Mobile Communication and the Family

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. Asymmetries in Asian Families’ Domestication of Mobile Communication

   • Sun Sun Lim

   Pages 1-9

3. Values

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 11-11

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   2. Desiring Mobiles, Desiring Education: Mobile Phones and Families in a Rural Chinese Town

      • Tom McDonald

      Pages 13-32

   3. Balancing Religion, Technology and Parenthood: Indonesian Muslim Mothers’ Supervision of Children’s Internet Use

      • Rahayu, Sun Sun Lim

      Pages 33-50

   4. Helping the Helpers: Understanding Family Storytelling by Domestic Helpers in Singapore

      • Kakit Cheong, Alex Mitchell

      Pages 51-69

4. Intimacies

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 71-71

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   2. Mobile Technology and “Doing Family” in a Global World: Indian Migrants in Cambodia

      • Ravinder Kaur, Ishita Shruti

      Pages 73-91

   3. The Cultural Appropriation of Smartphones in Korean Transnational Families

      • Kyong Yoon

      Pages 93-108

   4. Empowering Interactions, Sustaining Ties: Vietnamese Migrant Students’ Communication with Left-Behind Families and Friends

      • Becky Pham, Sun Sun Lim

      Pages 109-126

5. Strategies

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 127-127

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   2. Restricting, Distracting, and Reasoning: Parental Mediation of Young Children’s Use of Mobile Communication Technology in Indonesia

      • Laras Sekarasih

      Pages 129-146

   3. Paradoxes in the Mobile Parenting Experiences of Filipino Mothers in Diaspora

      • Ma. Rosel S. San Pascual

      Pages 147-164

   4. The Value of the Life Course Perspective in the Design of Mobile Technologies for Older Adults

      • Pin Sym Foong

      Pages 165-181

6. Back Matter

   Pages 183-187

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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.

• Family communication in asia
• Growing portability of media devices in asia
• Internet and mobile phone trends in asia
• Media have-less families in asia
• Media-rich families in asia
• Mobile communication in asia
• Mobile communication technologies in asia
• Mobile communication technology
• Multi-generational families in asia
• Nuclear families in asia
• Shifts in communication practices in asia
• Single-parent families in asia
• Social change in asia
• Social shaping of technology in asia
• Technological transformation in asia
• Technology adoption in asia
• Technology domestication practices in asia
• Transnational families in asia

“The book clarifies the importance of mobile connectivity among a variety of immigrant groups, making the book relevant well beyond Asia. … The book’s greatest strengths are that it extends the focus of migration and mobile communication research from North America and Europe to Asia, and that it takes seriously the understudied groups of migrants. … the book aids understanding why people who cross borders and leave their families behind … have a firm grip on their smartphones.” (Sakari Taipale, Asian Journal of Communication, June, 2016)

• Dept of Communications and New Medi, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

  Sun Sun Lim

Sun Sun Lim (PhD, LSE) is Associate Professor at the Department of Communications and New Media and Assistant Dean at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. She studies the social implications of technology domestication by young people and families, charting the ethnographies of their Internet and mobile phone use. Her recent research has focused attention on understudied and marginalised populations including young children, youths-at-risk and migrants. She also conducts research on new media literacies, with a special focus on literacy challenges in parental mediation and young people’s Internet skills. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Asia including in China, Indonesia, Singapore and South Korea. She has  published more than 50 articles and book chapters in notable edited volumes and leading international journals including the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media and New Media & Society. She is an Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Children and Media, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Social Media + Society and Mobile Media & Communication. Her other book Asian Perspectives on Digital Culture: Emerging Phenomena, Enduring Concepts (Routledge) is forthcoming in 2016.

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