Mirca Madianou

Polymedia: Towards a new theory of digital media in interpersonal communication

This article develops a new theory of polymedia in order to understand the consequences of digital media in the context of interpersonal communication. Drawing on illustrative examples from a comparative ethnography of Filipino and Caribbean transnational families, the article develops the contours of a theory of polymedia. We demonstrate how users avail themselves of new media as a communicative environment of affordances rather than as a catalogue of ever proliferating but discrete technologies. As a consequence, with polymedia the primary concern shifts from the constraints imposed by each individual medium to an emphasis upon the social, emotional and moral consequences of choosing between those different media. As the choice of medium acquires communicative intent, navigating the environment of polymedia becomes inextricably linked to the ways in which interpersonal relationships are experienced and managed. Polymedia is ultimately about a new relationship between the social and the technological, rather than merely a shift in the technology itself.

Mobile phone parenting: Reconfiguring relationships between Filipina migrant mothers and their left-behind children

The Philippines is an intensely migrant society with an annual migration of one million people, leading to over a tenth of the population working abroad. Many of these emigrants are mothers who often have children left behind. Family separation is now recognized as one of the social costs of migration affecting the global south. Relationships within such transnational families depend on long-distance communication and there is an increasing optimism among Filipino government agencies and telecommunications companies about the consequences of mobile phones for transnational families. This article draws on comparative research with UK-based Filipina migrants — mainly domestic workers and nurses — and their left-behind children in the Philippines. Our methodology allowed us to directly compare the experience of mothers and their children. The article concludes that while mothers feel empowered that the phone has allowed them to partially reconstruct their role as parents, their children are significantly more ambivalent about the consequences of transnational communication.

HUMANITARIAN CAMPAIGNS IN SOCIAL MEDIA: Network architectures and polymedia events

Social media and social networking sites (SNS) in particular have become popular in current humanitarian campaigns. This article assesses the optimism surrounding the opportunities that SNS communication offers for humanitarian action and for the cultivation of cosmopolitan sensibilities. In order to evaluate the mediation of suffering and humanitarian causes through social media, I argue that we need to understand the architectures of social media and SNS in addition to analysing the content of the campaigns drawing on the literature on humanitarian communication. Focusing on the analysis of two humanitarian campaigns through social media, the phenomenally popular and controversial Kony 2012 campaign and WaterForward, the article observes that the architectures of SNS orientate action at a communitarian level which heightens their post-humanitarian style. However, an emerging new genre of reporting and commenting which is termed “polymedia events” can potentially extend beyond the limitations of SNS communication by opening up the space for reflexivity and dialogical imagination.

News as a looking-glass: Shame and the symbolic power of mediation

This article brings together the literatures on shame and mediation in order to consider whether shame is generated, or amplified, in situations of mediation such as those when people find themselves exposed in the news media. Acknowledging the social nature of shame that presupposes the other’s regard for oneself, and drawing on a revision of Cooley’s concept of the ‘looking-glass self’ to describe the monitoring of the self from the point of view of the others in the context of mediation, the article argues that news can be a looking-glass through which viewers mirror themselves. Apart from heightening the awareness of the other’s gaze and expectations, news becomes a looking-glass in a more literal way. This occurs in the instances of mediated exposure when people find themselves unwillingly in the news. After an initial theoretical discussion of the emotion of shame and how such theories need to be revised in order to capture the structural transformations pertaining to mediated interaction, the article concentrates on a personal narrative of unwanted mediated exposure and observes how shame can be generated and amplified in the context of mediation, thus revealing the symbolic power of the media with potential consequences for social monitoring and conformity.

Digital Inequality and Second-Order Disasters: Social Media in the Typhoon Haiyan Recovery

This article investigates the intersection of digital and social inequality in the context of disaster recovery. In doing so, the article responds to the optimism present in recent claims about “humanitarian technology” which refers to the empowering uses and applications of interactive technologies by disaster-affected people. Drawing on a long-term ethnography with affected communities recovering from Typhoon Haiyan that hit the Philippines in 2013 triggering a massive humanitarian response, the article offers a grounded assessment of the role of social media in disaster recovery. In particular, the article focuses on whether any positive consequences associated with digital media use are equally spread among better off and socially marginalized participants. The analysis reveals sharp digital inequalities which map onto existing social inequalities. While some of our already better-off participants have access to a rich media landscape which they are able to navigate often reaping significant benefits, low-income participants are trapped in a delayed recovery with diminished social media opportunities. The fact that some participants are using social media to recover at a rapid pace while others are languishing behind represents a deepening of social inequalities. In this sense, digital inequality can amplify social inequalities leading to a potential “second-order disaster.” This refers to humanly perpetuated disasters that can even surpass the effects of the natural disaster.

Should You Accept a Friends Request From Your Mother? And Other Filipino Dilemmas

Abstract: This paper uses the concept of ‘cutting the network’ derived from the work of Marilyn Strathern to examine the relationship between two kinds of social network, that of kinship and the system of friends constructed on social networking sites. Specifically the material comes from a study of Filipina domestic workers and nurses in the UK and their relationship to their left behind children in the Philippines. A bilateral system of kinship can lead to a proliferation of relatives, while the use of the Friendster social networking site can lead to a proliferation of friends. It is when these two systems clash following the request by ones mother to become a friend that the constraints and problems posed by both systems comes into view. Cases show that it is possible to use social networking sites to help mothers become close friends for their absent children, but more commonly the increasing presence of actual mothers through new media disrupts the relationships that children had developed for themselves to a idealised projection of motherhood.

Polymedia and Ethnography: Understanding the Social in Social Media

In this essay I argue that social media need to be understood as part of complex environments of communicative opportunities which I conceptualize as polymedia. This approach shifts our attention from social media as discrete platforms to the ways users navigate environments of affordances in order to manage their social relationships. Ethnography emerges as the most appropriate method to capture the relational dynamics that underpin social media practices within polymedia.

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.

Ethics of Media: an introduction

In September 2012 a series of violent protests erupted in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia in response to a YouTube film that caricatured Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. The protests, which were directed primarily towards the US where the short film was made, echoed the similar violent reactions to the publications of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten in 2005. Were the protesters right to express their anger at what were evidently provocative and offensive media representations of their faith? Were the filmmakers and cartoonists entitled to freedom of speech and is this freedom limitless? Or was this a clear case of media harm? And what, if any, is the responsibility of the audiences who not only watch and read but also produce, circulate and ‘like’, potentially harmful content?

Desperately seeking the news public

Abstract This article, drawing upon an empirical study of news consumption among Greek, Greek Cypriot and Turkish-speaking audiences, attempts to rethink two assumptions about audiences and publics for news. On the one hand, the article challenges the normative perspective in which the news audience is traditionally studied. News consumption emerges as a multi-faceted process that transcends the public-private divide. The affective and sometimes instrumental uses of the news are deeply intertwined with the rational and critical dimensions of news consumption, rendering audiences both rational and emotional, both citizens and consumers. On the other hand, the article recognizes the diversity of the news audience, thus challenging the equation of the public with the nation and other supposedly homogenous groups. The article not only describes the plurality and ethnic diversity of the audiences for the Greek news but also goes on to identify the moments when difference is translated into withdrawal and even exclusion from public life.