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Friday, November 11
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PP 497
Migrants’ Media Experiences from the Transnational to the Local. A French Case Study
T. Mattelart
1
1
University Paris 8, Culture and communication, Saint Denis, France
The literature on media and diaspora has become a crucial locus for examining the elaboration, in times of globalisation, of transnational identities. In these
perspectives, migrants are described as creating, through 'the diasporic connections facilitated by various media”, various kinds of transnational 'imagined
communities” (Karim, 2003). The advent of a 'connected migrant”—who, thanks to the use of ICTs, is in a situation of permanent 'copresence” with his
country of origin — has even been proclaimed (Diminescu, 2008). These perspectives, however interesting they may be, tend to emphasize migrants’
transnational connections to the detriment of their local cultural and social affiliations. Taking a different view, we would like, in this paper, to suggest that
we, as academics studying the relationships between media and migration, have gone too far with the transnational argument. We have tended to put
too much emphasis in our analysis of migrants’media experiences on the transnational ties with the country of origin to the detriment of other mediatized
interactions taking place at a national or local scale. Our paper will be based on a qualitative study which we conducted among 40 families of Maghrebi or‑
igin in France, aiming at analyzing their ordinary media and ICTs uses, and which was carried out within the framework of an international research project
funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) on 'Media and migration in the Euro-Mediterranean space”. This study has stressed the importance
of mediatized interactions taking place at a national or local scale.
PP 498
ICT Domestication by Elderly Immigrants’ Families in Israel
N. Khvorostianov
1
1
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Communication Study, Beer-Sheva, Israel
As relatively new Internet users, elderly immigrants domesticated information and communications technologies (ICTs) while coping with intergeneration‑
al and spousal problems engendered or exacerbated by processes of aging and/or immigration. This qualitative study is based on in-depth interviews with
26 elderly users who immigrated from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) to Israel about 20 years ago, 13 of their nonuser spouses and 20 of their offspring. It
aims at exploring how relationships within the elderly immigrant’s family are manifested in a home computer context and seeks to determine the roles that
domestication of the relevant technologies plays in their family life. Our findings show that ICT domestication and family dynamics are complex interrelated
processes: Technologies have dramatically changed the elderly immigrants’ family situation, while immigrants have accorded these technologies unique
meaning, adapting them to respond to their family needs and negotiating ICT domestication as ameans of discussing and rebuilding family communication.