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612-822-4611
Living Across Connectivity: Intimacy, Entrepreneurship and Activism of East Asian Migrants Online and Offline

Living Across Connectivity: Intimacy, Entrepreneurship and Activism of East Asian Migrants Online and Offline

Hardcover

Series: Anthem Global Migration in the Asia-Pacific Region

General Racism & Ethnic StudiesGeneral SociologyImmigration & Refugees

ISBN10: 183998886X
ISBN13: 9781839988868
Publisher: Anthem Press
Published: Jun 4 2024
Pages: 212
Weight: 1.06
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

The use of smartphones displays many facets of contemporary mobility. Smartphones and those applications downloaded to the device enhance connectivity in regard to socialisation, entertainment, transactions, networking, activism, and mobilisation. While the device and applications help community building and boost a sense of belonging, they also generate alienation, exclusion and marginalisation. Such online mobility of capital, commodity, idea and emotion visualised on smartphones cannot take place without the parallel existence of technological, sociopolitical and economic infrastructure that is established in the physical world offline. In this light, this book argues that the use of smartphones, and the constant switch between online and offline, has meshed virtual, social and physical mobilities together. However, such inseparability is yet to break down the boundary that marks their distinctive and discrete existence. Put simply, the absence, loss, outage, switch-off, unaffordability, or confiscation of the device can easily obstruct this meshed mobility. Interrogating what causes these obstructions will highlight the indispensable role played by the material and social infrastructure in this meshed mobility as well as the embedded structural constraints. It is equally important to look at migration and mobility beyond the points of departure and destination and trace the process in between, as scholarship in migration studies has advocated. Thus, this book offers an insight into the compression and tension between online and offline and the interlaced modes of mobility. On the whole, the articles included in this book aim to answer two critical questions: (1) How does the use of smartphones by migrants and the people connected with them generate new modes of mobility? (2) How do online activities and offline infrastructure interact and result in this compression?

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General Racism & Ethnic Studies