Mobility, Migration and New Media: Manoeuvring Through Physical, Digital and Liminal Spaces

Abstract

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 collection. First, authors accentuate migration and new media appropriation as a process involving liminal spaces characterized by transition, experimentation and tentativeness. Second, they analyse the subtle frictions that derive from migrants’ embeddedness in digital and offline social fields, shot through with power asymmetries that may simultaneously imply empowerment on one hand, and surveillance and control on the other. Authors draw on empirical case studies of transnational migration in foregrounding multiple mobilities within, to or from Asia.

Full text

This is the pre-print version of Lim, S. S., Bork-Huffer, T. & Yeoh, B. (2016). Manoeuvring
through Physical and Virtual Spaces: Mobility, Migration and New Media. New Media &
Society,18(10), 2147–2154.
Mobility, migration and new media: Manoeuvring through physical, digital and liminal
spaces
Sun Sun Lim, Tabea Bork-Hüffer and Brenda SA Yeoh
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Abstract
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 collection. First, authors
accentuate migration and new media appropriation as a process involving liminal spaces
characterized by transition, experimentation and tentativeness. Second, they analyse the
subtle frictions that derive from migrants’ embeddedness in digital and offline social fields,
shot through with power asymmetries that may simultaneously imply empowerment on one
hand, and surveillance and control on the other. Authors draw on empirical case studies of
transnational migration in foregrounding multiple mobilities within, to or from Asia.
Keywords
Asian migrations, liminal spaces, multiple mobilities, power geometries, transnational
migration
Introduction
The migrant’s life is one filled with both promise and precariousness. As migrants venture
beyond their shores in pursuit of opportunities, theirs is often a subjective position of
uncertainty made up of varying degrees of risks, hopes and fears, which are constantly
reworked with growing familiarity at the adopted home. Throughout the entire migration
process, from the point of contemplating the overseas venture, to understanding and even
speaking the patois of the host country, information and communication technologies (ICTs)
play a crucial role in the way migrants negotiate the potential trajectories their overseas
ventures may take. For migrants with ready access to the Internet, websites, blogs, micro-
blogs and discussion forums are an inexhaustible fount of information about the destination
country, and where fellow migrants offer personal experiences and first-hand advice that are
unavailable from official sources. Newer media platforms such as social networking sites
host online migrant communities, facilitating interpersonal connections with virtual strangers
who readily offer advice and assistance, forging an instant safety net for the new migrant.
Likewise, smartphones that can connect swiftly to the Internet enable migrants to tap
location-based services to find their way in an unfamiliar territory and reach out to potential
connections. Upon settling in the host country, the gamut of procedures that besets the
migrant, whether relating to education, employment, healthcare or even basic subsistence,
can be daunting. Connections made in the digital space can again help migrants overcome
the veritable challenges of the physical realm. Indeed, with the emergence of more powerful

This is the pre-print version of Lim, S. S., Bork-Huffer, T. & Yeoh, B. (2016). Manoeuvring
through Physical and Virtual Spaces: Mobility, Migration and New Media. New Media &
Society,18(10), 2147–2154.
networked technologies, the space of flows (Castells, 1998) has been further enriched with
possibility, enabling migrants to navigate their way through unchartered terrain with greater
certainty and confidence. To be sure, virtual scaffolds are not without their shortcomings and
can often exact a toll on the migrant, paradoxical as the effects of technology can be.
The role of ICTs in the shaping of migrant experience has inspired a rich and extensive body
of research. Migrants of diverse profiles have exploited the manifold affordances of ICTs to
forge a sense of personhood and shared identity (Sun and Qiu, 2016), build and sustain
affective ties in both home and host countries, while seeking to improve their prospects in
practical and instrumental ways (Lim et al., 2016). The articles in this special section build on
and enrich this body of work by putting special emphasis on differentiating the subtle,
multifarious ways in which the use of digital media is becoming part of migrants’ lives,
practices and ventures, recognizing that ‘the ways in which places, and social practices,
become enmeshed into geographically and temporally stretched electronic networks such as
the internet is an extraordinarily diverse, contingent process’ (Graham, 2004: 21). This
special section offers a multi-disciplinary perspective on the topic by showcasing research by
communication and media scholars, geographers, sociologists and anthropologists, all
working in the field of mobility, media and the city. It considers how migrant lives are
enhanced but also complicated by new media and how they actively participate in and shape
various digital spaces, further questioning how their online interactions alter the contours of
everyday activities, societal integration, identity formation and emotional bonding as they
straddle home and host countries, or pass through places-in-transit. Case studies highlight
examples of transnational migration within, to or from Asia. They shed light on the role of ICT
use by transnational migrants from various cultural, educational, professional and socio-
economic backgrounds, with differential levels of ICT access, and varying migration
motivations, intentions, aspirations and expectations.
Through taking a differentiated lens on the dialectical relationship between new media and
migration, authors heed Sheller and Urry’s (2006) call to examine mobilities ‘in their fluid
interdependence and not in their separate spheres’ (p. 212). The papers discuss migration
as a process involving liminal spaces (cf. Bhabha, 1990, 1994) that are characterized by
periods of transition, experimentation and tentativeness. Collectively, they take the reader
through different stages of the migrant experience – from weighing a multitude of options
pre-departure, to arrival and adaptation in the host country – in demonstrating the contingent
nature of the relationship between migration and new media. While new media are found to
function as an ‘anchor’ (Williams et al., 2008) in liminal spaces in some case studies, they
are thought to exacerbate a state of transit and flux in others.
In her analysis of German migrant professionals’ sense of place in Singapore, Tabea Bork-
Hüffer inquires into how their attachment, bonding and sensuous experience of the city
evolve under the influence of ICTs from pre-migration via the immediate post-migration
phases to a few years after their arrival. She probes into the degree of consonance between
early and later impressions of the city that are simultaneously informed by unmediated and
mediated experiences, capturing also the effects of a digitally enhanced ‘imaginative’
(Sheller and Urry, 2006: 207) or ‘cognitive/imaginary’ mobility (Lemos, 2008: 98). Also in the
context of Singapore, Sun Sun Lim and Becky Pham explore mediated and unmediated

This is the pre-print version of Lim, S. S., Bork-Huffer, T. & Yeoh, B. (2016). Manoeuvring
through Physical and Virtual Spaces: Mobility, Migration and New Media. New Media &
Society,18(10), 2147–2154.
connections between migrant students, local and co-national friends in the host country and
family and friends in the home country. As migrant students cope with relocation challenges,
online spaces serve as a buffer zone for acculturation to the foreign land, while transnational
spaces offer a sense of comfort and security. Jozon Lorenzana explores how Filipino
migrants, who are seeking to establish new lives in Delhi, have their identities tested,
questioned, stretched and affirmed by locals and co-nationals. He proposes the term
‘mediated recognition’ to account for the ways new and traditional media facilitate
recognition by providing a platform for self-presentation and affirmation from social networks,
both proximal and distant, old and new. Lorenzana underlines how – often hybrid (cf.
Bhabha, 1994; Brinkerhoff, 2010) – identities are digitally constructed and performed in
liminal spaces through the ‘reiterative power of discourse’ (Butler, 1993: 2) and as a means
to counteract perceived downward social mobility. Maria Platt et al. analyse the factors that
determine access to and utilization of ICTs by Indonesian domestic workers in Singapore,
who are legally obliged to live-in with their employers. They show how the increasing
reliance on communication technologies by both the domestic workers and their employers
necessitates a renegotiation of social and employment relations in the household and
therewith potentially extends times of tension and liminality for the workers. Joong-Hwan Oh
discusses how members of a Korean women’s migrant platform, ‘MissyUSA’, use this forum
to make sense of complicated procedures and prolonged uncertainty as they seek
permanent residency and eventually naturalization in the United States. On a more
intangible level, these migrants seek to retain their Korean identity through recreating
traditional cuisine that embodies their rich cultural heritage, and making frequent trips to the
home nation. They thus gravitate to MissyUSA as it offers a point of convergence for those
seeking advice and those proffering it.
Another theme developed in this collection is migrants’ differential access to ICTs and digital
mobilities and the ensuing online and offline politics of space (Massey, 1991, 1993, 2012
[2005]). Whereas digital technologies potentially are ‘immensely empowering for the people
and places able to construct and consume them’ (Zook et al., 2004: 157), ‘mediated
communication must be understood as both producer and a product of hierarchy and as
such fundamentally implicated in the exercise of, and resistance to, power in modern
societies’ (Silverstone, 2005: 190). The very use of ICTs can itself be a stage for migrants to
assert themselves and their rights. In particular, for relatively disadvantaged low-wage
migrant workers, the power asymmetries (Lim, 2016) that inhere in employer–employee
relationships are exacerbated when employers impose a high degree of surveillance and
regulation of their domestic workers’ access and use of ICTs (see also Qiu, 2008; Wallis,
2015). This is discussed by Platt et al. whose findings indicate that Indonesian domestic
workers’ negotiations of ICTs create fluid possibilities for these women to exercise greater
agency while attempting to circumvent the inequalities inscribed upon their position as
foreign domestic workers who are highly vulnerable to the vagaries of their employers. The
authors’ dissection of migrant domestic workers’ complex bargaining strategies for access to
ICTs vis-á-vis their employers also challenges the reduction of the proverbial ‘digital divide’
into a simple distinction between ‘information haves and have-nots’ (Wresch, 1996): The
workers’ everyday tactical negotiations for access to ICT use – if not all the time, then under
certain conditions (e.g. only through their employers’ devices), or at certain times (e.g. after

This is the pre-print version of Lim, S. S., Bork-Huffer, T. & Yeoh, B. (2016). Manoeuvring
through Physical and Virtual Spaces: Mobility, Migration and New Media. New Media &
Society,18(10), 2147–2154.
finishing work in the evening) – exemplify a much more differentiated barter over the
appropriation of digital technologies in a global city-state where access to ICTs is generally
assumed to be so ubiquitous as to be almost ‘banal’ and ‘ordinary’ (Graham, 2004: 22). At
the same time, ICTs can also be deployed to create ‘panoptic geographies’ over migrant
lives, ‘with important implications for individual privacy’ (Zook et al., 2004: 168), as
employers who grant their workers the right to use ICT eventually excavate new ways of
surveilling their employees’ participation in digital spaces online. Platt et al., for example,
broach the issue of how being constantly reachable through ICTs by their employers can
become a source of stress and tension for the domestic workers.
Lim and Pham raise a similar issue although they focus on a group that is embedded in very
different politics of mobility and access to ICTs. In their analysis of migrant students’ digital
networks, they show how the boundless nature of ICTs can create obligations to stay in very
frequent contact with families and friends back home to an extent where this could
monopolise their time and distract them from seeking more contacts with local members of
host society. At the same time, they also point to ICTs’ empowering role as witnessed by the
positive effects that newly and digitally established ties to other acquaintances (mostly co-
nationals) in the migration destination have for some of the students. Making a similar point,
Lorenzana, observes how the Internet, where the great majority of the content is created by
users and social networks (Alonso and Oiarzabal, 2010), functions as a source of power
through giving users a voice, allowing them to actively construct and transform (self)images,
affirming a sense of (self)worth and re-establishing their sociality. He points out how these
processes also enhance his interviewees’ connections to members of local society. Bork-
Hüffer also outlines how the mere perception of digital content can be empowering and
become a resource in establishing and maintaining ties to the local society. She illustrates
how migrants’ engagement with the everyday socio-political assemblages (McCann and
Ward, 2011) in Singapore through their preoccupation with socio-political webpages and
blogs authored by locals, can become a source of crucial insider information and therewith
an important resource for her interviewees when engaging with their offline private and work
contacts with locals in Singapore. As pointed out above, a major contribution of this special
section is the focus not only on the often subtle but highly differentiated and
‘compartmentalised’ (Lim and Pham, this issue) digital connections and engagements forged
by migrants with people and places in their home countries, but also on the simultaneous,
equally differentiated, connectivities created at destination and elsewhere. Several papers
stress the complexity and diversity of mobile subjects sustaining mediated and unmediated
relations with very different groups – locals, fellow migrants and contacts in their home
countries of diverse ethnicities, class, educational and professional backgrounds and holding
various relationships to them (e.g. employers, employees, fellow students, co-workers,
customers, family members, friends and acquaintances). This approach throws open the
important and large body of literature that has focused on digital diasporas and the
emergence of comparatively closed digital transnational communities (e.g. the compendium
on ‘Diasporas in the New Media Age’ edited by Alinejad, 2011; Alonso, 2010; Conversi, 2012;
Turner, 2008; the Special Issue on Migration and Diaspora in the Age of Information and
Communication Technologies edited by Oiarzabal and Reips, 2012). We hence chime in with
Hanafi’s (2005: 581) observation that it is important to recognize the existence of ‘dispersed

This is the pre-print version of Lim, S. S., Bork-Huffer, T. & Yeoh, B. (2016). Manoeuvring
through Physical and Virtual Spaces: Mobility, Migration and New Media. New Media &
Society,18(10), 2147–2154.
communities’ and ‘dispersed people’ as well as Bork-Hüffer et al.’s (2016) critique of the term
‘migrant community’. In other words, we ask if analyses that focus purely on the examination
of digital transnational migrant spaces potentially bear a risk of shading out the significance
of migrants’ often intermingled digital and offline connections – of varying depths – that also
extend to people in local societies and elsewhere. Instead, we argue for a more expansive
approach to the connections between migrant lives and new media that is attentive to the
simultaneous, ramifying and multidirectional webs of ICT connectivity that is reflected in
migrant social worlds that are at once localized and transnationalised. We conclude by
pointing to various omissions in this special section that could serve to stimulate further
work. As ‘new spaces created by the domestication of new media are also gendered spaces
or even gendered divides’ (Sørensen and Meyer, 2003: 125), it is a little surprising that none
of the articles in this compilation specifically foregrounds the significance of gender in
migrants’ choices of and participation in digital spaces and mobilities (a question that
becomes particularly pressing with regard to Oh’s analysis of the ‘MissyUSA’ platform that is
restricted to married Korean–American or Korean–Canadian women). The different case
studies also call for a deeper analysis and theorization of the role of class (mobility) in virtual
and spatial mobilities. The mobile subjects that feature in this compilation could in all but one
case (Platt et al.’s article on migrant domestic workers in Singapore) be classified as
belonging to the ‘middle class’ in their home countries. Lorenzana’s, as well as Lim and
Pham’s findings show, however, that some migrants experience downward social mobility
and may be ascribed a very different social and class status once they arrive in the receiving
countries.
With regard to the fact that migration as a social phenomenon ranges widely, it further needs
to be noted that contributions are restricted to transnational and urban-bound migration. This
provides a starting point to think across other types of migration. What are similarities or
differences in new media use in terms of internal migration trajectories? While the papers
stress critical reflection on migration as a process that covers a period from pre-departure,
relocation times to the post-settlement phase, how is this (nonetheless single) migration
experience enmeshed in migrants’ long-term life cycle and biographies? How do circular
forms of migration in an increasingly transient world affect and interlink with virtual
mobilities? How does the interaction between spatial, circular and virtual mobilities affect
mobile subjects’ social fields and ‘life chances’ (Weber as cited in Giddens, 2000 [1984]) in
the long run?
Further, in her paper, Bork-Hüffer found that some of her German migrant professional
interviewees started to more readily embrace ICTs after moving to Singapore, triggered
especially by social pressure of their local peer groups. This seems to accord with the
popular observation that ‘Asian’ societies more readily embrace new technological
advancements when compared to their ‘European’ and ‘North American’ counterparts. It also
has been argued that in Asia, ICTs and particularly mobile phones ‘are also performing
multiple cultural functions; they operate within a range of cultural and symbolic registers.
They are more than just technologies; they are sites of cultural production’ (Bell, 2006: 43–
44). These postulations altogether urge us to ask: are there differential degrees and varying
limits to the way ICTs feature in the mediation of migrant social life across a diverse range of

This is the pre-print version of Lim, S. S., Bork-Huffer, T. & Yeoh, B. (2016). Manoeuvring
through Physical and Virtual Spaces: Mobility, Migration and New Media. New Media &
Society,18(10), 2147–2154.
Asian and Western societies? Conversely, how does differential ICT use in societies with
different social, cultural and historical complexions affect migration plans, decisions,
pathways, acculturation and identity formations? We hope that these questions will
underscore the need for cross-cultural comparisons that critically assess potential effects of
differences in the appropriation and use of ICTs.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research
Institute and Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Migration Cluster as well as the Alexander-
von-Humboldt-Foundation, Germany for supporting their research collaboration.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.
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Author biographies
Sun Sun Lim is Associate Professor at the Department of Communications and New Media,
National University of Singapore. She has written extensively on the social implications of
technology domestication by young people and families, charting the ethnographies of their
Internet and mobile phone use. Her latest books include Mobile Communication and the
Family: Asian Experiences in Technology Domestication (Springer, 2016) and Asian
Perspectives on Digital Culture: Emerging Phenomena, Enduring Concepts (Routledge,
2016).
Tabea Bork-Hüffer is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University
of Singapore. Her research interests and publications centre around the changing
geographies of internal and international migration, migrant health and health governance,
and the role of new media in migrants’ place perception with a regional focus on China,
Southeast Asia and Germany. She received the national award of the Association of
Geographers at German Universities (VGDH) for her PhD thesis on migrants' access to
health services in China.
Brenda S.A. Yeoh is Professor (Provost’s Chair), Department of Geography, as well as Dean
of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. She is also the
Research Leader of the Asian Migration Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. Her
interests in migration research in Asia include key themes such as cosmopolitanism and
highly skilled talent migration; gender, social reproduction and care migration; migration,
national identity and citizenship issues; globalising universities and international student

This is the pre-print version of Lim, S. S., Bork-Huffer, T. & Yeoh, B. (2016). Manoeuvring
through Physical and Virtual Spaces: Mobility, Migration and New Media. New Media &
Society,18(10), 2147–2154.
mobilities; and cultural politics, family dynamics and international marriage migrants. She
has published widely in these fields.