(Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at A Distance in The Age of Mobile Media

The home is at the forefront of rapid transformation brought upon the expansion of globalizing economies, transnational migration, and the widespread uptake of ubiquitous digital communication technologies. This book unravels how geographically dispersed family members use smartphones, social media, and mobile applications in forging and sustaining long-distance relationships. It foregrounds the diverse, personalized, intimate, and creative mobile practices of fragmented family members in the enactment of everyday household interactions, festivities, homeland connections, and crisis management. On the one hand, mobile device use facilitates transnational connectivity, paving the way for enabling intimate ties, care expressions, and homeland linkages. Yet, communicative tensions also arise when digital routines are shaped by uneven familial expectations, differential financial conditions, asymmetrical technological access and capacities, work conditions, and migration policies and processes. It is by deploying various strategies that transnational family members cope with an often unstable, unsettling, and ambivalent networked environment. Ultimately, this book provides a nuanced perspective on examining the mobilization of a home from afar in the age of smartphones and mobile applications.