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Earvin Charles B Cabalquinto, Telecocooning in the age of (im)mobility, Communication, Culture and Critique, Volume 14, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages 351–355, https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcab024
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Extract
The onset of a global pandemic has put contemporary social life on a stand still. People’s movements have been constrained due to border closures, travel restrictions, and lockdowns. As a result, many people have increasingly relied on digital communication technologies to forge and maintain ties. Notably, navigating an indefinite period of physical separation through digital media use is a familiar scenario among migrants and their left-behind family members. Even before the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, they were already heavily relying on communication technologies to sustain long-distance relationships. The expansive literature on the intersections of migration and digital media shows how digital practices facilitate a sense of co-presence (Nedelcu & Wyss, 2016), intimacy (Parreñas, 2001), and even care provision beyond borders (Baldassar, Baldock, & Wilding, 2007). However, as several scholars suggest, transnational communication can also be undermined by asymmetrical social and technological forces (Cabalquinto, 2018; Lim, 2016; Parreñas, 2005). As such, digital technologies often function as a blessing and a burden in maintaining transnational ties (Horst, 2006). In this reflective piece, I highlight how a networked environment serves as a key site for the production of structural inequalities. I achieve this by reflecting on my own (im)mobile experiences as a migrant academic who enacts transnational care practices, which facilitates an interrogation of the concept of “telecocoon” through a transnational perspective.
