ABSTRACT
Just as she gets off the Washington DC metro train at the end of a workday, Rose’s mobile phone starts beeping—halfway across the globe, her parents in the Philippines have just woken and want to video chat with their grandchild. When he wakes, Larry logs onto Facebook Messenger to receive updates from his cousin, who is running his business back home in the Philippines. For Nelia, part of her morning routine is to check social media and click on her friends’ shared links to keep up with events in the Philippines. While early migrants were constrained by the limits of communication and transportation technologies in maintaining transnational ties, contemporary migrants are not limited by technological capability. Developments in new media and information communication technologies (ICTs) in the 1990s paved the way for cheap and affordable real-time communication that reordered time and space, allowing immediate interaction and communication across the globe instead of the previous “exchanges of amateur videos” via visual images, voice cassette tapes, and written letters (Moores 2000: 121). From text messaging to Facebook, transnational Filipino migrants use various new media and ICTs to maintain relationships between physically distant families and friends, and the homeland.
