Sun Sun Lim

Managing peer relationships online - Investigating the use of Facebook by juvenile delinquents and youths-at-risk

While extensive research has been conducted on young peoples peer interaction via online communication, the focus has been on mainstream youths, with marginalized youth communities being understudied. To help address this inadequacy, the current study conducted interviews with Singaporean male juvenile delinquents (n=36) to understand the role of online communication in their peer interactions and the salient characteristics of such interactions. Our findings show that Facebook was the principal tool of online peer interaction. However, given the particular circumstances of juvenile delinquents, online social networking presents issues that may compromise efforts to rehabilitate them. These include extending the time and opportunities for unstructured and unsupervised peer socialization, peer endorsement of delinquent acts and the pressure of having to display group loyalty in the online space. Even after rehabilitation, youths who attempt to distance themselves from their delinquent peers are challenged by the persistence of their online social networks.

Learning through 'Prosuming': Insights from Media Literacy Programmes in Asia

In todays new media landscape, consuming media content is only part of the equation. Media consumers also enjoy various avenues by which they can produce and share media content. This combination of consuming and producing has been termed ‘prosuming’. Rather than being the preserve of the intellectual elite, virtually any media consumer can be a media producer too given the relative affordability and accessibility of new ICT and media platforms. Media production is satisfying because it allows individuals to flex their creative energies and empowering because it enables people to make their views heard. Focusing on media literacy programmes targeted at developing country youth, this article analyses media literacy programmes that impart media production skills. Specifically, it looks at the Little Masters programme in China, the Cybermohalla programme in India, and the Young Journalists (YOJO) Group in Vietnam. The article finds that media literacy programmes that emphasise media production may have more significant long-term impacts as they vest young people with the abilities to voice their concerns and raise public awareness about youth-related issues. The media literacy skills imparted are, therefore, imbued with the potential for social activism and democratisation. The experiences of the Little Masters, Cybermohalla and YOJO programmes also suggest a few strategies for heightened success–sensitivity to the social and cultural contexts of the participants, building up a sufficiently wide base of community support, and leveraging media convergence to increase their impact.

On Stickers and Communicative Fluidity in Social Media

Social media platforms provide the key affordance of “communicative fluidity”, where communication can be more seamless because of the multiple channels users can tap to express themselves. Besides just text therefore, users can communicate via photographs, videos, emoji, and stickers, on top of voice and video calls. The visual richness of social media enables users to make explicit feelings that cannot be articulated in words, while graphical representations such as stickers can lend messages an air of interpretability. Users can strategically and dynamically choose the best means by which to express their emotions, opinions, and intentions to attain communicative fluidity. However, the rigid scripting that underpins the vocabulary of social media can also compel users to communicate in ways that they find forced and inauthentic.

The evolution of video game affordances and implications for parental mediation.

Video games have grown in number, variety, and consumer market penetration, encroaching more aggressively into the domestic realm. Within the home therefore, parents whose children play video games have to exercise mediation and supervision. As video games evolve, parental mediation strategies have also had to keep pace, albeit not always successfully. By transposing our appreciation of parental concerns over the historical development of video games, we propose an analytical framework identifying key affordances of video games, elucidating how their evolution has distinct implications for effective parental mediation. These affordances are portability, accessibility, interactivity, identity multiplicity, sociability, and perpetuity.

Mobile Communication in Asia: Issues and Imperatives

This article introduces and provides the context for the themed section on mobile communication in Asia. It suggests that much work remains to be done in adequately grasping the new mobile, mediated face of communication in the very diverse Asian region. It also suggests that such a new direction in research needs to go hand in hand with rethinking the conceptual and theoretical bases of mobile, and indeed, Internet and computer-mediated communication.

Home, School, Borrowed, Public or Mobile: Variations in Young Singaporeans' Internet Access and Their Implications

This paper studied uneven Internet access amongst young people in Singapore. The study finds that young Singaporeans access the Internet mainly through home, school, borrowed, public, and mobile sources, with different implications for each type of Internet access. For those with home or mobile access, Internet use was routinised and often intense, even burdensome and distracting on occasions. For those who relied on borrowed, school, or public access, intermittent use appeared adequate but hampered their ability to hone online skills to the levels of their peers. The study also finds that although systematic incorporation of IT into the national curriculum can encourage parity in basic exposure to online skills, developing greater Internet proficiency is more likely with home Internet access.

Mobility, migration and new media: Manoeuvring through physical, digital and liminal spaces:

This special section assembles perspectives on mobilities, migration and new media that emphasise mobile subjects’ multifarious involvements in overlapping digital spheres, which relate them socially and emotionally to both their home and destination countries. In this introduction, we identify two key themes that connect articles in this collection. First, authors accentuate migration and new media appropriation as a process involving liminal spaces characterized by transition, experimentation and tentativeness. Second, they analyse the subtle frictions that derive from migrants’ embeddedness in digital and offline social fields, shot through with power asymmetries that may simultaneously imply empowerment on one hand, and surveillance and control on the other. Authors draw on empirical case studies of transnational migration in foregrounding multiple mobilities within, to or from Asia.

Critical literacy, self-protection and delinquency: the challenges of participatory media for youths at-risk

While pedagogy is predominantly viewed from the perspective of classroom instruction, educators worldwide invariably play a critical pastoral role of shaping the personal development of their students and nurturing in them life skills. With the avid use of participatory media by young people in peer interaction, educators need to be aware of the attendant risks and opportunities so that they may offer counsel and render appropriate advice. To this end, through interviews with 36 Singaporean male juvenile delinquents and youths-at-risk, this study explores how these youths utilise participatory media in their peer interaction. The findings indicate that for this vulnerable youth population, participatory media such as social networking sites can become a platform through which they are unwittingly drawn into criminal behaviour and post-rehabilitation, participatory media may offer an insidious route to recidivism. Participatory media complicates peer interaction by presenting risk factors such as network transparency, negative peer modelling, network seepage and network persistence, all of which have implications for these youths sliding further into delinquency and criminal activity. This article concludes with recommendations on the strategies which youths-at-risk can employ to avoid the risks of participatory media.

‘If you are a foreigner in a foreign country, you stick together’: Technologically mediated communication and acculturation of migrant students

As migrant students cope with relocation challenges, communication with left-behind family and friends can enhance their well-being, while interactions with co-national and local students can facilitate their acculturation to the host country. This article studies Indonesian and Vietnamese university students in Singapore to understand the role that technologically mediated communication plays in facilitating migrant students’ adaptation and acculturation. Through a media deprivation exercise, it finds that communication with left-behind family and friends offers support but can monopolise the students’ free time and impede their interaction with locals. Social media communication also exacerbates the development of cultural silos that comprise only co-nationals. On the positive side, migrant students used the online realm as an acculturative space to better understand the host country’s attitudes towards foreigners, thereby better equipping them for interactions with locals. Migrant students must strike a balance between exploiting mediated communication links to their home identities and exploring host cultures.

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

As globalisation continues unabated, migration in general and student migration in particular have intensified worldwide. Mobile communication technologies are important links between migrant students and their left-behind family and friends. This chapter seeks to highlight the complex relationships between the students’ migrant status and their technology use, as well as between technology and the family in Vietnamese transnational households. This chapter presents contextualised accounts of three Vietnamese migrant students’ media use over a two-week period, drawing data from a one-week media monitoring exercise, a one-week media deprivation exercise, semi-structured interviews and daily media diaries. The study found that the Vietnamese migrant students appropriated a variety of communication technologies to connect with their home country, which helped to energise family interactions, sustain family ties and facilitate parental and sibling mediation, thereby supporting bonding within Vietnamese transnational families. Moreover, the technologies also helped the students to build social capital with their left-behind friends in Vietnam.