Lanham, MD: Lexington Books [an imprint of Rowman and Littlefield], 2019. xxv, 143 pp. (Figures, B&W photos.) US$90.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4985-9849-1.
Due to the ubiquitous nature of communication via digital media, transnational migration no longer entails complete displacement from one’s homeland but, rather, involves experiences of the coexistence of local, national, and transnational senses of belonging. Today’s digital media-saturated experiences of diasporas call for an in-depth examination of how diasporic lives are negotiated through digital media environments. However, this research topic has not been sufficiently addressed by monograph-length investigations. In particular, Korean migrants’ appropriation of digital media has remained under-researched.
As one of the first book-length bodies of research on the use of digital media among the Korean diaspora, Claire Shinhea Lee’s Mediatized Transient Migrants: Korean Visa-Status Migrants’ Transnational Everyday Lives and Media provides an engaging analysis of the role and meaning of digital media in transnational lives. While media and migration studies have tended to examine working-class migrant workers or refugees, this book focuses on transient middle-class migrants, including temporary workers, international students, and their spouses, who remain under-researched in the existing literature. Drawing on qualitative interviews with and observations of transient Korean migrants in Austin, Texas, this book explores how temporary-visa-status migrants engage with digital media to connect with their homeland and negotiate their transnational everyday lives.
The book consists of six chapters, along with an introduction and conclusion. After the introduction that briefly addresses the field studies, data collection, and analytical processes, chapter 1 presents an overview of the book’s theoretical background, succinctly discussing a non-media-centric, ethnographic approach to diasporic audience studies and digital migration studies. Chapter 2 examines how digital media is used in the transient migrants’ search for ontological security in transnational contexts. The chapter reveals that for temporary visa-status migrants, constant routinized access to homeland news through different media forms is a method of coping with their sense of insecurity and precariousness.
Chapter 3 discusses the convergence of the Internet and television by examining the transient migrants’ everyday use of homeland television content distributed over the Internet and mobile media. This chapter reveals that the post-television audiences who access television content through the Internet are not necessarily fragmented but, rather, engage in collective viewing. They share their cultural tastes with other audience members, and in so doing, develop a sense of diasporic community.
Focusing on the use of smartphones and the Korean portal site Naver, chapter 4 examines how the transient migrants’ habitual consumption of the algorithms of trending keywords and news services facilitates their feeling of ambient copresence while disconnecting the migrants from the host country’s news. The author finds that the migrants’ constant exposure to trending, sensational news from the homeland increases their negative perceptions of the homeland.
Chapter 5 examines how the transient migrants redefine the notion of home through their media consumption during their transnational dwelling. This analysis aptly presents the complex and multidimensional understanding of home that is experienced by the migrants, whose longing for the homeland is alleviated through always-on, mediated communication. Moreover, media consumption appears to affect the transient migrants’ future planning and specifically their decisions regarding where to reside after the expiration of their temporary visas.
Chapter 6 explores the media experiences of Korean dependent-visa-status women, who struggle with feelings of isolation and actively access both American and Korean media. For these homemakers, American media is their only channel through which to view the host society, while diasporic Korean media is an arena in which they can experience a sense of community. This book’s engaging discussions are synthesized in the conclusion, in which the research is contextualized in existing key debates about diasporic audiences and transnational media.
Drawing on solid field studies, this book makes a significant contribution by expanding the scope of global media studies and Korean diaspora studies in several ways. For example, while perceptively showing how digital media technology reshapes diasporas, the book offers a nuanced understanding of the role and meaning of digital media in transnational lives. The author neither romanticizes the essential category of homeland nor overemphasizes the role of digital media as a game changer in transnational lives. Methodologically, the non-media-centric approach presented in this book effectively examines media consumption in relation to other social practices; it thus serves to explore how media forms are incorporated into polymedia environments, in which different media technologies and practices converge and become intertwined.
Perhaps this monograph could have touched on a few additional areas, such as the role of the media and the public sphere. As the author acknowledges, the book, which engages with domestication theory, emphasizing the household and family as a central locus of media consumption, pays minimal attention to media practices in public arenas beyond the domestic space. It could have included further analysis of how diasporic media practices enable users to engage with different forms of civic activities.
Overall, its compelling empirical analysis and effective theoretical framework make Mediatized Transient Migrants: Korean Visa-Status Migrants’ Transnational Everyday Lives and Media a useful addition to media and migration studies and Asian studies. Given its insight into transient migrants, whose status has become increasingly precarious in the Trump era, this book is timely and highly recommended for anyone who is interested in media, migration, and the Korean diaspora.
Kyong Yoon
The University of British Columbia, Kelowna