Virtual Materialities: the ‘thingy-ness’ of co-presence and caring across distance

• In Event: Caring across Borders: Materiality and Belonging in Transnational Families II

Abstract

The circulation and reciprocal exchange of caregiving across distance in transnational family relationships demands the use of ICTs and social media platforms. This care circulation is facilitated by the degree of choice of a range of ICTs available to network members (albeit with varying degrees of different types of individual access). The potential provided by this polymedia environment and the distant care uses it is employed for by network members can deliver a variety of effective forms of copresence experienced as a sense of ‘being there’ for each other, despite the distance. The resultant human-technology interaction underlines and emphasises the importance of human relations to the material world, of both technologies and nonhuman actors. Gille (2012) refers to this as methodological materialism, that is, the need to connect the social with the material. But more than this, the technologies themselves have a vibrancy, to use Bennett’s (2009) thesis, which adds not only an additional layer of meaning - but also of materiality (thingy-ness) – to deal with. This paper will explore the 'thingy-ness' of both 'special transnational objects' that travel across transnational family networks of caregiving, as well as what we call the virtual materialities of caring and co-presence across distance drawing on findings from Baldassar and Wilding's current ARC project, Ageing and New Media.

Author

• Loretta Baldassar, University of Western Australia