MIGRATION AND NEW MEDIA
Transnational Families and Polymedia
Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller
MIGRATION AND NEW MEDIA
‘An exemplary and groundbreaking study, with contributions to theory and our
understanding of polymedia in everyday life, this stands out as an extraordinary read
on the technology of relationships.’ – Zizi Papacharissi, University of Illinois-Chicago, USA
‘This fascinating, richly detailed book investigates the role that fluency across
multiple digital platforms plays in enabling mothering and caring to be sustained at
a distance. A genuine breakthrough.’ – Nick Couldry, Goldmiths, University of London, UK
How do parents and children care for each other when they are separated because of
migration? The way in which transnational families maintain long-distance relationships
has been revolutionised by the emergence of new media such as email, instant messaging,
social networking sites, webcam and texting. A migrant mother can now call and text her
left-behind children several times a day, peruse social networking sites and leave the webcam
on for 12 hours, achieving a sense of co-presence.
Drawing on a long-term ethnographic study of prolonged separation between migrant
mothers and their children who remain in the Philippines, this book develops gro­undbreaking
theory for understanding both new media and the nature of mediated relationships. It
brings together the perspectives of both the mothers and children and shows how the very
nature of family relationships is changing. New media, understood as an emerging environment
of polymedia, have become integral to the way family relationships are enacted and
experienced. The theory of polymedia extends beyond the poignant case study and is
developed as a major contribution for under­standing the interconnections between digital
media and interpersonal relationships.
Mirca Madianou is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of
Leicester, UK. She is the author of Mediating the Nation and several articles on the social
consequences of the media.
Daniel Miller is Professor of Material Culture at the Department of Anthropology,
University College London, UK. His most recent books include Tales from Facebook and
Digital Anthropology (edited with Heather Horst).
Anthropology/Media
MIGRATION AND
NEW MEDIA
Transnational families and
polymedia
Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller
First published 2012
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2012 Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller
The right of Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller to be identified as the authors of this work
has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
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including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
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and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Madianou, Mirca.
Migration and new media : transnational families and polymedia / Mirca Madianou and
Daniel Miller.
   p. cm.
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  1.  Foreign workers, Philippine–Family relationships–Great Britain.  2. Women foreign
workers–Family relationships–Great Britain.  3.  Children of foreign workers–Family
relationships–Philippines.  4.  Communication in families–Philippines.  5.  Interpersonal
communication–Technological innovations–Social aspects–Philippines.  6.  Communication,
International–Technological innovations–Social aspects–Philippines.  I.  Miller, Daniel, 1954–
II. Title.
  HD8398.F55.M33 2011
  331.40941–dc23
	 2011022759
ISBN: 978–0–415–67928–2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978–0–415–67929–9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978–0–203–15423–6 (ebk)
Typeset in 10/12.5pt Bembo
by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong
	 Contents  v
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements	 vi
1	 Introduction	 1
2	 The Philippines and globalisation: migration,
mothering and communications	 16
3	 Why they go – and why they stay	 31
4	 Letters and cassettes	 53
5	 The mothers’ perspective	 69
6	 The children’s perspective	 84
7	 The technology of relationships	 103
8	 Polymedia	 124
9	 A theory of mediated relationships	 140
	 Appendix: a note on method	 153
Notes	 156
References	 159
Index	 169
vi  Acknowledgements
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As is always sadly the case in ethnographic work, we cannot acknowledge any of our
participants individually, since our whole project was based on a promise of anonymity.
But it will be obvious from every page of this book how much we owe to
them all. They have provided not merely the gift of time and information. When
mothers gradually revealed their long history as migrants, often punctuated by
considerable suffering including abuse, or poignantly conveyed the emotional
traumas of their long-term separation from their children, and in turn these same
children bared their souls with regard to their own feelings, we realised the
privilege of any researcher who has been granted this intimacy and confidence.
We hope this book goes some way to a deeper appreciation of those lives and
their futures.
We can, however, happily acknowledge the assistance given to us by Cora
Castle and all her staff at the Centre for Filipinos in London.The Centre proved
very sympathetic to the aims of our research and allowed us to hang out as much
as we liked with both the staff and those who came to use their facilities and
advice, typically on Sunday mornings, the only free time many of the domestic
workers were actually given.We are also very much obliged to Jonathan Corpus
Ong for working as our research assistant and providing accommodation during
our stay in Manila.We are grateful to Anna and Raul Pertierra, Dierdre McKay,
and the anonymous readers provided by Routledge for comments on our draft texts.
In Manila we enjoyed the hospitality of Raul Pertierra and conversations with many
academics at the University of the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila and Miriam
College, including Jun Aguilar, Maruja Asis, Oiye de Dios, Lourdes Gordolan, Lulu
Ignacio and Emma Porio. The Department of Media and Communications at
Ateneo also kindly organised a symposium for us to explain our project. We would
like to acknowledge the help of Lidia Pola, who hosted Danny and allowed him
to participate in her surveys of the use of new media by school children in a
	 Acknowledgements  vii
town south of Manila.We are deeply grateful to our respective spouses, John and
Rickie, for their generous support and tolerance, especially of our absences
during fieldwork both in the Philippines and later in Trinidad. Mirca would like
to thank Alex Thompson for being a tremendous research assistant during the
Philippine fieldwork at the age of 15–18 months. She would also like to thank
her own mother, Dimitra Gefou-Madianou for transnational grandparenting and
for uncomplainingly giving up much of her time to make our fieldwork possible.
Finally, Mirca would like to express her gratitude to the Fellows of Lucy Cavendish
College, University of Cambridge for their support and for granting her the
necessary study leave which was essential for carrying out the research.
The research was funded by the ESRC as part of the award on ‘Migration,
ICTs and the transformation of transnational family life’ (RES-000-22-2266), with
an additional grant from British Telecom specifically to cover the cost of interview
transcriptions.
1
INTRODUCTION
Within the past few years a revolution has been taking place, one with huge
consequences, but so far subject to only limited systematic research. While there
are many studies of globalisation and migrant transnationalism, few have addressed
the consequence that probably matters most to those involved, which is the
separation of families. Specifically, how do parents and children care and look after
each other when they live in different countries for many years separated because
of migration? Although transnational families are not new, they are becoming
increasingly common. Furthermore this type of separation now often involves
mothers and their children as a consequence of the feminisation of migration,
partly fuelled by the insatiable demand for care and domestic workers in the
developed world.The dramatic change which has revolutionised the way in which
families maintain long-distance communication, is the emergence of a plethora
of internet- and mobile phone-based platforms such as email, instant messaging
(IM), social networking sites (SNS) and webcam via voice over internet protocol
(VOIP). These new media have engendered the emergence of a new communicative
environment, which we will call ‘polymedia’. This book is dedicated to the
understanding of this new type of ‘connected transnational family’ which is
the result of the convergence of these two phenomena: migrant transnationalism
and the explosion of communicative opportunities afforded by new media.
This book makes both a substantive and theoretical contribution to the understanding
of these profound, parallel developments of family separation and transnational
communication that are shaping our contemporary worlds. We believe
that to understand these transformations we cannot and should not separate them
as, on the one hand, a study of the media, and on the other hand, an enquiry into
what it means to be a migrant, or a mother. Our understanding will be much
enhanced if we study media situated in the context of what it means to be a
transnational mother in this environment of polymedia. As a result, this book
2  Migration and new media
contains not just a theory of polymedia, but also a theory of mediation in which
we consider in general terms how relationships and media are mutually shaped.We
do so by drawing on a long-term ethnographic study of prolonged separation
between transnational Filipino migrant mothers based in London and Cambridge
and their (now adult) left-behind children in the Philippines. No other country
exemplifies the phenomenon of ‘distant mothering’ as clearly as the Philippines
with over 10 per cent of its population working overseas, the majority of whom
are women with children left behind. The Philippines is also at the forefront of
globalisation in terms of its appropriation of new media platforms, notably mobile
phones, the consequences of which have already been documented, especially
with regard to the public sphere (Castells et al., 2006; Pertierra et al., 2002; Rafael,
2003). More than 10 million Filipino children are officially estimated to be leftbehind,
most of whom see their migrant parents only once every two years. Given
that such visits are even less frequent for families of undocumented migrants, it
is evident that such parent–child relationships have become increasingly dependent
on the available communication media. We argue that focusing on this case of
prolonged separation and intense mediation helps to bring to light and crystallise
aspects of both parts of this equation: a better understanding of the consequences
of new media, and an insight into the very nature of parent–child relationships.
Starting from this case of accentuated separation and mediation, we then move
on to develop a new theory of polymedia and of mediated relationships which,
we argue, can have a wider applicability. The book is equally driven by the aim
to make an original contribution to the migration literature as well as to develop
a theoretical understanding of digital media, distant love and the nature of mediated
relationships. It also follows Stafford (2000) in arguing that understanding separation
is a route towards understanding the basis of human relatedness, autonomy
and dependence and thereby the very nature of relationships.
One of the book’s arguments is that although information and communication
technologies (ICTs) do not solve the problems of separation within families, they
do contribute to the transformation of the whole experience of migration and
parenting. For example, it is telling that the opportunities for cheap and instant
communication feature strongly in migrant mothers’ justifications regarding their
decisions to migrate and to settle. However, the fact that ICTs can potentially
contribute, even if indirectly, to the shaping of migration patterns is not to say
that the communication is necessarily successful. In fact, we will show how the
perpetual contact they engender can often increase rupture and conflict between
parents and children. The only way this becomes clear is through our transnational
approach to research, which involved working with both the migrant mothers and
subsequently the left-behind children of these same mothers whom we interviewed
back in the Philippines. In the book we both demonstrate and interpret a discrepancy
between the mothers’ and children’s accounts.While for the mothers new
communication technologies represent welcome opportunities to perform intensive
mothering at a distance and to ‘feel like mothers again’, for their young adult
children such frequent communication can be experienced as intrusive and unwanted,
	 Introduction  3
although this often depends on specific issues such as the age of the children at
the time the mothers left and the nature of the media available to them.
In addition, this book aims to make a wider theoretical contribution by developing
a theory of polymedia and a theory of mediated relationships.The theory of
polymedia emerged through our need to develop a framework for understanding
the rapidly developing and proliferating media environment and its appropriation by
users. Although our analysis of communication technologies begins by investigating
the affordances (Hutchby,2001) and limitations of each particular medium,technology
or platform, our discussion of the emergence of a new environment of proliferating
communicative opportunities that is polymedia shifts the attention from the
individual technical propensities of any particular medium to an acknowledgement
that most people use a constellation of different media as an integrated environment
in which each medium finds its niche in relation to the others.We will also argue
that, as media become affordable and once media literacy1
is established and continues
to develop, the situation of polymedia amounts to a re-socialising of media
itself, in which the responsibility for which medium is used is increasingly seen to
depend on social and moral questions rather than technical or economic parameters.
If the term ‘polymedia’ recognises the importance of the human context for media
use, this leads the way to our final chapter where we are able to bring this theory
into alignment with the theorisation of relationships to create a theory of mediated
relationships, which builds upon prior theories of mediation in media studies (Couldry,
2008; Livingstone, 2009b; Silverstone, 2005), but is here combined with debates
about kinship, religion and mediation in anthropology (e.g. Eisenlohr, 2011; Engelke,
2010). In this final theoretical chapter we demonstrate that the key to understanding
mediated relationships is not to envisage them as simply a case of how the media
mediates relationships. Rather we start from our theory of relationships which demonstrates
that all relationships are intrinsically mediated and that we can understand the
impact of the media only if we first acknowledge this property of the relationship.
This book exemplifies the benefits of giving equal weight to relationships,
media, ethnography and theory. But it is also sensitive to the context of its own
case study, to the stories of suffering, separation, loss and also empowerment and
love that make this more than just grounds for delineating such academic terrain.
We have focused this volume just as much on the need to convey these stories
and the background in the political economy of global labour and its impact
especially on migrant women and their left-behind children.
The rest of this chapter will review the three key literatures which underpin
this study, namely, global migration and transnational families; new media, consumption
and transnational communication, and finally motherhood.We will end
the chapter by providing an overview of the whole book.
Global migration and transnational families
Families whose members are temporally and spatially separated because of work
are nothing new. Thomas and Znaniecki’s classic The Polish Peasant in Europe and
4  Migration and new media
America (1996) is a riveting account of the early twentieth-century migration to
the US partly told through the letters that sustained these long-distance relationships
between separated family members. The recent intensification of global
migration and, crucially, the increasing feminisation of migration, have brought
about a new type of transnational family where women seek employment in the
global north, leaving their children behind.Transnational motherhood (HondagneuSotelo
and Avila, 1997), precisely because it challenges entrenched and often
ideological views about the role of mothers and the value of children (see also
Zelizer, 1994), has largely been seen as one of the hidden injuries of globalisation:
the high social cost the developing world must pay for the increased income
through remittances which keep the economies of the global south afloat.
The impact on left-behind families and the relationship people maintain to their
countries of origin have been a relatively recent focus of attention, perhaps because
for so long the migration literature focused on questions of assimilation and integration
in the host societies (Vertovec, 2009: 13). An influential approach for
understanding transnational families has been the ‘care chains’ approach (Hochschild,
2000; Parreñas, 2001) and the related notion of ‘care drain’ affecting
developing countries which experience a ‘care deficit’ by exporting their mothers
and care workers (Hochschild, 2000; Widding Isaksen et al., 2008). The work of
Parreñas (2001) on Philippine migration has acquired paradigmatic status in exemplifying
the connections between different people across the world based on paid
or unpaid relationships of care. The concept of a global care chain has particular
poignancy because of the way this is refracted in the impact upon left-behind
children. The paradigmatic case is where a Filipina woman from Manila spends
much of her life looking after a child in London, using part of her wages to
employ a Filipina from a village to look after her children in Manila. This woman
in turn uses part of her urban wages to pay someone else in her village to look
after her own children. These images of a global care chain are powerful representations
of the larger inequalities of contemporary political economy.
There exists a corresponding debate at a popular level within the Philippines itself
with regard to the impact of migration upon parent–child relationships. Critical to
our fieldwork was a film called Anak (the word inTagalog for ‘child’) which portrays
the extreme example of a mother who feels she has sacrificed herself for her children
by taking on domestic work in Hong Kong. But during her absence, her son
drops school grades and loses his scholarship, and her daughter falls into a life of
assorted vices including smoking, drinking, drugs and abusive boyfriends leading
to an abortion.The film is dominated by the relationship between the mother and
the sullen and resentful daughter who blames all her woes on being abandoned by
her mother.This was a hugely popular film in the Philippines. It was directed by R.
Quintos and starred Vilma Santos, a well-known actress and politician, now the
mayor of a major town.We often started our discussion with the children by asking
for their reaction to the film, which was easier to broach than immediately discussing
their own childhood. So in addition to any academic debates, we also have to be
aware of the way these issues are constantly appraised within the Philippines itself.
	 Introduction  5
In the academic literature, gender has been understood as being key to understanding
dynamics in transnational families. Parreñas (2005a) in her study of
Filipino left-behind children noted that when mothers migrate they are expected
to perform the caring and emotional work typically associated with their maternal
role, but also to take on the traditional male breadwinning role. Globalisation
and female migration have not reversed, nor even challenged traditional gender roles
and hierarchies.This finding is also shared by Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila (1997)
in their study of Latina transnational mothers in California as well as FresnozaFlot
(2009) in her research with Filipina migrants in Paris. Hondagneu-Sotelo and
Avila (1997: 562) argue that female migration has not replaced caregiving with
breadwinning definitions of motherhood, but rather has expanded ‘definitions of
motherhood to encompass caregiving from a distance and through separation’.
For Pessar (1999), any advances by women’s breadwinning capacity are cancelled
by the fact that female migrants are overwhelmingly employed in the care and
domestic sector, thus preserving patriarchal ideologies. However, McKay (2007)
and Pingol (2001) observed a different gendered division of domestic work in the
Philippine region of Northern Luzon.
The political economy of care and the feminist critique on which the care chains
approach is based have made significant contributions to the literature on migration,
with their emphasis upon the economic motivations for emigration. However,
the focus of the care chains approach on structural factors does not acknowledge the
empowering potential of migration for women and does not grant much agency
to migrants themselves in determining their own trajectory (McKay, 2007; Silvey,
2006;Yeates, 2004).The care chains approach also assumes a normative and universal
perspective of biological motherhood which should be performed in a situation
of co-presence (actually living together in the same household). What the more
ethnographically based studies such as McKay (2007) and Aguilar et al. (2009)
demonstrate is that both the global feminist discourse employed by Parreñas (2001),
and also globalised ideas about women’s responsibilities (which are found in the
Hollywood-style melodrama that clearly influenced the film Anak) have to be
complemented by grounded study within the Philippines, which may reveal very
different and more nuanced expectations about mother–child relationships.
Mothers themselves are subject to competing discourses about the moralities
of their own actions. In such circumstances it seemed vital to recognise the migrant
women’s own perspective, particularly when the research agenda concerns sensitive
and emotive issues such as family separation. In our research we have adopted
an ethnographic approach which recognises migrants as reflexive subjects, albeit
ones positioned in structures of power. For example, crucial for understanding
the relationships and communication between mothers and left-behind children
is the analysis of the context of migration, including the reasons why women
migrate in the first place.The bottom-up ethnographic perspective followed here
can uncover the contradictory and perhaps less socially acceptable motivations
for migration and cast light on the processes through which women negotiate
their various roles, identities and relationships. This is an approach followed by
6  Migration and new media
Constable (1999) in her work with Filipina migrant workers in Hong Kong,
where she focused on the ambivalent narratives of return amongst her participants.
Such accounts of the motivations for migration and settlement often highlight
personal reasons which are not captured by more top-down perspectives such as
that of the care chains with its emphasis on the role of the state and the political
economy of care.
In Chapter 3 we build upon Parreñas (2001: 27) who developed an intermediate
level analysis combining a bottom-up perspective with the macrostructural approach
of political economy of labour migration (Sassen, 1988).This allowed Parreñas to
identify a range of ‘hidden motivations for migration’ which extend beyond the
well-rehearsed and socially accepted reasons, which are usually economic. For
example, Parreñas observed that personal reasons including the breakdown of a
relationship, domestic abuse and extramarital affairs, constitute a significant motivation
for women’s migration (2001: 62–69), often in conjunction with other
well-documented economic and political reasons. However, our work suggests
that migrants do not always articulate the contradictions (what Parreñas calls the
‘dislocations of migration’ [2001: 23] ) in their narratives. Rather, often the discrepancy
between their own accounts (which often draw on well-rehearsed public
discourses about what constitutes good mothering and a good reason to go abroad)
and their actual practices, points to the contradictions and ambivalence that is part
of the project of migration.To unearth such discrepancies one needs the long-term
and in-depth involvement of ethnography. Migrant women occupy simultaneously
different and often contradictory subject positions: breadwinners and caregivers;
devoted mothers and national heroines; global consumers and exploited workers.
Our ethnographic perspective documents how they negotiate these conflicting
identities both discursively and through practices.
Although, as we noted earlier in this section, research on transnational families
is part of the transnational turn within migration studies, it is perhaps ironic that
one still encounters a degree of ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and GlickSchiller,
2002) within such scholarship. It is as if researchers cannot escape the
‘assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form
of the modern world’ (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller, 2002: 301). Although it would
be foolish to entirely repudiate the relevance of the nation-state in the analysis of
migrant transnationalism, it seems that one way of overcoming the straightjacket
of methodological nationalism is to actually conduct research transnationally. Our
research has benefited from this comparative, multi-sited perspective. By focusing
on the relationships between migrant mothers based in the UK and their left-behind
children in the Philippines we have ‘followed the thing’ through a multi-sited
ethnography (Marcus, 1995). The comparisons – and contradictions – between
the mothers and the children’s perspectives lie at the heart of this book.We came
to recognise that we would have written an entirely different book if we had
concentrated on migrant mothers only, or on their children. Transnationalism is
all about relationships, and following them (rather than assuming them) is one
way of dealing with the perils of methodological nationalism.
	 Introduction  7
Transnational communication and new media
For transnational families who are reunited on average every two years,2
new
media are essential for keeping in touch. Dependence on new media is exacerbated
in the case of irregular migrants who often do not see their families for longer
periods (in our sample the longest period without a visit was 13 years; for similar
observations see also Fresnoza-Flot, 2009). In such cases new communication
technologies become the only means through which migrant mothers can maintain
a relationship with their children. Given this almost extreme dependency, it is
perhaps surprising that new media have not received much attention in the literature
of migrant transnationalism, although studies have highlighted the more general
importance of the mobile phone as a social resource in the lives of migrants (see
Thompson, 2009). Most academic writing on new media and migration has looked
at the important questions of identity and integration (Gillespie et al., 2010) and
the political implications for diasporic and national populations (Brinkerhoff, 2009;
for a review see Siapera, 2010). Although this literature has been very useful and
influential, it does not address the urgent question of sociality and intimacy in
a transnational context (although see Horst, 2006; Miller and Slater, 2000; and
Wilding, 2006), while the focus on the rather bounded concept of identity does
not always capture the dynamic nature of transnational processes (Glick-Schiller
et al., 1992; Madianou, 2011).
In the context of Philippine migration, Parreñas observed that among separated
Filipino families mobile phones actually tie migrant women to their traditional
gender roles (Parreñas, 2005b), echoing North American studies about mobile
phone use and the spillover of the domestic into the professional sphere (Chesley,
2005; Rakow and Navarro, 1993). Apart from gender inequalities, Parreñas also
argues that the political economic conditions of communication determine the
quality of transnational intimacy and family life (Parreñas, 2005b), as families
without access to the internet or even a landline are deprived of care and emotional
support. In the next chapter we shall acknowledge these stark asymmetries
both between the communications infrastructure of the Philippines and the UK
and within the Philippines. But although a political economic analysis has to
inform our understanding of transnational family communication, it cannot fully
account for the dependency of such families on digital media and the mutual
shaping of technologies and relationships.
The greatest challenge of studying new media in the context of transnational
family relationships is that the technologies themselves are constantly changing
and research often seems to be chasing a moving target of technological developments
and innovative appropriations on the part of the users. Each new mode of
communication seems to become whatVertovec (2004) described for cheap international
cards, that is ‘the social glue of transnationalism’, with examples provided
by Wilding (2006) on email, or Uy-Tioco on texting (2007).This is reflected in
our own studies. When we began our fieldwork three years ago, transnational family
communication was often mainly centred upon one medium such as telephone
8  Migration and new media
calls or email, each with its own affordances and limitations. It was often possible
to see the consequences of that particular type of communication on the relationships
in question. However, gradually, and certainly over the past couple of years,
we noticed a shift towards a situation of multiple media. Relationships, increasingly,
do not depend on one particular technology, but on a plurality of media
which supplement each other and can help overcome the shortcomings of a particular
medium. People can also take advantage of these different communicative
opportunities in order to control the relationship. So, for example, if they want
to avoid confrontation they do not call but send an email.This is what led us to
consider polymedia with a focus on the social and emotional consequences of
choosing between a plurality of media rather than simply examining the particular
features and affordances of each particular medium (see also Baym, 2010;
Gershon, 2010).
Although we recognise that this new environment of communicative opportunities
is not yet a reality for everyone in the Philippines or even in the UK, it
already represents a qualitative shift in the way technologies mediate relationships.
This is why we felt the need for this new term to allow us to describe the situation.
Although the term ‘media ecology’ could be an alternative, it is concerned with
the wider systems of communication such as transport, or issues of usage such as
politics and health (Slater and Tacchi, 2004), while we wanted a term that will
highlight the unprecedented plurality and proliferation of media.‘Multimedia’, on
the other hand, is now an established term with a very different meaning (a situation
where several different forms of media are being used simultaneously and
in direct relationship to each other, for instance using instant messaging on social
networking sites) and it would therefore be confusing to use that term. ‘Multichannel’,
or ‘multi-platform’ might be closer to what we wish to describe, although
choosing either term would force us to prioritise either the terms ‘platform’ or
‘channel’ when in fact our findings suggest that such technological hierarchies are
not particularly meaningful to users.This is why we chose ‘polymedia’ as a new
term to describe the new emerging environment of proliferating communicative
opportunities.
It may seem that the term ‘polymedia’ merely acknowledges the plethora of
different media that are now available, but the point we wish to make is both
more profound and closer to the heart of social science. Our argument will be
that this growth of diverse media is crucially linked to changes in their pricing
structure as well as in users’ media literacy (Livingstone, 2004), and it is the combination
of these factors that transforms the relationship between people and
media. Previously people would assume that the choice of media was dictated by
issues of availability of technology or price, and were constrained from extending
their inferences from the choices other people made. But the word ‘polymedia’
will be used to consider much more generally how media are socialised, which
is why it then leads on to a subsequent theory of mediation. Both draw upon a
number of theoretical developments such as the rich tradition of consumption
and domestication of ICTs (Berker et al., 2006; Miller and Slater, 2000; Silverstone
	 Introduction  9
and Hirsch, 1992) and the theory of mediation (Chouliaraki, 2006; Couldry, 2008
and 2012; Eisenlohr, 2011; Livingstone, 2009b; Madianou, 2005 and 2012b; Miller,
in press; Silverstone, 2005).
Historically, mediated interaction was understood as being inferior compared
to the golden standard of face-to-face.This was mainly due to the reduced amount
of symbolic cues (for example, lack of visual cues in a letter, or telephone communication)
which gave rise to ambiguities and potential misunderstandings (Baym,
2010: 51–54; Thompson, 1995: 84). Also problematic was the perceived lack of
norms to regulate mediated interaction which also had the potential to amplify
conflict (through the case of ‘flaming’) (Baym, 2010: 55). Recent studies on the
social shaping of technologies (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1999; Wajcman et al.,
2008), domestication (Berker et al., 2006; Miller and Slater, 2000) and mediation
(Couldry, 2008; Livingstone, 2009b; Madianou, 2005; Silverstone, 2005) have shown
that mediated interactions are more complex than that and that society and relationships
are mutually constitutive. Similarly, polymedia aims to contribute to this
academic discussion by showing how users can overcome the limitations of any
particular medium by choosing an alternative in order achieve their communicative
intents and to assume control over their relationships.We should stress, however,
that we are not implying that media power is becoming redundant in a situation
of polymedia. On the contrary, power is a recurrent theme in this volume and
will be analysed as being present in both the social and family contexts (family
relationships are asymmetrical) and the political and economic contexts of migration
and telecommunications.
All of these are brought together in our final chapter, which culminates in
a theory of mediation which can be traced back to the early days of media and
communications research when Lazarsfeld and Merton wrote in 1948 that research
ought to try to understand the effects of the sheer presence of media institutions
on society. Silverstone developed this notion of mediation as:
a fundamentally dialectical notion which requires us to understand how
processes of communication change the social and cultural environments that
support them as well as the relationships that participants, both individual
and institutional, have to that environment and to each other. At the same
time it requires a consideration of the social as in turn a mediator: institutions
and technologies as well as the meanings that are delivered by them are
mediated in the social processes of reception and consumption (Silverstone,
2005: 3).
In this volume the term ‘mediation’ applies just as much to the question of what
is a social relationship as to the question of what is a medium. The situation of transnational
mothering raises huge issues of what the very terms ‘mother’ and ‘child’
mean.When we come to the analysis of our research material it will become clear
that this extreme case actually throws light on the question of what is a mother as
it applies to any situation including that of co-presence because a social relationship
10  Migration and new media
is already a form of mediation.A mother is both a normative concept – the ideal
as to what a mother should be – and the experience of actually being, or having,
a mother. As this book unfolds it will show why any further development of a
theory of mediation as applied to media is best achieved through equal attention
to the theory of mediation as to the relationship.This point leads directly to our
third discussion of the literature, which starts to open up this question of what
we mean when we use the term ‘mother’.
Transnational motherhood: normativity and ambivalence
The last section suggests that in order to assess the impact of ICTs on the relationships
between transnational mothers and their left-behind children, we need
to pay just as much attention to the issue of motherhood as to an appreciation
of the media. In the next chapter we will provide a discussion of the Filipino
idioms of family, motherhood and childhood. The present discussion is a more
general reflection on motherhood which we argue is indispensable to the understanding
of mother–child relationships and their mediation. One of the reasons
such a clarification of terms and theoretical baggage is crucial is because motherhood
is a constant trope in ideological debate. Moral panics regularly erupt about
what constitutes good, or ‘good-enough’ mothering (Winnicott, 1971), feeding
into questions and often translated into policy regarding mothers’ employment
and identities (Riley, 1983; Rutter, 1981; Smart and Neale, 1999). Even though
there is an increasing recognition of the changing nature of family and the plurality
of parenting arrangements (Golombok, 2000) – from single mothers and working
mothers to stay-at-home mothers and from heterosexual mothers to lesbian mothers
and so on – there is widespread assertion, even among feminists, that parenting
needs to take place in a situation of co-presence.This is nothwithstanding anthropological
accounts of many regions, such as the Caribbean, where the nuclear
co-present family has never been the norm (for a classic account see Clarke, 1957).
In this climate mothers leaving their children to pursue their own ambitions are
quickly branded ‘bad mothers’ ( Jackson, 1994; for a discussion of the Philippine
case see Parreñas, 2008: 22–39).Transnational mothering disrupts this normative
notion of co-present parenting. This is the dominant discourse that we now see
reflected in the film Anak discussed earlier. Our purpose in the next few paragraphs
is to clarify our analytical tools that will help us understand the changing nature
of mother–child relationships in the context of separation and mediation.
Being a mother is defined by being in a particular relationship.As Miller (1997)
has shown in his paper ‘How infants grow mothers in North London’, the
development of the child as a new being is equally reflected in the process,
much more commonly taken for granted, by which a female becomes a mother.
This disrupts the dominant literature which is driven by a concern to examine
the impact of maternal behaviour on children’s development. Feminist critique has
for a long time identified such one-sided emphasis in psychoanalysis and developmental
psychology (Hollway and Featherstone, 1997; Parker, 2005: 15–18). Even
	 Introduction  11
Winnicott’s (1975) essay ‘Hate in the countertransference’, which is now considered
a classic text on maternal ambivalence, is concerned with its impact on the
baby’s development. To simply see the mother from the point of view of her
child’s needs would be tantamount to her infant’s own narcissism: seeing the
mother as merely an extension of the infant’s needs. Parker (2005: 18) refers to
‘maternal development’ to contest the one-sided emphasis on child development,
thus acknowledging that mothers, just like their children, are changing also as part
of the challenges of the experience of motherhood.This is part of Parker’s efforts
to theorise mothers, rather than treat them as empty vessels to be filled with their
children’s needs and desires. Our research contextualises motherhood in the wider
lives of these Filipina women, subjects with multiple identities and needs, that
can become manifest as ambivalence. Although most writing on ambivalence is
located within psychoanalysis (Hollway and Featherstone, 1997; Parker, 2005), we
feel it is essential to recognise these same issues within an ethnographic encounter
that can equally expose what Hays (1997) terms the ‘cultural contradictions
of motherhood’.
Our evidence will show that ambivalence is particularly relevant to the experience
of migration. For mothers with left-behind children, migration as deterritorialisation
can exacerbate such maternal ambivalence.We regard ambivalence as a normal
state for many mothers (Hays, 1997), who must negotiate contradictory roles as
workers and mothers, but equally the ideal freedoms posed by feminism contradicted
by the constraints and re-gendering created by motherhood (Miller, 1997).
For migrant mothers such negotiation is more challenging because work (in the
UK) and mothering (in a transnational space) are spread across different countries
and continents, leading to a situation of ‘accentuated ambivalence’ (Madianou,
2012a). In Chapters 3 and 5, which aim to illustrate the contours of transnational
mothering from the bottom up, we will explore the ways in which mothers
negotiate this ambivalence and the role that ICTs play in this process.
This insistence upon acknowledging the perspective of mothers need not be
opposed to the perspective of their children, which for us would be an abnegation
of our understanding of the constitution of both mother and child as a relationship.
According to Hollway (2001) the literature on motherhood and child development
seems to have been marked by a certain dualism between those perspectives which
see mothers as objects of their babies’ and their families’ needs (rather than
people in their own right) and the feminist critique which sees women as subjects
and active agents. Hollway (2001) proposes an alternative perspective of intersubjectivity
as part of the attempt to examine mothers’ and children’s needs in tandem.
Accordingly, here we directly juxtapose the points of view of both mothers and
children. We were able to accomplish this because methodologically we sought
to interview not only the mothers in the UK, but then with their permission
their left-behind children – now young adults – in the Philippines. In total we
were able to pair 20 mothers and children, but our wider sample contains many
more mothers and children who were not ‘paired up’ (see Appendix for a detailed
discussion of our sample and overall method).
12  Migration and new media
Overview of the book
Having provided an overview of the literatures that inform our analysis and an
outline of our own approach, we will now provide a synopsis of the rest of the book.
In Chapter 2 we show that the more abstract issues raised here are particularly
well exemplified in the case of the Philippines.An intensely migrant country with
over 10 per cent of its population working abroad, the Philippines can be seen to
epitomise processes of globalisation and the asymmetries between the global south
and north.The chapter provides a brief introduction to the history of Philippine
migration before presenting the statistics and an account of the feminisation
of migration. This is followed by a discussion of the main literature on Filipino
migration and its consequences. It reveals the unusual situation where the state
itself actively promotes and celebrates this phenomenon.The focus then turns to
Filipino migration into the UK, which has become one of the most popular
destinations for Filipino migrants in recent years, especially following the systematic
recruitment of Filipino nurses by the British National Health Service between
1998 and 2005.The second part of this chapter briefly describes the Philippines
as having been in the vanguard of some aspects of digital communication, such as
mobile phone texting.
Chapter 3 is dedicated to unearthing the reasons why women migrate in the first
place and why they often choose to prolong migration and even settle in the UK.
This analysis is crucial if we are to understand the communication between migrant
mothers and their children. Contrary to popular perceptions and influential approaches
such as neoclassic economics and world systems theory (for a review see
Castles and Miller, 2009; Massey et al., 1993), our research has found that economic
motivations, albeit crucial, are not the only catalysts for migration and they are
even less salient in explaining the reasons why women do not return to the
Philippines. This chapter details the myriad motivations for female migration in
the Philippine context and argues that ambivalence is a central theme in the
experience of migration. This is particularly the case for women, whose lack of
employment opportunities in the Philippines coupled with other structural push
and pull factors mean that their jobs (and the respect and satisfaction they derive
from them) are and can only be abroad, while their children remain in the Philippines.
This chapter develops a concept of ‘accentuated maternal ambivalence’
(Madianou, 2012a) to highlight the particularly challenging and contradictory
nature of transnational mothering.
This book deliberately flows between an emphasis upon the media and a focus
upon the relationships. Chapter 4 achieves two key goals that help give the book
structure and narrative as a whole. Firstly it provides material on the earlier stages
of separation, mostly taken from oral historical accounts, so that we have a clear
sense of the underlying conditions from when mothers were initially communicating
with mainly young children. But at the same time the fact that this was based largely
on only two dominant media, letters and cassettes, with only the occasional phone
call, means that we can introduce the other key theme of this book, which is the
	 Introduction  13
focus upon media themselves. In particular, the chapter systematically discusses the
affordances and constraints of these old media and the ways in which they framed
communication in these long-distance relationships. Even within this rather simple
early media environment we see that users exploited the contrasts between these
two available media in order to express their emotions and achieve their aims with
regard to their relationships. In that sense in Chapter 4 we see the earliest evidence
of polymedia: of media as an integrated communicative environment. Having a
relatively simple distinction between two media in this chapter helps the book’s movement
towards the final chapters where we are faced with the proliferation of many
different forms of media as part of an emergent environment of polymedia.
Chapter 5 is dedicated to the mother’s perspective. It observes how the explosion
of opportunities for cheap and synchronous communication through new communications
technologies has allowed for ‘a more complete’ practice of intensive
mothering at a distance. Different communicative media fulfil different aspects of
mothering, allowing women to be in control of their households and children’s
upbringing. The digital divide within the Philippines and between the global
north and south has implications for the type and cost of ‘distant care’, affording
more opportunities to those with access to internet-based platforms. However,
intensive mothering is also performed though mobile phones, which are widely
available and represent a significant improvement from the past situation when
communication was asynchronous and prohibitively expensive. Even though the
frequency of communication through new media can often involve conflict and
disappointment, for mothers it represents a more ‘real experience’ of mothering
and an opportunity to ‘feel like mothers’ again. In this sense, communication
technologies have implications not only for practices of mothering, but also for
maternal identities. Even though there is evidence for the persistence of traditional
gender roles in the transnational division of reproductive labour, transnational
communication cannot simply be understood as confirmation of a negative spillover
(Chesley, 2005) and asymmetrical gender relationships as the existing literature
suggests (Parreñas, 2005b).We argue that new media are fundamental in the negotiation
of the ‘accentuated ambivalence’ of migrant women by allowing them to
negotiate a plurality of roles and identities across distances (see Madianou, 2012a).
In that sense, new media can also be seen as a kind of solution (however imperfect)
to the cultural contradictions of migration and motherhood.
If, as Chapter 5 has shown, the opportunities for cheap and instant communication
are generally welcomed by the mothers, in Chapter 6, which focuses on
the perspective of those left behind, we observe how transnational communication
can be experienced as a burden by around half the children we worked with.We
start by contrasting the mothers’ perspective given in the previous chapter against
the evidence that around half of the now adult left-behind children whom we
met do not agree that these new technologies effectively reinstate their mothers
in that role. However, this observation is not uniform. The other half of our
participants feel that in some ways the combination of physical distance and
control over new media made the transition through teenage life easier and even
14  Migration and new media
strengthened their relationships to their mothers. Three factors account for
the success or failure in these mediated relationships: the age of the child when the
mother left, the quality of the pre-existing relationship and the range of the available
media. We end this chapter with a tentative theorisation of relationships as
they have emerged in the light of this study.
In Chapter 7 we begin to extend beyond the specifics of the empirical case
study by developing a systematic comparison of each of the individual media
discussed in the book, ranging from older technologies such as the phone to more
recent additions such as email, instant messaging, social networking sites, webcam
and texting. Our comparison revolves around the following parameters: interactivity,
temporality, materiality and storage, replicability, mobility, public/private,
social cues and information size. Having already established how the particular
relationships appropriate the communication technologies (in Chapters 5 and 6),
our aim here is to identify the ways in which each medium frames communication.
Thus we ask what is qualitatively different about communicating via webcam
(using applications such as Skype) compared to email or telephone calls? Why is
webcam perfect for helping children with homework, or simulating situations
of co-presence during family meals, but not as successful an environment for
expressing love? Why is email communication so prone to misunderstandings and
even the amplification of conflict? And what is it about phone calls that people
find so appealing in terms of gauging their loved one’s true emotions? This leads
to a general discussion of media affordances and propensities as evident from our
substantive study.
Chapter 8 develops our theory of ‘polymedia’, one of the book’s original
concepts. After considering the affordances and limitations of each particular
medium in the previous chapter, we now turn to the combination of all these
different media and the way this constitutes the emergence of a new communicative
environment. Polymedia thus has to be understood as more than a sum of
its parts as it represents a qualitative shift in the relationship between media and its
social context.A theory of polymedia shows how the existence of multiple alternatives
within an integrated communicative structure leads to a different environment
for relationships themselves.This recognition extends our focus to the social and
emotional consequences of choosing between a plurality of media (rather than
simply examining the particular features and affordances of each discrete medium).
In particular, this chapter examines the impact of the situation of polymedia for
the nature of sociality, for the emotional aspects of communication and for the
importance of power as a context for the analysis of asymmetry in relationships.
In our final chapter we develop our theory of mediation. Having made a
contribution both to the understanding of the transformation of family relationships
in the context of migration and globalisation and to the understanding of
the different communication technologies in the context of long-distance love, the
theory of mediation brings the two together.We start by introducing a theory of
the relationship as an intrinsically mediated form.We then show how the impact
of media within relationships is transformed with the advent of polymedia.This
	 Introduction  15
allows us to create a theoretical framework that transcends the emphasis upon
media in media studies, and on relationships and kinship in social science, to create
a theoretical structure that can equally inform both.Although these final chapters
are increasingly devoted to issues of theory, they remain constantly grounded in
our ethnographic encounter combining the perspectives of migrants and their
left-behind families.The struggles of these mothers and their children with regard
to the relationships that matter more than almost anything else in their lives, is
what ultimately reveals what is at stake in these theoretical discussions, an attempt
to understand empathetically a situation which seems to be becoming ever more
widespread as international migration becomes an inescapable feature of our
contemporary world.
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