A Good (Family) Life in Polymedia? The Ambivalent Consequences of the Mediatization of Migration

• In Event: Good Life in Mediatized Worlds? Critical Perspectives

Abstract

Transnational families and the left-behind children phenomenon are often described as the hidden injury of globalization, the social cost developing countries pay in return for the remittances which sustain their economies. Much enthusiasm surrounds the ability of new media for keeping separated families together. But do these new media environments constitute opportunities for good family life at a distance? Drawing on a five-year long multi-sited ethnography of long-distance communication within Filipino transnational families the paper observes that new media (understood as environments of polymedia) don’t solve the problems of separation. Still, the increasing taken-for-grantedness of transnational communication has consequences both for family relationships and for the phenomenon of migration as a whole. This “mediatization of migration” is a deeply ambivalent process: on the one hand it provides opportunities for individual autonomy and intimacy at a distance, but on the other it supports neoliberal policies which promote migration as national development.

Author

• Maria Mirca Madianou, Goldsmiths College, University of London