Sent home: mapping the absent child into migration through polymedia

Migrants and their transnational families document their children and child‐rearing practices on social networking sites (SNS) to enhance their social mobility. In this article, I identify a new group of migrant children, namely those sent home to their parents’ countries of origin for an imagined ‘good childhood‘. I demonstrate that polymedia – SNS and other platforms – sustain these children and create new norms of publicness and visibility in transnational parenting. Exploring how families document child‐raising across international boundaries, I show how the trajectories of parenting relationships remain open ended. I counter the predominant focus on transnational parenting as a kind of abandonment attached to left‐behind children. Instead, I refocus the research on the opportunities polymedia give families to create and sustain intimacies, thus making the trajectories of migrant families and children increasingly dynamic. Polymedia create important shifts in global migration – a transformation that requires changes in the way scholars approach transnational families and long‐distance parenting.     

Bridging Temporal and Spatial "Gaps": The role of information and communication technologies in defining communities

The diffusion and use of digitally based information and communication technologies (ICTs) offers the opportunity to redefine and reconceptualize 'community' both in terms of delineating the boundaries of community, as well as the modes of communication used between members. The creation of an electronic infrastructure, the Internet, permits the possibility of widespread public communication that is inexpensive and relatively easy to access. A second consequence builds on the first; the emergence of (virtual) communities based on geographically distributed sources of information production and exchange rather than the geographic proximity of community members to one another. An assessment of three cases of ICT-linked communities suggests that one component of sustainability of these virtual communities of interest may be a geographic linkage. While interests not based on geography are, at least at present, more transitory and less important than those created by the use of the Internet and similar kinds of ICTs. While we may join a virtual community because of an interest we have, unless that interest affects us in our daily lives, in our lives as physically-instantiated and geographically-centred individuals and citizens, there is no good reason to believe that we will long continue an active membership in the virtual community. Indeed, this is precisely what the three case studies presented in this paper suggest.