One of the striking features in the transformational nature of diaspora today is the salience of
a provisional and nomadic symptom (“willing to go anywhere for a while”), as evident among
East Asian women on the move. Digital media and mediated networks have been instrumental
in facilitating this change in contemporary mobility. Underlying the processes of circulatory
migration flows, modes of social organization and transnational experiences help in the accel-
erated globalization of digital media and the Internet, as well as their time–space compressing
capacity. Thus, it is not just the increasing, nomadic flows of people that are of significance here,
but also the rise in multi-directional flows of digital media, information, and communication
technologies that parallel people’s transnational mobility for creating new conditions of identity
formation in digital diaspora.
This chapter explores how the activation of transnational flow and the circulation of East
Asian pop culture, which have both been facilitated by the development of digital media, inter-
act with the increasing mobility of people in this region. This chapter argues that today’s cir-
culatory provisional migration and digital diaspora are significantly enabled and driven, in part,
by the strategic and mundane use of mediated cultural spaces, through which movements are
not necessarily limited, but are likely to increase in their impact and further sustained in vari-
ous transnational contexts, albeit with unintended consequences. The electronic mediation of
the Internet plays a significant role not just in facilitating the ongoing physical mobility and
possibly maintaining its long-term durability, but also is crucial in constituting and changing
the way in which diasporic lives and subject positions are experienced and felt in an otherwise
sense of placeless-ness. New cultural spaces, connections, and various capacities of mobility are
now changing the scale and patterns of migration as well as the nature of migrants’ experience
and their thinking about mobility and home, therefore bringing forth complex conditions of
identity formation. The mediated spaces, established through newer, cheaper, and more efficient
modes of communications and transnational ethnic media from the homelands of East Asia,
allow dispersed yet networked migrants to transnationally maintain their home-based relation-
ships and to regulate a dialectical sense of belonging in their host countries.
This chapter also addresses the paradoxes of digital media as home-making practices, by
drawing on a case study from my ethnographic research. The chapter is based on a larger ethno-
graphic project (Kim 2011) that explores the nature of women’s transnational mobility, media,
and identity by undertaking a two-stage approach to data collection, namely personal in-depth
rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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