Polymedia Communication Among Transnational Families: What Are the Long-Term Consequences for Migration?

This chapter investigates the cumulative consequences of new communication technologies for the phenomenon of migration. Drawing on a seven-year-long comparative and multi-sited ethnography of long-distance communication within Filipino transnational families, I demonstrate that the recent convergence in new communication technologies has profound consequences not just for the migrants and their left-behind families but for the phenomenon of migration itself. Although new media cannot solve the fundamentally social problems of family separation, they are increasingly used as justifications for key decisions relating to migration or settlement in the host country. The chapter brings together research with migrants and institutional actors and shows that transnational communication through new media has become implicated in making female migration more socially acceptable while ultimately influencing patterns of migration.