6. Extended Family & Digital Diaspora (Winarnita--diaspora)

Recap

Previously, we considered the "ambient co-presence" and "polymedia" concepts. Anthropologists developed these concepts in studying how migrants, in particular, use digital technologies. Migrants connect with left-behind-children and other family members use Internet-enabled communication like Skype and WhatsApp.  They also use social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to stay connected. McKay, for instance, argues that 'likes' and 'tagging' Facebook posts compensate for the time the migrant misses with her loved ones. As mentioned, we could analyze the relationship between the migrant and those she's left behind as 'ambient co-presence'. We also described polymedia as the use of various 'platforms' (applications), and the emotional and logical reasons why we chose one platform over another. In this video, Monika does a quick recap:

Diaspora

Before we get on to understanding the topic of this week--extended family and digital diaspora--we will first look at the concept of "diaspora".  The concept is closely associated with Migration Studies. But, given the No one can ever agree on a definition in Anthropology, but this looks quite acceptable:

 "Diaspora is a term used to describe the mass, often involuntary, dispersal of a population from a center (or homeland) to multiple areas, and the creation of communities and identities based on the histories and consequences of dispersal". 

The definition might be too constraining. Anthropologist Paul Burke, for example, has published a book on what he terms the "Warlpiri diaspora". The Warlpiri people number just over 1000, so their diaspora is not 'mass' when compared. The above definition mentions "often involuntary". This problematic. It's difficult to determine whether a person was forced, or free, to migrate. But the migrations we consider below (from INdonesia and the Philippines) are mostly voluntar. Nevertheless, the dispersal idea seems to work well. Visit this link for more. 

In this video, Monika explains the concept diaspora in relation to a recent journal issue she edited:

It's relevant for this section's discussion that kinship connects with diaspora. For instance, Indonesian migrants in Australia sometimes refer to the Indonesian diaspora as a keluarga besar (big family). In other words, they see their diaspora as a form of kinship (as a family). 

Digital diaspora

To explain digital diaspora, we could turn to Laguerre. According to Alonso, Laguerre defines "digital diaspora" as:

 the use of cyberspace by diasporic groups, including immigrants or descendants of an immigrant group that uses IT connectivity to participate in virtual networks of contacts for a variety of purposes, for the most part, may concern either the home culture, the host culture, or both. 

We find that in his book Diaspora, Politics, & Globalization: 

Laguerre proposes a relationship among migrants and their home society that transcends current views in migration studies. The relationship among Haitians who live outside Haiti reflects a web rather than a radial relationship with the home country; Haitian migrants communicate among themselves and the home country simultaneously. In viewing the Haitian diaspora from a global perspective, the author reveals a new theory of interconnectedness in migration, which marks a significant move away from transnationalism.

Virtual diaspora

A competing concept that emerges out of the anthropological literature on diaspora is "virtual diaspora".  Laguerre is also a proponent of this concept. Virtual diaspora occurs when migrants: 

• engage in domestic and foreign policies of the hostland, and
• participate, via the Internet, in the political affairs of the homeland

This adds a new dimension to the transnational or even global architecture of national security. An example of virtual diaspora is the Indonesian Diaspora Network. This a formal organization first set up by the Indonesian Ambassador to the US. Members of this network engage in domestic and foreign policies of the hostland through cultural diplomacy while participating via the Internet (and on the ground) in the political affairs of Indonesia. One successful campaign was their lobbying the Indonesian government to create dual citizenship laws for all Indonesians. For more on digital politics, see this blog. And click here for more on the Indonesian diaspora.

Competing terms: Digital vs Virtual

It may be difficult to evaluate these different terms. Indeed you may be thoroughly sick of them! Generally, scholars who propose a new term which they think will better explain the same phenomenon. Digital Anthropology is a comparatively new field, the things we are studying are emerging and changing quickly. Moreover, Anthropologists, being keenly attuned to these changes, attempt to find terms that best describe what they experience doing fieldwork. The result is a competing vocabulary. Laguerre himself uses You only need to be able to dissect the differences between the terms if you are writing a research report or essay on this matter.

Extended Family members in the Diaspora: Ambient co-presence

The scale of migration in the contemporary world is utterly unprecedented. People dispersing to all parts of the world for various reasons seek to maintain a kinship network. To understand this, we turn to anthropological research specifically about the extended family who are dispersed, become part of a 'diasporic' community and how they maintain contact through social media

Winarnita & Herriman: Fightback through Facebook

‘YESSSS. . . . . . . .YOU BITCH’. This was one of many confronting memes posted by women in a Malay community-based in Australia. Our research (Winarnita and Herriman 2018) focuses on women marginalized for being either divorce and/or a single mother. They live in a Malay community in Australia. In response to perceived local gossip, they use Facebook to fight back against local gossip. They also use Facebook to vent and seek solidarity. This is apparent in their expletive-ridden posts; various types of religious memes; and, female empowerment memes. They receive comments and often online support by extended family members in the diaspora; either in other parts of Australia, Malaysia or other locations in Southeast Asia. Although we don't use the concept of  'polymedia' in this article,  you can observe an ambient co-presence with other local Malays as well as the extended family in the Malay diaspora. All these people, in a sense, are 'present' in these women's Facebook posts. Here we talk about our research on marginalized Malay women in our fieldwork location: "Fight back through Facebook"

Memes

For more about memes, you can have a look at a YouTube version of this discussion specifically contextualized to how memes are used in Indonesia by Jo Byrne and Monika Winarnita in digitalindonesia.co

Refugees & the Digital Diaspora

Another focus of research in digital anthropology is refugees. As distinct from migrants such as the Tongans or Malays, those displaced and forced to migrate as refugees may physically be unable to return to the country. They are fleeing to seek asylum in another country where they can begin a 'new life'. Their family members may be dispersed to other parts of the world. Digital technologies enable them to maintain a diasporic community. These technologies can also mediate this sense of 'loss' by creating online communities to belong to, reconnecting and maintaining relationships severed by the refugee experience or geographical distance and recreating an imagined online homeland.

Eva Nisa: The Rohingya Virtual Jannah

Anthropologist Eva Nisa (2019) conducted fieldwork amongst Rohingya refugees in Malaysia. Nisa observes that the refugees can connect transnationally dispersed families through social media. They also create a virtual 'Jannah' or 'heaven' through an imagined Rohingya homeland that exists as a diasporic online community. “Virtual heaven” also refers to the connected presence and to the happiness and pleasure that Rohingya Muslims experience through using various communication technologies to ease problems their families experience on their journey to permanent countries of settlement. As refugees in Malaysia, they are able to have the means and access to set up a YouTube news channel RVision with stories of atrocities experienced by the Rohingyas including getting realtime reports by citizen journalists in conflict zones.

Eva offers an expanded view of the role of polymedia, illustrating how polymedia can support a variety of communication media users as they assume different roles. She quotes Madianou and Miller’s (2013) definition of the polymedia environment as an environment where communication channels proliferate and affect interpersonal communication:

 “polymedia is not simply the environment; it is how users exploit these affordances [apps, techonologies, etc.] in order to manage their emotions and their relationships” (172). 

Mediated communication is not only about access and cost but, as Madianou argues, “the theory of polymedia represents an effort to understand media as environments and their consequences for personal communication” (2014, 667). Young Rohingya Muslims in their twenties, use a wide range of social media platforms to establish a connected presence. They found an imperfect virtual metaphorical “heaven” (Jannah) by embracing the freedom to raise their voices through a wide variety of communication technologies. They have used social media to facilitate both the “doing” of family (Morgan 2011), as well as to speak out about humanitarian issues in both the virtual and nonvirtual public spheres.

Manipulated Digital Photos (Gifford and Wilding)

Other creative ways that refugees use digital technology is described in the work of La Trobe Sociologist Raelene Wilding and Sandra Gifford (2018). These authors describe how refugees use edited and manipulated digital photos of themselves. They superimpose the photos on to refugee camps and add missing family members. These images are circulated online. They do this as a way of telling their refugee story and their longing for missing family members and the home they can no longer return to. In other words, they recreate their refugee narrative. They may not yet feel they belong to a community in Melbourne but the technologies enable them to feel as though they belong to a larger Hazaran diasporic community. 

Wilding and Gifford also co-authored an earlier article with Zoe Robertson about young refugees in Melbourne who use digital media in response to the absence of their family members. They argue that new media help most transnational families to maintain a connected presence and “mediated co-presence,” but that “refugee transnational families are a clear exception, with both physical and mediated contact between kin living in refugee camps or in transit remaining limited, if not impossible”. Robertson, Wilding, and Gifford (2016) also discuss how digital media assist young refugees in Melbourne “to construct a family imaginary that serves to sustain a sense of family-hood in the context of ongoing separation”.

Anh Nguyen: Facebook photos of Vietnamese refugees

Similarly, Anh Nguyen, in her PhD work at the University of Melbourne did online and offline research with members of a Vietnamese diasporic Facebook group who uses photos and other multimedia posts to 'construct' a narrative of their refugee experience after the Vietnam war. She argues that this Facebook group has become an online space for a 'museum curation' of the Vietnamese diaspora with photos, locations of refugee camps and their experiences cataloged and archived online. Members of this Vietnamese diaspora Facebook group in Melbourne also did an offline exhibition of the photos and story that they had put up online, which Anh (2019) curated and published for an academic journal special issue creative section of 'Multimedia, Mobility and the Digital Southeast Asian Family's Polymedia Experiences.' 

So what?

Why is all this research significant? First, prior to the widespread use of the Internet, communications were:

1. cumbersome: you needed a telephone
2. expensive: You might have to save up for it.
3. intermittent
4. special: Planned for birthdays etc. 

Nick remembers how communications used to be:

I was an Honours student at Murdoch uni at the time, I think it was about 1997. But I lived near UWA. One of the public phones at UWA started working for free. I don't how or why this happened. In any case, word spread around Perth. I heard about it and went to try and call friends oversease. Howevever there was a long queu of migrants and I got tired of waiting. For a couple of months, whether night or day, you could a find a queu of migrants apparently calling international numbers to connect to loved ones there for free.

International communications are no longer like this. You can have people around you all the time; you are virtually present in each others' lives. Migrants and refugees can maintain almost constant contact with their loved ones and relations who may even be dispersed around the world. This seems to have emotional implications--it might reduce a sense of missing them or loneliness. Relationships are important to us--particularly kinship--can be maintained more easily. But maybe the technologies make us more lonely. Maybe they enable unwelcome surveillance.

Again, so what? Well, there is an economic implication. Let's say you're a mother with the possibility of emigrating for work for 5 years. That's potentially five years without seeing your growing children. You might say, "OK I'll relinquish my caring role for my kids to my sister, who will be with the kids every day. But at least I'll have a connection with them. So I will go." This hope enables Filipinas to emigrate to Canada; Guatemalans to emigrate to the US; Hungarians to emigrate to the UK etc.. There are huge economic implications for both the destination country and the home country.

And again so what? So now families are no longer physically proximate in the way they used to be. In the past, when we studied kinship we looked at families who often 'lived under the same roof'. Now families may be dispersed around the world yet virtually present in each other's daily lives.

Main reading

Winarnita, M & Herriman, N 2012. 'Caring & Family: Marriage Migration to the Malay Muslim community of Home Island (Cocos Keeling Islands)', Indonesia and the Malay world, vol. 40, no. 118, pp. 372–387.

Secondary Readings

Wilding, R. & Gifford, S. (2018) Social Media and the Refugee Experience: Young People Negotiating Displacement in an Age of Connectivity, In Transnational Migrations in the Asia-Pacific: Transformative Experiences in the Age of Digital Media Eds Gomes, C. and Yeoh, B., Rowman and Littlefield, 159-176. 

Wilding, R. (2012) “Mediating Culture in Transnational Spaces: an Example of Young People from Refugee Backgrounds” Continuum 26 (3): 501–511. 

Nishitani, M. (2014) “Kinship, Gender, and Communication Technologies: Family Dramas in the Tongan Diaspora”, Australian Journal of Anthropology 25(2): 207–222. 

Nishitani (2019) 'Love, duty and burden: Mothers' and daughters' engagements with familial obligations', Emotion, Space and Society, August 2019, Vol.32 

Anh Nguyen “Photo Essay: “Vietnamese Here Contemporary Art and Reflections” Art Exhibition, Melbourne, Australia, May 2017” Migration, Mobility, & Displacement 4 (1): 133-139 

Robertson, Zoe, Raelene Wilding, and Sandra Gifford. 2016. “Mediating the Family Imaginary: Young People Negotiating Absence in Transnational Refugee Families.” Global Networks 16 (2): 219–36. 

Mckay DCC. (2019). Ambient surveillance: how care-for-control emerges across diasporic social media. Ethnos. 

Eva F. Nisa, (2019) “Rohingya Muslims in Malaysia: Finding (Imperfect) Heaven in Polymedia” Migration, Mobility, & Displacement 4 (1): 85- 103

Laguerre, M.S.. (2010). Digital diaspora: Definition and models. 49-64

Alonso, A.(2010). Diasporas in the New Media Age: Identity, Politics, and Community. Reno: University of Nevada Press

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