Sun Sun Lim

Singapore Management University | smu

With the rise of remote working due to the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, organisations today increasingly adopt mobile collaborative technologies such as instant messaging platforms, enterprise social media, and project management software to facilitate a variety of work and communication practices. While previous studies on workpla...

Critical thinking skills are regarded as a higher order cognitive ability that can empower students to be more effective at acquiring and applying their hard-earned knowledge. With university education being the penultimate step before students join the working world, also coinciding with when they enter early adulthood, the higher education sector...

Faced with the multifaceted challenges of modern motherhood, more women are gravitating towards online forums such as Reddit to seek support. The inherent anonymity of such platforms helps to create safe virtual spaces where women can openly share their concerns and participate in dialogues about sensitive topics without the burden of judgement or...

Singapore’s economy has witnessed successive waves of transformation with its highly skilled and competent workforce serving as a backbone to continuing economic growth. Tripartism is a key feature of Singapore’s economy and underpins workforce participation and the mediation of employer-employee relations through collaboration between trade unions...

Shortly after I was appointed NMP, I bumped into an opposition politician who remarked somewhat wryly, "I hope you will also reflect the concerns of Singaporeans out there who fear things like facial recognition." As a social scientist whose life's work has oriented around studying fears and apprehensions people have about technology, along with th...

Young people's peer culture encompasses norms and conventions, shared interests and activities, and unique modes of communication. Mobile phone enabled and online media constitute an increasingly important part of young people's lives worldwide. This chapter explores how young people integrate their media consumption into their peer culture focusin...

As our interactions with each other become increasingly digitally mediated, there is growing interest in the study of people’s digital experiences. To better understand digital experiences, some researchers have proposed the use of screenomes. This involves the collection of sequential high-frequency screenshots which provide detailed objective rec...

As our interactions with each other become increasingly digitally mediated, there is growing interest in the study of people’s digital experiences. To better understand digital experiences, some researchers have proposed the use of screenomes. This involves the collection of sequential high-frequency screenshots to provide detailed objective record...

This paper contributes to the growing research imperative on how the pandemic affects men and women differently, and the latter more adversely. We present rich empirical evidence on the gendered struggles of unpaid care work of working mothers in Singapore, by not only considering the heterogeneity amongst mothers. It also considers the effects tha...

Effective social data governance rests on a bedrock of social support. Without securing trust from the populace whose information is being collected, analyzed, and deployed, policies on which such data are based will be undermined by a lack of public confidence. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digitalization and datafication by governments fo...

Digital resources—which include devices, internet connection and digital literacy—have become basic needs. Thus with the global COVID-19 pandemic having accelerated digitalization, the urgency for universal digital inclusion has hastened. Otherwise, digital inequality will lead to social inequality and impede social mobility. Using Singapore as a c...

Technology giants today preside over vast troves of user data that are heavily mined for profit. The concentration of such valuable data in private hands to serve mainly commercial interests must be questioned. In this article, we argue that if data is the new oil, Big Tech companies possess extensive, encompassing and granular data that is tantamo...

Singapore is widely regarded as one of the most digitally-connected countries in the world and indeed brands itself as a ‘Smart Nation’. Its highly comprehensive information and communication (ICT) infrastructure that was established during its nascent economic development paved the way for the country to mature into a financial, manufacturing and...

With the intensifying use of social media in many realms of everyday life, even parenting is manifesting a public dimension. Whereas one might regard parenting as a private activity undertaken within the home, the use of social media to highlight the joys and trials of child-rearing has put parenting under the digital spotlight. Parents are keen to...

In contemporary society, information and communication technologies (ICTs) are widely cherished for helping transnational households preserve a coherent sense of familyhood despite geographical separation. By virtue of the constant connectivity bestowed by ICTs, international migrants and their left-behind family members can remain involved in the...

The term ‘growing pains’ perhaps best captures the difficulties and trials young people go through when they transition from toddlers to tweens and develop from teens into emerging adults. Every lifestage presents exciting possibilities but is also beset with uncertainty. Young people must learn to develop their own identities while making sense of...

In contemporary society, people are located in media ecosystems wherein a variety of ICT devices and platforms coexist and complement each other to fulfil users’ heterogeneous requirements. These multi-media affordances promote a highly hyperlinked and nomadic habit of digital data management which blurs the long-standing boundaries between informa...

The rapid advancement of new digital technologies, such as smart technology, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, robotics, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT), is fundamentally changing the nature of work and increasing concerns about the future of jobs and organizations. To keep pace with rapid disruption, companies need to...

The rising ubiquity of mobile-enabled devices has greatly accelerated the spread of online disinformation. Media production and dissemination capabilities are within easy reach of consumers, who may become key nodes in sharing fabricated information. Social media platforms' advertisement-driven revenue models have encouraged the proliferation of vi...

In contemporary society, information and communication technologies (ICTs) are widely cherished for helping transnational households preserve a coherent sense of familyhood despite geographical separation. Despite ICTs having positive benefits for the maintenance of long-distance intimacies, digital asymmetries characterized by gaps in routines, em...

With young people at the vanguard of technology adoption and media consumption, many governments are actively incorporating young people into their public education campaigns, and young people are enlisting themselves as media literacy advocates. This article reviews a selection of such media literacy programmes to unpack their key thrusts and comp...

Patriarchal bargains have been studied in many settings as a strategy that helps women circumvent constraints and forge spaces for individual empowerment. Despite the growing use of mediated communication, little is known about how patriarchal bargains are enacted and realized within online interactions such as in discussion forums. By analyzing ho...

This article reflects on the growing scourge of hate speech and its propagation via digital social media networks. It discusses how media studies has drawn attention to salient aspects of online hate speech including technological affordances, communication tactics, representational tropes, and audience response. It argues that insights from media...

Tracking how people move around urban areas can pinpoint where disease might transmit fastest and farthest. Tracking how people move around urban areas can pinpoint where disease might transmit fastest and farthest.

An international study in 42 countries inquired children’s perception of the coronacrisis, their knowledge on COVID-19 and the role the media play in this. URL: http://www.br-online.de/jugend/izi/english/publication/televizion/33_2020_E/Goetz_Mendel_Lemish-Children_COVID-19_and_the_media.pdf

The diffusion and appropriation of the mobile phone, and later the smartphone, have shaped and altered society in a variety of ways. The transition to the 3G and then the 4G networks has enabled the smartphone and thereby a wide variety of functions, services, and platforms that are used throughout society. These have had wide-ranging consequences....

Mobile communication has dramatically changed over the past decade with the diffusion of smartphones. Unlike the basic 2G mobile phones, which "merely" facilitated communication between individuals on the move, smartphones allow individuals to communicate, to entertain and inform themselves, to transact, to navigate, to take photos, and countless o...

This study analyzed the role and impact of social media use on the daily lives of marriage migrants. We empirically examined a moderated mediation model by surveying 201 marriage migrants. This study focused on four key concepts: social stigma, empowerment, self-stigma, and social networks forged via social media such as Facebook, Kakao Talk, LINE,...

This chapter enunciates how mobile media have engendered the conditions for transcendent parenting practices to emerge, thereby transforming family life in Asian urban middle-class households. It argues that although mothers generally seem to be more involved in their transcendent parenting duties, a more desirable state of shared transcendent pare...

This chapter discusses parents’ use of mobile media to enhance their children’s personal safety. There is an extensive slate of mobile communication features, customized apps and services that parents now actively tap to monitor their children’s whereabouts, or to simply have a sense of their well-being. Mobile media such as live webcam feeds, CCTV...

This first chapter introduces the concept of transcendent parenting and how it emerges out of the media-rich household in Asia. It defines transcendent parenting—what constitutes it and how it is manifested in parenting practices through always on, always available mobile media. It then covers the landscape of media use in urban middle-class househ...

This chapter analyzes transcendent parenting and young people’s social interactions. As parents are deeply concerned about their children’s contact risks, they can and do become heavily involved in their children’s peer interactions online and offline. Parents can use the digital trail of their children’s mobile media communication, install parenta...

This chapter identifies the key priorities among parents of Asia’s urban middle-class families. The three key priorities are inculcating values in their children to ensure positive maturation, exercising oversight and supervision over them to protect them from harm and adverse influence, and providing support for their children’s academic achieveme...

This chapter focuses on transcendent parenting practices and young people’s lives in relation to academic matters. Shifting away from the traditional face-to-face teacher-parent meetings and phone calls, home-school conferencing via mobile apps has become increasingly prevalent. This includes the use of homework-reminder apps, school attendance tra...

This chapter focuses on transcendent parenting practices and young people’s lives in the home setting in Singapore. It discusses how parents perceive their multifaceted roles as principal nurturers, disciplinarians, teachers, friends, counsellors, advocates, and even managers of their children to ensure that their children have the best material co...

Social media have been seen to accelerate the spread of negative content such as disinformation and hate speech, often unleashing reckless herd mentality within networks, further aggravated by malicious entities using bots for amplification. So far, the response to this emerging global crisis has centred around social media platform companies makin...

Social media have been seen to accelerate the spread of negative content such as disinformation and hate speech, often unleashing reckless herd mentality within networks, further aggravated by malicious entities using bots for amplification. So far, the response to this emerging global crisis has centred around social media platform companies makin...

Whether members of the family are headed to school or work, smartphones accompany family members throughout the day. The growing sophistication of mobile communication has unleashed a proliferation of apps, channels, and platforms that link parents to their children and the key institutions in their lives. While parents may feel empowered by their...

As Vietnam’s economic growth and consumer demands continue to accelerate, more Vietnamese families are now able to acquire portable touchscreen devices such as iPads. Previous research has shown that the use of touchscreen devices can benefit pre-schoolers’ learning, especially within school and home settings. However, little is known about the bro...

Media literacy education in Singapore has a relationship of interdependence with the city‐state's economic priorities. Anticipating the general shift toward an information‐based society, the Singapore government has undertaken various initiatives to establish a robust information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure and an ICT‐savvy ci...

This article first outlines the characteristics of youth as a developmental stage, as well as the nature of youths' social and familial interactions, to explain the context in which youth digital culture emerges. Specifically, it explains how youth digital culture influences youths' identity formation and is both constitutive of and influenced by t...

Growing numbers of Chinese mothers relocate overseas with their children to puruse better educational opportunities. As de facto ‘single parents’ in the host society, these Chinese ‘study mothers’ have to overcome acculturation challenges while paving the way for their children to quickly adapt and thrive in an alien environment. Mobile communicati...

The evolution of humankind is intimately intertwined with the development of our living spaces. All forecasts point to an almost complete urbanization of our planet by 2100. This process was accelerated by the industrial revolution, leading to rapid urbanization which has now entered a truly explosive phase. Predictions about our urban futures are...

This chapter focuses on how Vietnamese international students and their left-behind families connect with each other and maintain the transnational family space through technologically mediated communication and emotion work, and the challenges that arise from such transnational connections. We interviewed 15 dyads of Vietnamese students in Singapo...

This study examined the role of social media in the daily lives of migrant students. The focus of this study was students’ use of social media and the benefits that they derived from it, particularly for communication with friends and family back in their home country. A total of 45 female Vietnamese students participated in a week-long social medi...

Diverse international perspectives show that children can benefit greatly from digital opportunities. Despite widespread optimism about the potential of digital technologies, especially for information and education, the research reveals an insufficient evidence base to guide policy and practice across all continents of the world, especially in mid...

Youth work seeks to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents for re-entry into mainstream society and to prevent youths-at-risk from falling into delinquency, thus necessitating that youth workers assiduously monitor their clients. With the avid use of social media by youths, youth workers must also adopt these communication platforms to reach out to thei...

This article argues that parental mediation theory is rooted in television studies and must be refined to accommodate the fast-changing media landscape that is populated by complex and intensively used media forms such as video games, social media, and mobile apps. Through a study of parental mediation of children's video game play, we identify the...

Our special issue offers studies of specific instances of transmedia. On the one hand, one set of studies looks at the different strategies media corporations have adopted for engaging audiences. On the other hand, another set of studies looks at media users' negotiations of the transmedia landscape. The collection as a whole brings together perspe...

This special section assembles perspectives on mobilities, migration and new media that emphasise mobile subjects’ multifarious involvements in overlapping digital spheres, which relate them socially and emotionally to both their home and destination countries. In this introduction, we identify two key themes that connect articles in this collectio...

As migrant students cope with the relocation challenges, communication with left-behind family and friends can enhance their well-being, while interactions with co-nationals and local students can facilitate their acculturation to the host country. This article studies Indonesian and Vietnamese university students in Singapore to understand the rol...

In many urban societies, mobile media and cloud computing that offer always-on, always-available information and communication services are increasingly pervasive. These services shape the communication practices and media consumption habits of families, influencing how parents guide children's media use, and how parents and children connect with o...

Distinct “media generations” are identified through the association of successive generations of youths with the most prevalent media of their time. The resulting labels, ranging from “television generation” to “digital natives”, seem to offer a convenient shorthand for describing media consumers of different eras. However, generational labels are...

This volume captures the domestication of mobile communication technologies by families in Asia, and its implications for family interactions and relationships. It showcases research on families across a spectrum of socio-economic profiles, from both rural and urban areas, offering insights on children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly. While m...

As powerful, portable media devices such as smartphones and tablets diffuse across the region at an unparalleled rate, families in Asia are coming to terms with the many asymmetries that these gadgets herald. Because mobile communication devices are deeply personal, but are also vested with a remarkable combination of instrumentality and emotionali...

Face is a concept with considerable resonance in many Asian cultures. The Asian concept of face broadly encompasses three dimensions: self-face, concern for one’s own image; other-face, concern for another individual’s image; and mutual-face, concern for the images of both parties and the image of their relationship. This paper transposes the conce...

In this introductory chapter, the authors explore why the internationalization of media studies has been stymied and argue that the conditions are now ripe for invigorating this effort, especially in and through Asia. The fervent adoption of information and communication technologies in Asia, the region’s rapid economic growth, and its youthful and...

In exploring the relationship between advertising and cultural rituals, this chapter examines how Philippine television advertisements for mobile technology products and services use the frame of ritual and mobilize the various dimensions of kapwa (connecting to significant others) to appeal to consumers. We question how advertisements reify the im...

The market for international education is sizable, with more students traversing borders than ever before. Armed with skills, knowledge, and ambition, migrant students often venture to their host countries with the intention to upgrade themselves and raise their qualifications so as to improve their employment prospects and overall quality of life....

As globalization continues unabated, migration in general and student migration in particular have intensified worldwide. Mobile communication technologies are important links between migrant students and their left-behind family and friends. This chapter seeks to highlight the complex relationships between the students' migrant status and their te...

As technology adoption accelerates in Indonesia, the growing use of the internet by children has triggered moral panic and led to calls for greater parental mediation of children's internet use. Concerns typically cent around access to online pornography and other deleterious content. The polemic surrounding these issues has taken on a distinctly m...

A region of dramatic growth and transformation, Asia is witnessing an ever accelerating flow of capital, goods, and people, both within and beyond its geographical boundaries. Accordingly, domestic and international migration has also intensified in this thriving continent. Underlying this ceaseless flow of people is a rich technological landscape...

Thumb tribe, generation Google and digital natives! Around the world, there is no denying the appeal of snappy terms that capture young people's socio-technical relationships with their media devices. However, these are ultimately generationalisations, i.e. gross generalisations about the media practices of a particular generation and are ultimatel...

Social media platforms provide the key affordance of “communicative fluidity”, where communication can be more seamless because of the multiple channels users can tap to express themselves. Besides just text therefore, users can communicate via photographs, videos, emoji, and stickers, on top of voice and video calls. The visual richness of social...

In the Philippines, mobile phones are actively used across the population, including the large numbers of Filipino citizens working abroad, a majority of them women. This article investigates how television advertising of mobile phones engages culturally relevant roles of mothers to attract women as technology consumers. Using semiotic analysis, th...

This article introduces and provides the context for the themed section on mobile communication in Asia. It suggests that much work remains to be done in adequately grasping the new mobile, mediated face of communication in the very diverse Asian region. It also suggests that such a new direction in research needs to go hand in hand with rethinking...

While securing ethical approval is never an easy process, it is even more daunting when conducting research on young people, particularly those from vulnerable segments of the population. As we nurture the next generation of scholars of children and media, academics must prepare student researchers for this critical step in the research endeavour....

While pedagogy is predominantly viewed from the perspective of classroom instruction, educators worldwide invariably play a critical pastoral role of shaping the personal development of their students and nurturing in them life skills. With the avid use of participatory media by young people in peer interaction, educators need to be aware of the at...

When young people interact, they absorb the peer culture that underpins and sustains their relationships with each other. Peer culture encompasses norms and conventions, shared interests and activities, and the unique modes of communication deployed in the afore-mentioned elements. The ways in which young people integrate their media consumption in...

Research on women’s use of mobile media has also been largely ordered by their spheres of existence, namely the home and the workplace, while capturing the rapidly blurring boundaries between these closely intertwined milieu. Felicitously, even though research on mobile media use by women has been understandably dominated by regions where ICT penet...

While extensive research has been conducted on young people’s peer interaction via online communication, the focus has been on mainstream youths, with marginalized youth communities being understudied. To help address this inadequacy, the current study conducted interviews with Singaporean male juvenile delinquents (n = 36) to understand the role o...

Cautionary voices have pointed to the apparent dangers that mobile media and communication pose for young people in the form of “deviant” activities such as sexting and mobile phone-facilitated bullying and criminal activity. Such incidents have ignited moral panics about the proliferation of mobile media because they are seen to facilitate emergen...

Video games have grown in number, variety, and consumer market penetration, encroaching more aggressively into the domestic realm. Within the home therefore, parents whose children play video games have to exercise mediation and supervision. As video games evolve, parental mediation strategies have also had to keep pace, albeit not always successfu...

This article explores the strategic “facework” practices of an under-researched youth population. Based on interviews with male juvenile delinquents and youths-at-risk in Singapore, the article analyses their use of online social networking sites (SNS) using the Asian concept of “face.” These youths' online facework, geared towards gaining face, gi...

As China, Japan and Korea seek to boost Internet adoption, the social impact of the Internet, especially on minors, is an issue of societal concern and the target of policy interventions, non-governmental initiatives and industry responses. This study reviews these efforts to promote children’s Internet safety by assessing regional trends and payin...

This paper explores ICT use by Indian and Filipino female migrant workers who are employed as live-in maids in Singapore through ethnographic interviews with twenty women. Their particular employment circumstances translate into a circumscribed and isolated living and working experience which makes their access and use of ICTs even more significant...

Today's media consumers can consume, produce and disseminate media messages involving multimodal representation. Consequently, in both receptive and expressive modes of communication, multimodal representation demands that media consumers possess a wide range of media-related knowledge and competencies. While multimodal representation in itself pos...

With the widespread availability of information technology, young Singaporeans enjoy exciting possibilities for the consumption and production of media. Their government has introduced various initiatives through schools and public education campaigns to encourage more young people to acquire media production skills. This chapter reflects on the ef...

Singapore is a highly mediatized society where the government has avidly promoted the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs). It has the world's highest broadband Internet penetration rate, at 99.9 percent (W. Tan) and mobile phone subscriptions stand at over 5.9 million (Infocomm Development Authority), exceeding the country...

Virtual worlds have made notable inroads into the lives of children, affording online extensions of their offline lives In this article, we propose a conceptual framework for understanding the space that virtual worlds occupy in children’s play and the ways in which children’s participation in them overlap with their everyday play experiences, both...

ICTs such as television, the Internet and mobile phones are assuming a growing presence within the modern homestead and are having an indelible impact on family dynamics and parenting. While gender studies have sought to understand ICT domestication from the perspective of mothers, the influence of social and cultural factors on the adoption and ap...

Introduction This study explores whether internet users' concerns for personal information privacy, principally manifested as online privacy, are related to their attitudes to government surveillance and national ID cards (often perceived as a surveillance tool). This is a relationship which needs to be explored in-depth because of three concurrent...

This paper studied uneven Internet access amongst young people in Singapore. The study finds that young Singaporeans access the Internet mainly through home, school, borrowed, public, and mobile sources, with different implications for each type of Internet access. For those with home or mobile access, Internet use was routinised and often intense,...

Singapore has one of the highest Internet and mobile phone penetration rates in the world. With increasing government investment in IT, media and technology are assuming an ever growing role in the lives of Singaporeans. Singaporeans use media intensively, consuming media in all forms as they acquire information essential to their education, work,...