occasions to show what a good 'grandmother' she is on Facebook as mentioned earlier, being on Facebook is important not only for her mother 's well-being post-divorce to reconnect with friends and also for her mother to show positive images of herself.

Venn diagram of migrant woman's polymedia uses of various social media accounts and for what reasons.

Ambient co-presence

McKay (2018) does fieldwork amongst Philippine migrant mothers who work in aged care in the UK. Most of these women have left their children back in the Philippines to be brought up by their extended family (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins all living close to one another in a village), for example:

McKay tells the story of how one of the migrant mothers manages to buy a large screen TV for her parents' living room and has an attached computer set up so that the TV screen would have a connection to a video WhatsApp chat link.

While playing in the living room, her young child would hear and sometimes see her mother through the screen while she does her daily activities.

This migrant mother leaves her smartphone on while she rides the bus to work, chatting away using an earpiece with a small mike, occasionally showing images from the window.

When she gets home after work she has dinner in front of the screen and show her family and child what she cooked and ate then she takes a screenshot of her child talking to her on Skype.

She then keeps this photo on her Facebook photo album which she uses as a diary to show all her Facebook friends that she still 'mothers' her young child. 

Her extended family would tag her name on photos they upload on to Facebook of important family celebrations back in the Philippines such as birthday parties particularly if the celebration includes gifts sent from the UK as packages for the occasions, to show that she is 'virtually' there.

In other words, this story of the Philippine migrant mother is an example of the concept of ambient co-presence, where she is mothering virtually and is still 'present' in her child and extended family's daily life.

The concept of ambient co-presence exists because maintaining family relationships across distance has become less expensive and cumbersome through digital technologies such as Skype, Zoom video and instant messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Sharing family members' major milestones, such as a birth, birthdays, graduations, marriage and weddings, even death and funerals are able to be done through 'live' videos, online family photo albums, social media updates, and event announcements, where the online viewers are 'virtually present'. Anthropologists ask whether family relationships are thus changed significantly by the digital technologies available to maintain them, and if so in what ways? 

Wilding and Baldassar's (2018) research (see Digital Kinning) shows how elderly family members who are hindered physically to travel and visit children and grandchildren are able to re-connect and maintain a family relationship through digital communication technologies. McKay, however, argues that for migrant workers living far away from their family members, the gift of time, sharing a meal, celebrating milestones, have been replaced by social media 'likes, comments and tags' which often create frictions instead of closeness. 

The online digital world has also created a different 'ambient' of family surveillance, where a wife working in the UK can micromanage her household in Trinidad through daily Skype video chat (Miller and Sinanan 2014). In essence, we are often in a relationship with the online 'avatar' of our family members. We can carry this avatar with us everywhere on our smartphones. 

In the above examples, ambient co-presence is maintained through an online proxy (e.g. Facebook, WhatsApp). Ambient co-presence provides the sense that our family members are always present. In effect, the digital provides a new way of being 'family'. Or as anthropologists would say, a new way of doing kin'.

We have so far considered examples of polymedia and ambient co-presence through anthropological research in different communities and cultural contexts. These show the reasons research participants use different social media and online communication and the emotional connection for them to remain 'virtually' present in their family's daily activities. For Winarnita (2019) and McKay (2017) in their respective field sites, the migrant women/mothers try to negotiate their identity and image as mothers to family, friends and 'public', their relationships and the emotional ties attached to these polymedia use.

Ambient co-presence under a single roof

Below is a short documentary by anthropologist Heather Horst. It shows stories of parents in Fiji talking about the reasons why they allowed (or didn't) their children (mainly teenagers) to have social media accounts. In effect, their children are subjected to surveillance. Unlike above examples of ambient co-presence--in which the parent was on the other side of the world--here the parent is merely in another room in the house.

Parenting in the Smart Age: Fijian Perspectives YouTube documentary by Heather Horst

Computer Love

 Nick says:

For the first 35 years of my life I had lived without a smartphone. In 2008  I got my first smartphone-the first iPhone model-in 2008. Several years, and several iPhone models later, I was traveling, posting on Facebook. I lost my smartphone. I suddenly felt disconnected. Before that, I'd never felt disconnected in the same way. I realize I had developed a digitally mediated connectivity with my parents and siblings. 

 This kind of attachment to technology and family is not unusual. So what is going on here? The phenomenon of device attachment is even stronger in the older migrants described, in this week's essential reading, by Wilding et. al. as an "emotional attachment to a device". What else have you read about this issue?

Emotions, Digital Media & Transnational Families

The above research has demonstrated the importance of digital media in maintaining transnational family relationships. In the essential reading for this, Wilding et. al. emphasize the role of emotions. They argue that emotions are more important than previously recognized. These emotions include an attachment to one's children or feeling guilty about not supporting one's Parents. These emotions, the authors argue, or what drives the use of digital media and the creation of transnational families.

Sources

Madianou, Mirca. 2016.  “Ambient Co-presence: Transnational Family Practices in Polymedia Environments.” Global Networks 16 (2): 183–201.

Madianou, Mirca, and Daniel Miller. 2012. Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Madianou, Mirca. and Daniel Miller.2013. “Polymedia: Towards a New Theory of Digital Media in Interpersonal Communication.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 16 (2): 169–87.

Deirdre McKay (2010) On the Face of Facebook: Historical Images and Personhood in Filipino Social Networking, History and Anthropology, 21:4, 479-498,

Winarnita, Monika. 2019.“Multimedia, Mobility and the Digital Southeast Asian Family’s Polymedia Experiences: Introduction to this Special Issue” Migration, Mobility, & Displacement 4 (1): 1-5

Winarnita, Monika. 2019.“Digital Family Ethnography: Lessons from Fieldwork amongst Indonesians in Australia” Migration, Mobility, & Displacement 4 (1): 105-117

McKay, Deirdre 2018. “Sent home: mapping the absent child into migration through polymedia” Global Networks 18 (1): 133–150.

Wilding, Raelene, and Baldassar, Loretta. 2018. "Ageing, migration and new media: The significance of transnational care". Journal of Sociology, 54(2), 226–235

Miller, Daniel, and Jolynna Sinanan. 2014. Webcam. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Heather Horst, Heather. 2015. "Cultivating the cosmopolitan child in Silicon Valley". Identities, 22:5, 619-634