At the crossroads of change – New media and migration in Asia
Abstract
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 that enables communication links between migrants and their left-behind families, albeit with uneven levels of access to technology that translate into variations in the quality and nature of communication. Such long-distance communication has been revolutionised by new media, including various Internet- and mobile phone-based platforms. This chapter charts key trends in migration within Asia through a systematic review of key literature, and explains the critical role that new media platforms play in the process of migration, from the establishment and sustenance of emotional bonds to the generation of capital that can contribute to improved job opportunities and an enhanced quality of life.
... An entire ecosystem of expertise is mobilized to erase and whitewash the exploitation, unseeing the exploitative systems, and holding up digital platforms as emancipatory resources. In the literature on migration and digital spaces, migrants are depicted as empowered through digital technologies (see., Chib & Aricat, 2017;Lim et al., 2015;O'Lwin, 2022), obfuscating the systemic exploitation that constitutes the migrant experience in the context of the architectures that support digital technologies. For instance, digital technologies are conceptualized as tools for migrants to seek empowerment, with digital platforms narrated as technologies enabling financial mobility through job opportunities. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic foregrounds the unequal trajectories of infectious diseases globally, coupled with the highly unequal effects of pandemic responses adopted locally, regionally, and nationally (Bojorquez et al., 2021; Elers et al., 2021; Habersaat et al., 2020; Rydland et al., 2022). The patterns of distribution of the burdens of the pandemic both within nation-states and across nation-states drive home the materiality of the vastly unequal terrains of health and well-being that the accelerated expansion of extractive capitalism has caused. These inequalities are constituted by almost five decades of aggressive and relentless pursuit of neoliberal policy-making and are intertwined with inequalities in the distribution of wealth, income, and opportunity (Dutta, 2016).
... Más allá de la utilización de estas nuevas tecnologías por los grupos fundamentalistas, el entramado virtual tienen un montante general de gran positividad. Por ejemplo, actualmente una gran mayoría de inmigrantes utilizan éstas para forjar un sentido de personalidad y de identidad compartida, construyendo y manteniendo vínculos afectivos tanto en el país de origen como en el país de acogida, al tiempo que buscan mejorar sus perspectivas de manera práctica e instrumental (Lim et al. 2015;Lim et al., 2016). ...
Este trabajo muestra un análisis actual de las publicaciones científicas relacionadas con la integración de los musulmanes, nutrido mediante artículos extraídos de WOS, Scopus y Latindex. Para ello, se realizó una búsqueda bibliográfica en 36 investigaciones comprendidas entre 1987 y 2017, donde se destacaron las ideas e hipótesis más importantes de los autores vinculadas con la actual crisis global entre la cultura occidental y la musulmana. Los resultados fueron adquiridos mediante filtración de palabras claves, según frecuencia e importancia.
This work shows a current analysis of the scientific publications related to the integration of Muslims, nourished by articles extracted from WOS, Scopus or Latindex. For this, a bibliometric search was carried out in 36 investigations between 1987 and 2017, highlighting the most important ideas and hypotheses of the authors related to the current global crisis between Western and Muslim culture. The results were acquired by filtering keywords according to frequency and importance.
... For example: Tencent news personalized reading product "express", in the line will open more personalized channel outside the mainstream news perspective, including the "gaming" "space" and "divination" and "delicacy" and other channels, the user can customize the menu page and in the news, a channel for "marking" "comment" interaction. Further, the mobile media now need to explore experience as the center of the youth sub culture content and how products are made of high quality, high sense of substitution, to, to replace today on sub culture common shallow label understanding, so as to help the mobile media to attract more millennials to users, and they are Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 185 the main mobile media consumption in the future [9]. At this point, VICE has been a great success. ...
... Our study has sought to integrate and build upon insights from two areas -critical studies of mediated transnational communication, and intercultural communication. In so doing, it has extended the former to consider the perspectives of migrant students, as extant literature has focused primarily on low-waged migrant labourers and professionals (see Lim, Pham and Cheong, 2016). It has also broadened research on intercultural This is the pre-print version of Sun Sun Lim and Becky Pham, 'If you are a foreigner in a foreign country, you stick together': migrants' acculturation given their growing importance in our mediatized landscape. ...
As migrant students cope with relocation challenges, communication with left-behind family and friends can enhance their well-being, while interactions with co-national and local students can facilitate their acculturation to the host country. This article studies Indonesian and Vietnamese university students in Singapore to understand the role that technologically mediated communication plays in facilitating migrant students’ adaptation and acculturation. Through a media deprivation exercise, it finds that communication with left-behind family and friends offers support but can monopolise the students’ free time and impede their interaction with locals. Social media communication also exacerbates the development of cultural silos that comprise only co-nationals. On the positive side, migrant students used the online realm as an acculturative space to better understand the host country’s attitudes towards foreigners, thereby better equipping them for interactions with locals. Migrant students must strike a balance between exploiting mediated communication links to their home identities and exploring host cultures.
... Scholars of media and intercultural communication, as well as from disciplines such as psychology, geography and sociology, have conducted extensive research on migrants' use of technologically mediated communication to maintain ties with family and friends back home, and/or to foster links with people in their newly adopted homes and to build up their economic and social capital (see Lim, Pham & Cheong (2015) for a comprehensive review). Research that focuses specifically on migrant students' use of mediated communication is fairly extensive, although many issues still remain unexplored. ...
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. Yet the growing tide of anti-foreigner sentiment in many countries around the world severely undermines the hospitability of host countries for migrant students. The challenge of adapting to a potentially hostile environment, coupled with the difficulties of living independently for the first time, compounds the sense of alienation that can beset migrant students as they grapple with life in a foreign land. Communication with family and friends who can help them through this process of adaptation, in both home and host countries, is therefore crucial for enhancing migrant students’ sense of well-being. This chapter undertakes a systematic review of the research literature to understand the role that technologically mediated communication plays in facilitating migrant students’ adaptation and acculturation to their host countries in light of their particular circumstances. Specifically, it seeks to identify which types of technologically mediated communication can be leveraged to enhance migrant students’ intercultural communicative competence. It outlines how technologically mediated communication channels feature in migrant students’ acculturation practices and explores how technologically mediated communication can be optimized for acculturation strategies that prevent cultural polarization and intercultural conflict.
In recent decades, the role of digital communication in the lives of migrants in Asia has greatly expanded, becoming integral to the decision to migrate, earning a living, and the practice of keeping in touch with left-behind families and friends. The papers in this Special Issue foreground how gender structures and practices within migrant households and the wider political economy shape migrants’ digital communications. They expand the breadth of our thinking about the interlinkages among gender, migration and digital communication from a range of new subject positions including transnational families, international students, and marginalized minorities in the region.
The study of environmental migration has shown how an attachment to land reduces the perceptions of risks, and how women often lack resources to evacuate. This qualitative study of Japanese women’s migration to Southeast Asia after the Fukushima nuclear disaster complicates the debate by showing that the post-disaster attachment to the land is disrupted by unequal gendered social relations and that digital communication among women provides a wide range of resources and emotional support to differently positioned women. This article shows how gendered social relations and digital communication play a major role in environmental migrant decision making processes in Asia.
The increasingly transnational reach of East Asian media suggests that East Asia has become an ever more de-territorialized media zone. But what has been relatively neglected in the extant scholarship is in-depth consideration of how East Asian media culture has been transnationalised beyond the geographic boundaries of Asia, especially in the context of accelerating online content distribution. In this article, we propose that Australia provides a useful case study to illuminate the cultural impacts of East Asian media beyond Asia. What is Australia's place in trans-Asia media circuits? Does the consumption of East Asian media by audiences in Australia enable them to develop increasingly reflexive understandings of cultural identity, in a turn toward everyday cosmopolitanism? Alternatively, might the new kind of mediasphere we witness emerging in Australia entail new forms of cultural encapsulation, or a proliferation of mutually disconnected ethno-specific media sphericules? Analysing in-depth qualitative interviews with 47 users of East Asian media in Australia, this article investigates how such media engagements open up and/or close down routes to reflexive transcultural practices for these media users; that is, it evaluates the potential of these media to cultivate cosmopolitan ethos in this context. We conclude that East Asian media in Australia may function for their users, paradoxically, as a cosmopolitan media niche within a national mediascape characterised more typically by cultural encapsulation.
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 Singapore and their left-behind parents. We found that the students and their parents utilised various types of ICTs to remain in contact with each other, including phone calls and other Internet-based platforms that offer online chat, voice calls, social networks and news. ICTs were regarded as a welcome blessing that offered a convenient and transformative means of communication to sustain transnational family ties, especially when compared to the parents' own migration experiences in the 1960s and 1970s. To cope with feelings of loss and uncertainty about the future, both the parents and children engaged in emotion work to maximise the various affordances of ICTs to fulfil their mutual familial duties from a distance. However, this transnational connection was not without challenges. The easy availability of convenient and persistent technologically-mediated communication intensified the emotion work that the parents and children undertook and demanded, leading to tensions as the children forged an independent existence abroad.
This article contributes to the exploration of interrelationships between human and media mobilities through analysis of qualitative interviews with 18 Southeast Asian transmigrants in Australia. This group demonstrated three main orientations toward the media they habitually engaged. In the memorial-affective orientation, respondents re-engaged media familiar from remembered pre-migration childhood and family contexts. An ambivalent-localizing orientation was taken toward Australian legacy media, some of which respondents found helped them relate to Australian culture while other forms were experienced as xenophobic and alienating. In the cosmopolitan-global orientation, respondents engaged global corporate, largely Anglophone media in ways that reinforced their sense of themselves as mobile and cosmopolitan. Most importantly, in our respondents’ experience, these three orientations were often not separable but interwoven into complex admixtures. We explore the implications of this hybrid experience of location through media both for the conceptualization of place in globalization, and for the study of migrant media.
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