Mobile Communication and the Family

This volume captures the domestication of mobile communication technologies by families in Asia, and its implications for family interactions and relationships. It showcases research on families across a spectrum of socio-economic profiles, from both rural and urban areas, offering insights on children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly. While mobile communication diffuses through Asia at a blistering pace, families in the region are also experiencing significant changes in light of unprecedented economic growth, globalisation, urbanisation and demographic shifts. Asia is therefore at the crossroads of technological transformation and social change. This book analyses the interactions of these two contemporaneous trends from the perspective of the family, covering a range of family types including nuclear, multi-generational, transnational, and multi-local, spanning the continuum from the media-rich to the media have-less.

“Too long the subject of myths and stereotypes, Asian families’ lives are here sensitively analyzed in all their diversity in order to grasp how culture shapes and is shaped by the meaningful appropriation of new digital technologies within the home. In this welcome volume, authors expert across a range of countries and cultures unpack the emerging practices of technology domestication and use that matter to children and their families. Gender, religion, tradition and migration emerge as striking sources of asymmet
ry, while emotional and relational bonds are often enhanced rather than undermined by families’ uses of technology.”
Sonia Livingstone, Professor, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics

“Ranging from the dilemmas of Filipino mothers who are trying to manage their families while overseas, to the struggle for control between Indonesian children and their parents over cell phone use – and most everything in between – this savvy collection of insightful studies from Asia lends new depth and insight concerning the paradoxes of mobile communication. As such, it is an important, nuanced addition to the understanding of the way communication technology challenges and re-creates social relationships.”

Professor James Katz, Feld Family Professor of Emerging Media & Executive Director, Center for Mobile Communication Studies, Boston University