Digital diaspora, mobility, and homeriskier trajectory afar. If educated women in Korea, Japan, and China had a far better chance
of success in their career choice and self-development at home, they would not need to propel
themselves individually or force themselves to move to a precarious international stage or within
a provisional circuit of multiple migrations. The choice of study abroad is not just a legitimate
channel for physical mobility and displacement, but, importantly, involves the very nature of
identity itself emerging as an increasingly popular do-it-yourself “reflexive biography” (Giddens
1991)—a self-determined yet highly precarious biographical strategy that is driven by imagined
futures of individualization, work and economic power, self-fulfillment, and enlargement of the
self.
The level of mobility embraced here is high, possibly continuous and open-ended. For the
highly mobile transnational migrants, the migration circuit does not stop in a single destination,
but rather the destination site can provisionally serve as a transient stop until the next move to
somewhere else that is also contingent. The new pattern of circulatory migration flows, and this
relatively recent and largely unexplored nomadic symptom, may involve multiple cross-border
activities and multiple transnational forms, demanding a rethinking of mobility, home, nation,
identity, and diasporic imagination in the much more complex light of globalizing processes.
The traditional notion of diaspora was often linked to the fractured trajectories of people who
were forced to move across the globe with a deep sense of displacement or trauma; however,
since the late-1980s the concept of diaspora has been expanded to encompass the diverse
movements of people, whether forced or voluntary, and various ethnic groups in a massive
migration across national borders (Cohen 1997). Migrants live in marginal situations within
a dominant culture of the host society, dealing with cultural differences while at the same
time sustaining connections to their countries of origin, thereby possibly forming a sense of
belonging “here” and “there” in varying degrees contingent upon specific transnational con-
texts. Rather than staying in one particular locale as their traditional forebears did, contem-
porary migrants sojourn at any given time and place, willing to provisionally go anywhere or
everywhere, which may entail to some extent an open-ended sojourn and settlement across
national borders.
The media, mostly taken for granted, go along with diasporic subjects. Since the mid-1980s
dramatic changes have occurred in the global media cultural industries, developing the basis for
a new migration regime. The proliferation of satellite and cable television and online networks,
enabled by digital technologies and the deregulation and liberalization of broadcasting and tel-
ecommunications, as well as the formation of transnational audiovisual markets and distribution
technologies, have created a complex terrain of multi-vocal, multimedia, and multi-directional
flows, including contra-flows from East Asia to the West (Thussu 2007). The profusion of the
media today, with new imaginations, new choices, and contradictions, generates a critical con-
dition for reflexivity, engaging everyday people to have a resource for the learning of self, cul-
ture, and society in a new light (for details, see Kim 2005, 2008). These changes have created
the emergence of new cultural spaces and migratory projects, both imagined and enacted, in
rapidly globalizing Asia. Contemporary diaspora distinguishes itself from past forms of migra-
tion, because today’s mass-mediated imaginaries frequently transcend the boundaries of national
space, and the identity politics of integration into host countries, as well as the decisions over
whether to move, stay, and return, are deeply affected by mass-mediated images and narratives
(Appadurai 1996). Notably, a provisional nomadic sensibility (“willing to go anywhere for a
while”) has been facilitated by the mediation of rapidly evolving media technologies. Migration
flows often continue beyond original intentions, depending on new transnational social net-
works, the ethnic media from the homelands that ensure the continuation of connectivity, and
a rooted sense of ontological security and stability to a certain extent.