Mobile Communication and the Family ― Asian Experiences in Technology Domestication

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.

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 theJournal of Computer Mediated Communication, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media and New Media & Society. She is an Editorial Board Member of theJournal of Children and Media, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Social Media + Society and Mobile Media & Communication. Her other bookAsian Perspectives on Digital Culture: Emerging Phenomena, Enduring Concepts (Routledge) is forthcoming in 2016.