Glocalization: American Expatriates reconstruct media environment in China

• In Event: 338 - Section on Communication and Information Technologies Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Paper Session: Table 09.

Abstract

Transnational migrants are portrayed as living in “timeless time” in a “space of flows” in the information age (Castells, 1996). Migrants and their media consumption are “de-territoralized” in which the cultural practices are separated from geographic and social territories. However, media practices do not exist in the vacuum. As people crossing national borders, they inevitably navigate different media systems and reconstruct the media environment to their own benefits. Digital technologies are not placeless. Instead, they are invented and consumed in a particular media environment. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with over 60 Western expatriates living in China, this paper addresses the challenges “people on the move” face in their local environment and how people adopt different strategies to reconstruct the media environment their were familiar with. By analyzing the three most popular communication technologies, including satellite television, mobile phone and the internet, this paper argues that locality matters in the expatriates’ media environment for the following reasons: 1) personal networks and the local community provides invaluable information for expatriates to access digital media technologies in the first place; 2) use of mobile technologies to navigate the local environment plays significant part of expatriates’ media usage, given the language barriers; 3) most importantly, the media choice expatriates make is influenced by how much they connect to the local environment. Instead of arguing for the irrelevance of physical place, we should consider how the place matters in different ways in the age of migration and media globalization.

Author

• Fan Mai, University of Virginia