Media as Home Making Tools - MC&S 2011

Media, Culture & Society33(6) 869 –883

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The media as ‘home-making’ tools: life story of a Filipino migrant in Milan

Tiziano BoniniIULM University of Milan, Italy

AbstractAccording the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) there are 850 million international passenger arrivals each year; and according to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), in 2008 there were 42 million refugees across the globe. The condition of mobility, in all its spatial and temporal variations is a condition of daily life in a globalized world. Even those who are lucky enough not to be forced to abandon their home are at times obliged to be away from home temporarily. A migrant who is far from his country, a seasonal worker or asylum seekers, all share a sense of displacement, more or less intense. This article addresses precisely the universe of migrants, with the aim of demonstrating that this existential condition can be alleviated and eventually ‘domesticated’ (albeit temporarily) thanks to the media. The article will explore the use of media on the part of migrants and the role of the media not only in temporarily connecting them to their private homes or to their public sphere of origin, but also in recreating the ‘warmth’ of domesticity, in other words in ‘making them feel at home’. The main part of the article will attempt to partially verify this thesis by presenting the case study of a Filipino family living in Milan.

Keywordsdiaspora, globalization, home, media, migration, public sphere

And when we cannot go home? When we are on the move, displaced by war, politics, or the desire for a better life? We can, with our media, take something of home with us: the newspaper, the video, the satellite dish, the Internet.… Home has become, and can be sustained as, something virtual, as without location. A place without space.… I think of [my childhood and

Corresponding author:Tiziano Bonini, Arts, Culture and Comparative Literature Institute, IULM University of Milano, via Carlo Bo 4, 20143 Milano, Italy. Email: [email protected]; [email protected]

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adolescence]. A black and white television screen in the front room. The Coronation of Elizabeth II. Transistor radio under the pillow. The programmes of childhood: Journey into Space, The Cisco Kid, In Town Tonight, The Six Five Special, Potter’s Wheel, Radio Luxembourg. To share that world with one’s contemporaries, to reflect on the past it evokes, is to connect with the other, to domesticate a shareable past. But it is also to include memories of media into one’s own biography, into memories of home, good, bad and indifferent. These are the shaping experiences: of home as a mediated space, and of media as a domesticated space. Secure in them we can dream. (Silverstone, 1999: 92–3)

‘When we cannot go home’, Silverstone seems to be saying, ‘the media can offer us a good temporary shelter’, because ‘/secure /in them/ we can dream/’. It sounds almost like a verse. This sentence has a musical quality, a metre that makes it resonate. On its own, it sums up, supports and consolidates – like a chemical agglutinant – the uneven theoretical path of this work: media as a frame to feel secure in, a place that shelters and protects, that leads the way to a dream world, to a ‘what if?’, a ‘let’s pretend that we are home right now’ dimension: let us close our eyes and listen to the radio from our home on the internet, let us concentrate on the satellite channel coming from our country, let us wear some headphones and listen to the music from home. Silverstone fully grasped the media’s ‘domestic’ potential. Home, for Silverstone, is a ‘place without space’, immaterial, it is a disposition of the soul rather than a geometrical surface area.

Apart from the symbolic objects, the suitcase, the new house, the mother tongue (Morley, 2001), then, there is a frame – this is the founding thesis of this research – within which one can experience feelings of domesticity. This frame is the most illusory, fragile and temporary of those mentioned up to now, but it can be very powerful. It is the frame formed by the media, the (old and new) means of communication used to ‘feel/return’ home. A good metaphor to illustrate it might be: the media serve as a portable set, a modular backdrop that represents our home and that we use when we are travelling to take a picture of ourselves, pretending that we never left. In the same way that tourist resorts are backdrops depicting our home, going to great lengths to reproduce the envi-ronment that we left, screening us from the reality of the place we went to visit, the media provide us with a canopy under which we can shelter and look at the rain pouring down on the streets.

The migrant’s mobile phoneChongo, a former Somali thief, spends his time sending text messages to the members of his clan who are scattered around the world, thus recreating the ‘family territory’ that is the foundation of the Somali way of life. (Salza, 2007: 45)

Urban flâneurs, metropolitan nomads and tribes of teenagers constantly use mobile phones to ‘inhabit space’, to re-negotiate its boundaries in their own favour (Itō et al., 2008). However, if for these categories of temporary nomads the telephone is only one of the means available to maintain their social networks, for migrants destined to live away from their country for years this is a vital tool, the only fragment of home they have left, and not only in a virtual sense. A migrant may have no place to sleep, but he cannot afford not to have a mobile phone. His telephone is his office and his home: that

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is where he can be reached by his boss, or by his wife. The hundreds of ads by Latin American, African and Eastern European migrants looking for a job or a house plastered on traffic-light poles in Italian cities all feature a mobile phone number. Benjamin, an asylum seeker I interviewed in Palermo in 2005, always had a mobile phone with him. And so did Roberto, an African migrant described by Iranian-American writer Behzad Yaghmaian:

‘I can afford to call you and talk to you now.’ Indeed in Athens Roberto frequently called me from his new cell phone, a modest second hand Nokia he bought in Omonia Square. Cell phones are invaluable devices for migrants of all nationalities, allowing them to be connected to the rest of the world. Living on the margins of society, the cell phone gives them a sense of normality, it helps them fight their isolation. Roberto was no exception. In Bulgaria, he told me, he had shared a SIM card with a Nigerian friend. Climbing the mountains between Bulgaria and Greece, however, he had lost his cherished cell-phone. ‘It fell from my pocket and rolled down in the snow. I felt alone.’ (Yaghmaian, 2005: 164)

Mobile phones are being used increasingly to connect migrants with the families they left behind; this is also due to the rapid spread of mobile telephony in the migrants’ countries of origin. In 2008 in Africa there were 152 million mobile phone users: only two years before, there were only 63 million. Mobile phones had surpassed land lines already in 2001–2. While land lines increased from 12 million to 21 million in the whole of Africa between 1995 and 2001, in 2001 mobile phone users grew to 24 million (which includes the 10 million users in South Africa) (see Shanmugavelan and Warnock, 2004). While the density of land lines progresses slowly (2.77 telephones for every 100 people in 2005) and following an uneven a pattern (urban areas are more connected than rural ones), mobile phone users increase by 50 percent every year, in both urban and rural areas, so that even public phone centres are increasingly relying on mobile networks.1 The importance of mobile phones in Africa is demonstrated by the answer given by a Nigerian student living in London when she was interviewed on her use of domestic media:

I use landline most times, they use their mobiles back home. Then they write letter, I write letters to my dad. My dad prefers writing letters to phoning. So, I guess he is old-fashioned, also because … sometimes when I call, it is not always clear, clear as they should. So sometimes it is very frustrating we are not able to communicate as effectively as they should because transmission is sometimes not very good in Nigeria. That is because of where they are, it’s not like all the part is like that. Where my parents are, the connectivity is quite poor. Transmission is quite poor, so he prefers to write. The mobile phone came in quite recently, actually, about 3–4 years, but they came in and became more effective, you know, easy to acquire … and yes, more effective than the landline, which were there before. Even when landline was there, telecommunication was very poor in Nigeria, difficult to have landline, so most people actually did not have landline. And so, when mobile came, it made a lot of difference in telecommunication in Nigeria. Lots of difference, within last 5 years … (Asano, 2005)

Mobile phones have not only become fundamental tools for influencing the public sphere, as Janey Gordon (2007) and Vicente Rafael (2003) brilliantly demonstrated, but are also playing a central role in nurturing both the strictly private realm of migrants and


their parochial one (Lofland, 1998), becoming the most important means of ‘keeping up ties with loved ones’, that is, of taking care of remote relations.

Research by Heather Horst, an American sociologist from the University of Southern California, noted how the rapid spread of mobile phones among the poorer strata of the Jamaican population has improved connections with migrant relatives. While only 7 percent of Jamaican homes have a land line, 86 percent of Jamaicans over 15 years of age have a mobile phone (Horst, 2006). According to Horst, who conducted this research in 2004,2 the sudden availability of mobile telephony and the drop in the cost of calls has deeply changed the perception Jamaicans have of mobility. Mobile phones have allowed migrant parents to take part in the daily life of their children who have been left in the country of origin. Even relations between husbands and wives, or boyfriends and girlfriends, have been influenced by these new dynamics. Before she acquired a mobile phone, Marcia received a call from her husband, who had migrated to Canada, only once every two to three months, and she was constantly worried about him. Now that she can call him directly from her phone, they talk every two to three weeks, and this reassures her about his health and safety. Winston, a Jamaican who works in the United States for nine months a year, says that the mobile phone:

made a lot of difference. It set your mind more at ease. Sometime she get worried. But now as soon as she want to talk she just dials. She want to call me night day or anytime. I am doing my own work so I can stop at anytime. Sometime she calls at night or in the afternoon. She calls before she goes work. (Horst, 2006: 150)

Letters, telephones, emails: returning home for a few minutes

The increase in forms of mobility on a global scale since the mid 1990s has generated an increase in transnational communication flows. If during past emigration, new arriv-als in the United States kept in touch with their families of origin only sporadically through hand-written letters (sometimes dictated to someone who could write), at least until the 1990s – when internet and low-cost international calls started to spread – the only way to ‘be close’ to loved ones, aside from letters, was to call them on the phone. However, phone calls were expensive and were made only in exceptional and ritual circumstances, to give news of somebody being born or dying. In many cases, moreover, for a long time the telephone was a luxury not only for migrants, but also for those stay-ing at home, who did not have the money to install a land line. Until the spread of the internet (and therefore of emails), of mobile telephony and of low rates for international calls, the most frequently used means of communication of the 20th century to keep family ties alive was the letter.

Starting from the 1990s, however, the choice of media available to various ethnic diasporas to temporarily ‘return’ home quickly began to widen (Brinkerhoff, 2009). The intersection of traditional media (old media) and new digital technologies (new media) enriches the mediascape, favouring also transnational migrant communities (Vertovec, 2009). Satellite television and radio channels, internet websites for national newspapers, web and community radio stations give global diasporic communities (in the sense

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intended by Cohen, 2008) the opportunity to keep themselves informed on current affairs, new cultural trends and ongoing social issues in their country of origin, temporar-ily returning inside their original public sphere (in this case home is intended as the public home: the country of origin). Mobile phones, email services and international phone cards have on the other hand contributed to improving connections with the fam-ily, with one’s private home. In the following paragraphs we will see how the phone and the internet play a crucial role in keeping in touch with loved ones from a distance.

In relation to this issue, it may be useful to mention the qualitative research conducted by Raelene Wilding of the University of Western Australia between 2000 and 2003 on the role of ICT (information and communication technologies) on keeping up relations from a distance in the Italian, Irish and Dutch migrant communities, and among Asian and Iranian political refugees who established themselves in Perth, Australia.3 The peo-ple interviewed regarding the media used until the first half of the 1990s said that letters were the most common and regularly used means of communication. The telephone, on the other hand, was a luxury that only few could afford. For instance, one migrant described his efforts to call her mother at the beginning of the 1980s:

at that stage my mother didn’t have a phone in the house, so I’d ring the next door neighbour and they’d run over and get somebody and they’d come back … the neighbour was my aunt and uncle, so it was like you’d get one of the cousins or your aunt or uncle, so you could have a bit of a chat with whoever answered the phone, and you know, there was eight of them as well, so someone would hop over the wall and get somebody from our family. (Wilding, 2006: 130)

Conversations with her mother lasted for even less time than those with her aunt’s extended family, due to the high charge per minute for calls. As she had just arrived in Australia and she had to save up to pay the rent, calls to her mother were kept to a mini-mum (two or three a year), while she wrote her many letters, even a couple a month.

It was in the late 1990s that the communication systems of these families underwent a further change, with the spread of the internet and emails; as one woman said, ‘Now it’s e-mail messages and phone calls, but very frequent calls and very frequent mes-sages’ (Wilding, 2006: 131). Migrant families that started using emails (about a third of the interviewees) confirmed that this had meant that the frequency of exchanges with home increased significantly. Messages contained in emails (sent even more than once a day) are normally brief and, again, ‘they do not say anything in particular’. As an Asian migrant said:

They [my family] have access to email as well, that’s been really good because we’d probably email each other three or four times a day. My emails are fairly long actually, because we have a lot to say. We’re a talkative bunch. And the phone, we’re always on the phone! (Wilding, 2006: 131)

This comment highlights an important aspect of the integration of ICT within transna-tional communication flows: when a new technology appears, it does not replace but adds itself to older ones. According to Wilding, families seem to increase the frequency of communications consistently with an increase in available media, adding further communication levels. Distant communication strategies are redefining themselves and


becoming more refined due to an increase in technological and economic opportunities. As one woman explained, in the 1990s she communicated with her family overseas ‘first, by letters and phone. When the phone was very expensive, the phone call was only once every two weeks or so and so I would write letters, quite a lot, quite a bit’ (Wilding, 2006: 131). The telephone was used only on special occasions, such as birthdays, Christmas, New Year. When telephone use became routine, the frequency of exchanges via letter started to dwindle and to become less regular. Letters today are used in particular circumstances, to explain difficult subjects such as a medical diagnosis, or to communi-cate delicate personal decisions and complex feelings. The internet has not replaced the telephone or letters, but has further modified the communication routines of divided families. The families studied by Wilding used the internet in three ways: a few of them created personal websites on which they posted news and photographs that documented special events. Some families, not many, used chat rooms to talk to each other. In par-ticular, they used private chat rooms, accessible only to family members; these discussion ‘rooms’ served as a kind of virtual home, located in an intermediate space – cyberspace – where it was possible to reunite the family, transcending geographical distances. According to the research, the main reason for using the internet, however, was obvi-ously to have access to email services. The majority of emails were short and exchanges were usually quite frequent and almost always between two people. More rarely, on special occasions (such as when a child was born), emails were sent to more recipients at the same time. In their account of the importance of emails in maintaining family ties, interviewees often highlighted that they felt closer to their faraway relatives thanks to emails. The use of ICTs plays a fundamental role in ‘maintaining relations’ and fuelling the imaginary dimension of distant relations; ICTs help to build an image of loved ones back home, to imagine them in their daily life, to feel that they are less far away. In this case, the simple fact of managing to establish a connection via telephone or email is as important as the content of the communication. The phatic function of language (the one more focused on the channel, on contact; Jakobson, 1960) is the one most emphasized in this type of communication. The immediacy of email communications has generated a deeper feeling of attachment of migrants to their home:

When I came here first, it was that thing, you know, you’d get a letter and the news was sort of old, and then you’d respond to it, so it could have been a month. Whereas now I feel like I’m more involved in what’s happening there. It sort of gives me more of a feeling of being part of it, because sometimes you get news before other people, you know, people who are there! (Wilding, 2006: 133)

Wilding claims that emails and the phone have contributed to generating a strong feeling of shared space and time – at least for the duration of the conversation – between members of a family separated by geographical distances and time zones. However, this mediated, virtual, imagined intimacy is very fragile and can quickly weaken for those migrants whose family of origin is no longer able to access these means of communica-tion. One man told Wilding how he felt that the distance between him and his mother had suddenly grown when she started suffering from a severe form of dementia and could no longer use the phone or write him letters.

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Uses of the media described so far seems to generate a subtle, fragile sense of home, as if, while using them, a migrant could experience a little rise in the temperature sur-rounding him. The emotional exchanges between migrants and their families are elec-tronically mediated and their intensity, their temperature, depends on the kind of medium and context involved. To better understand this concept try to think about this image: each medium generates all around itself a kind of fragile membrane or involucre, exposed to external interferences, easily breakable, but hard to destroy completely. As the ozone membrane protects life on Earth, the media membrane protects migrants from alien space, making them feel almost at home, in a warmer place. When a migrant doesn’t find a way to come back home, media are the only tools he can use. This image take us back to my first quotation from Silverstone: ‘Secure, in them [the media] we can dream [of being at home]’. Now it seems clearer.

Returning home by any means: the life story of Roy a Filipino migrant in Milan.

The following life story of a Filipino migrant in Milan lays no claim to demonstrating my hypotheses ‘in the field’ – the chosen sample is too small – but its objective is to test some of the data emerging from past literature and subject the theoretical path followed so far to a preliminary, partial verification. The interviews and participant observation yielded data not only on the frequency of use and on the meanings associated with tech-nology, but above all helped outline the story of a migrant who is attempting to recreate a sense of home for himself and his family by any means available.

Roy,4 the subject of my case history, was born in Burauen, in the southern Philippines, almost 50 years ago. He grew up in Burauen and later on moved to Manila to study mechanical engineering at the State University. In 1981, straight after graduating, he found a job in Amman, Jordan, where for ten years he was in charge of international trade for a Japanese company producing electronic components for various brands. In 1982 he met his wife, who was working as a secretary for the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman. They were married a year later and in 1986 their first child was born. After the Gulf War of 1991 they decided to move to Italy. In 1996, while at the same time being a pastor for his neighbourhood’s Filipino Catholic community, he was regularly hired as a porter in a Milanese building. Roy’s second child, a girl, was born in Italy in 1998. Both children, he says, feel Italian: ‘My son doesn’t care about the Philippines, he doesn’t want to go there, not even on holiday. My daughter was born here, she studied here, she is com-pletely Italian.’ Roy, on the other hand, visits the Philippines often, at least once a year. When I ask him where home is, he says that it’s in the Philippines, but that here too life is good. His heart, however, is at odds with itself:

I go back to Manila every year, I bought a house there. I also go to visit my parents in Visayas. I have some brothers and sisters in Manila, but the majority of my family, and my parents, live in Visayas. We are happy here, we have a strong marriage, a stable job, we go to church, we enjoy this lifestyle.… First of all, I’m here to work, to earn a living. Half of my heart is Italian, but when I go to my country I always say to myself that when I retire I will go back to the Philippines. The desire to come and go is at the foremost in my thoughts. To be here a while,


with my children, and there a while. We also bought a flat in Milan, to ensure a future for ourselves here as well. (Roy, interview 25 January 2008)

The first time I met Roy was in 2003. Roy was attempting to decipher his last phone bill from Italian Telecom. He thought the numbers did not add up, and he asked me to help him understand why the bill was so high. After a few calculations I confirmed to him that there were no mistakes, unfortunately, and that it was because of international calls that the bill was so high. Some months after that I moved to another apartment. In January 2008, I went back to his building, hoping that Roy would still be working there and that he would be willing to be interviewed for my research. Roy was there, behind the glass door, sitting in his place. This time, he was holding a palmtop. When I explained to him the purpose of my research, he said: ‘Of course, no problem, I use media a lot to return home.’ So for two weeks I went back to visit him every day to interview him (open-ended, in-depth interviews) and to observe him while he jumped from his computer to his mobile phone, from YouTube to his palmtop, attempting to keep up with the political situation in the Philippines and with his family’s life.

From letters to the webcam: returning home according to Roy

Roy left for Jordan in 1981. The world-wide web did not exist at the time and was unim-aginable. Roy could not predict that in only a few years he would be using a computer to send letters home, nor that he would be able to see his relatives moving inside an open window on the screen of his computer and listen to their voices coming out of a speaker, nor that one day he would be reading text messages from his sister on a small portable screen, and that he would be able to call her instantly, wherever he or she is. The only means available to send accounts of his life in Jordan to his relatives and to get news from home was to write letters by hand, to post them and to wait at least ‘three weeks, if not a month’ to get a reply. Letters were the most common and frequently used means of communication: ‘We would write letters to each other a few times a month, sometimes sending pictures of newborns or of particular travels.’ On special occasions, civil or reli-gious, Roy received and sent greetings cards, mostly ‘Christmas, Valentine and birthday cards’. The telephone was used very sparingly, only ‘for emergencies, when somebody was ill’, or when Roy had to explain personal matters. ‘During the 1980s international calls were too expensive, for me and for them. And not everybody had a phone at home.’ Calls from and to fixed telephone lines, letters and cards were the only means of com-munication available in the 1980s. Roy’s recollections mirror closely the accounts col-lected by the Australian anthropologist Raelene Wilding: changes in the use of technology follow the same evolution in Roy’s case as well as in the case of the migrants interviewed by Wilding. If in the 1980s letters were the most common means of communication and the telephone the one less frequently used, in the 1990s the two swapped places. The cost of international calls dropped all over the world, and use of the telephone for routine communications increased, while letters were used only on special occasions. The inter-net (with everything that goes with it: emails, chat rooms, web-cams, web radio, social networking) and mobile phones added to the telephone, replacing almost completely the

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old hand-written letter: ‘We stopped writing letters, including cards, we don’t use them any more. Now a text message is enough’ (Roy).

The difference between the subjects interviewed by Wilding and Roy can be found mostly in the different use of emails. While the migrants Wilding spoke to communicated with their relatives mostly via email (with the exception of asylum seekers, who more frequently used pre-paid cards and mobile phones), Roy rarely uses emails to keep in touch with his family, because ‘in the Philippines computers are very expensive, and internet too is very expensive, so that almost no one in my family can afford them’. He writes a few emails only to his brothers and sisters who moved to Manila. He also meets up with them in chat rooms, to have real-time conversations. During one of our inter-views, for instance, we interrupted our conversation because he saw on the computer in front of him that one of his brothers had invited him to chat via Skype. They only wrote a few lines to each other, also because I was there, but the essence of their brief exchange was ‘just’ to say hello, to ask each other how they were doing, and then go on with their business.

On the other hand, he sometimes, very rarely, arranges a rendezvous via web-cam with those relatives who do not own a computer, mostly those who stayed in the vil-lages: ‘I must say that … in some of our villages there are internet cafés. When I miss home, when I want to see one of my relatives, we set up a date via chat and we see each other on the webcam.’ These kind of Skype conversations take Roy back to his original parochial realm, as intended by Lofland (the nature of a realm is determined by the relationships that occur within it; see Lofland, 1998).

Roy’s computer is constantly connected to the internet (flat rate ADSL), and is equipped with a webcam. It is from here, in his kitchen/dining room/living room that he shows himself and addresses his relatives via webcam. Apart from these exceptional contacts via email, chat room and webcam, the daily communication with home, the most frequently used and direct channel for Roy is his mobile phone, and especially the short messaging and multimedia messaging system.

When Roy and his family arrived in Italy in 1991 they kept writing letters home for a while. In Italy they did not have a landline yet, and if they wanted to call (‘rarely’) they used pre-paid phone cards. When Roy moved to New York, he wrote many letters home, and ‘when the feeling of longing was too strong and I missed the voices of my family’ he used a public phone on the street, paying with a phone card bought in an ethnic corner shop. In 1996 Roy bought his first mobile phone (he recalls it proudly and specifies its make – Mitsubishi). He paid 900,000 Italian lira for it – a fortune, ‘almost more than two pay-checks’ – but it was worth it, according to him, because:

With a mobile phone the whole world became really close. Even the Philippines. Text messages didn’t exist yet, I used it to call because we didn’t have a land line at home. Then, when text message promotions started, we began to use text messages, which have become the most common way to talk for us. (Roy, interview 28 January 2008)

In this account, too, we can note a strong analogy with Wilding’s interviewees: first of all, Roy shares with them a great enthusiasm for ICTs. Many of the people interviewed by Wilding talked of a ‘miracle’, and all of them used words such as ‘closeness’ and


‘proximity’ to describe their motivations in using ICTs. Moreover, if on the one hand ICTs have almost entirely replaced old systems (letters, cards), on the other they have integrated with each other acting as ‘multipliers’ of a sense of proximity: both Wilding’s immigrants in Australia and Roy use the internet, mobile phones, text messaging and satellite according to the context and the need, with no one of them replacing the other. They create a communications platform made up of various levels, and each one of them can be used in certain circumstances. All together, these levels contribute, as Wilding claims, to ‘a stronger capacity to construct connected presence’ (2006: 134).

Multipliers of proximity, frames to feel at home, ‘miraculous’ tools, whichever defini-tion we choose to use, the emotional value that migrants attribute to ICTs, their role in keeping ties alive or in ‘lubricating’ relations at a distance should be clear by now:

I don’t miss home as I did before, it’s not the same feeling I had before internet and text messages. Before, when I wanted to go back to the Philippines and I couldn’t because the flight was expensive (about €1000 now), there wasn’t much I could do. Only in emergencies, when someone in the family dies, do we decide to take this journey. Apart from this, now it’s easier to be close to my family. Technology makes us feel more at ease, the feeling of homesickness lessens thanks to these tools. (Roy, interview 29 January 2008)

In particular, in Roy’s case, text messages are the preferred means of communication:

Now we use text messages because it’s the easiest, quickest and cheapest way to communicate. If we want to have a longer conversation with someone back home we use the land line. My parents send me a text message telling me to call them. It’s us who call them because here it’s cheaper to call there than the other way round. (Roy, interview 2 February 2008)

Here we can note another similarity between the study conducted by the Australian anthropologist and Roy’s answers: those who migrated to a rich country are not only considered to be responsible for the support of relatives who stayed home, but they are also expected to cover communication costs. Those who were left behind not only expect to be called, they also decide when the contact should take place. While technologies such as Skype and chat rooms make it quite easy to display the users’ availability to talk (on Skype and on chat services we can set our online status, so that anyone who wishes to contact us already knows whether we are online or busy elsewhere), from this point of view the telephone makes users ‘blind’: when we want to contact someone we do not know whether we will find them until they answer, and we cannot tell if we are inconven-iencing them until they say so explicitly. A great many of the text messages between Roy and his Filipino relatives served precisely this purpose: to enquire whether the other per-son was available or not to talk and, in the case of a positive reply, to set a telephone date. Once the date was set, it was always up to Roy to cover the call’s cost, not only because ‘calls from Italy are less expensive’, but also because ‘they think it’s fairer that I call’.5

During my visits to Roy’s home I never witnessed a phone call between him and his relatives in the Philippines, but I saw him texting home quite often. Roy told me that he normally exchanges messages with his family with a frequency of four or five text mes-sages a day. The content of these messages (generally brief and simple) – with the excep-tion of particular situations in which an event or some news has to be told – is mainly

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affectionate (greetings, loving words to remind the person on the other side of the world of one’s existence and attachment) or of a phatic kind, that is centred on the communica-tional channel (requests to be called, arrangements regarding a telephone date).

The proximity deriving from a text message exchange is, however, cold and mechan-ical. It helps to keep open the communication channel through which, albeit less fre-quently, a more intimate, warmer, sensual relation can travel: the actual phone call (from a land line or a mobile phone) or the Skype and webcam conversation. In Roy’s case, text messages are used as a lubricant, while the telephone, chats and the webcam are the fuel that keeps the family intimacy alive at a distance. The text message makes sure that the home’s front door does not creak and that it opens properly.

From the newspaper to YouTube: returning to the Philippine’s public sphere

When Roy was in Jordan in the 1980s, he often had Filipino music and films sent to him. VHS tapes, music tapes (and later on CDs) – the small media studied by Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi (1994) – were passed on by friends returning from the Philippines and by visiting relatives, or he simply ordered them by mail. During his lonely Jordan nights, the young, still unmarried engineer made do with a surrogate of home by watching a few Filipino films or listening to traditional music tapes. If he wanted to know something about his country’s political situation he bought Filipino newspapers, which were delivered to Jordan at least ten days after their publication. When he came to Italy, Roy continued buying ten-day-old newspapers from the Philippines and to care about the politics and culture of his country. However ‘the internet’, he says, ‘changed everything’:

Before the internet I watched many more videotapes and I bought newspapers, which got here at least a week late. Now I no longer buy newspapers. I read them on the internet.

We have satellite TV (connected to the computer) and we can watch foreign channels – BBC, CNN – but we don’t watch them that often. We used to send each other tapes and CDs using a courier. Filipino films, Filipino music. We still send CDs or DVDs, but less frequently, because now that there is the internet we can download them from the web – we use e-Mule, Adunanza. (Roy, interview 30 January 2008)

The internet is the metamedium (Kay, 1984: 52) that replaces – in Roy’s case – the press, the radio, the television and cinema. He now gets online the same newspapers that he previously had to read days after they were published (however, he is not aware of the existence of blogs and social networks); while a streaming of the Philippines’ public radio plays on his computer, two windows are always open on his desktop, one with Skype and the other with YouTube.6 The internet has remixed almost all the previous media, as Manovich (2005) claimed, but it seems that for homesick people like Roy, nothing changed: they still keep on watching domestic contents, even if they use You Tube instead of VHS, as the Nguyen’s (2003) study demonstrated.

When Arjun Appadurai published Modernity at Large in 1996, he did not foresee the impact that new media would have as home-making tools; however, his theory is still valid:


Those who wish to move, those who have moved, those who wish to return, and those who chose to stay rarely formulate their plans outside the sphere of radio and television, cassettes and videos, newsprint and telephone. For migrants, the stimulus to move or return are [sic] deeply affected by a mass-mediated imaginary that frequently transcends national space. (1996: 6)

In Roy’s case, the computer has replaced old media, becoming a home-making tool more powerful than the previous ones. When Roy is working, until 6 p.m., the computer is on and ‘always online’.

Between one bell ring and another, and the arrival of the postman or of a building resident, Roy virtually lives inside the Filipino public sphere. In the afternoons I spent with him I saw very little on his computer which was not linked to the Philippines or to his work as a pastor of the Catholic Filipino community in his neighbourhood. On the desktop of his computer he always keeps many windows open at the same time – from the website of the Filipino newspaper he is reading to the YouTube channel dedicated to news coming from his country. Each one of these windows is a door leading to the Philippines’ public sphere. Every day, Roy goes in and out of these doors innumerable times, making innumerable trips home, inside and outside of his diasporic sphere, as Appadurai reminds us:

As Turkish guest workers in Germany watch Turkish films in their German flats, as Koreans in Philadelphia watch the 1988 Olympics in Seoul through satellite feeds from Korea, and as Pakistani cabdrivers in Chicago listen to cassettes of sermons recorded in mosques in Pakistan or Iran, we see moving images (and sounds) meet deterritorialized viewers. These create diasporic public spheres. (1996: 4)

However, his permanence within the virtual walls of his Heimat is not only passive, as it once was when he read the newspaper. The means that Roy uses do not simply replicate the information, entertainment and updating functions served by the newspapers he read days late and the tapes he was sent by mail, but allow him to take part, remotely, in the public life of his country. Roy told me that ‘every now and then’ he writes comments on the website of the newspaper he reads, that he has emailed the radio station he listens to, to find out the name of the music being broadcast, or sent pictures of his family to his region’s local newspaper, or participated in some Filipino emigrants’ chat groups, or made online donations to political parties. Moreover, his activities as a Christian pastor mean that he exchanges opinions and files (text and audio) via email with his ecclesiastic superiors in the Philippines. True, it is an occasional kind of participation, and Roy might never become an opinion leader for the Filipino diaspora, but this form of distant partici-pation mediated by the computer is above all valuable for Roy himself, because it makes him feel ‘closer to home’ (home is intended here as the public home).

Conclusion

Millions of tourists, migrants, vagrants and workers depend on the thin cables that from Morse onwards envelop the world to build a virtual connection with home. Such is the case of Roy and his wife, who every day attempt, with great effort and by any means,

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to recreate, albeit for a few minutes and at a distance, a feeling of home, of domesticity. Home in this case is obviously not only a physical place, ‘that firm position which we know, to which we are accustomed, where we feel safe and where our emotional relationships are at the most intense’ (Heller, 1970: 239), but above all an intimate, symbolic, private space, in the sense that Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1957) and anthropologist Mary Douglas give to it: ‘While home is located, it is not necessarily fixed in space – rather, home starts by bringing space under control’ (Douglas, 1991: 289). Feeling at home is an emotional state that we can experience anywhere, not only in the place we were born or where we live. This article about using the media ‘to return home’ and my research regarding the Filipino household lead me to believe in the value of media as home-making tools and to further analyse their role in shaping a desire for home in ‘away-from-home’ people.

I wish to conclude with an autobiographical episode, which is useful in explaining the spark that generated this research and to come full circle with my obsession regarding the possibility of recreating a feeling of home, even if it is mediated. It was the summer of 2003 and I was stuck in the coach station of Syracuse, in the state of New York. The previous day, 14 August, the city of New York, and the majority of the East Coast, had been hit by a sudden power cut. I was headed to Chicago but New York’s coach station was in the midst of a post black-out chaos, so that many bus services, including mine, had been cancelled. I had to change buses three times and spend two nights outside closed stations in Syracuse and Cleveland. I spent the first night with two Mexicans who were heading to nearby Rochester. For them, it was time to go back to work: they had left Mexico as they did every summer to go and pick apples in Rochester. Then they would go further south, to pick oranges in Florida. They were seasonal commuters: six months in the States and six months at home. That was their second night in the US. They took Mexican fruit and beer out of their backpacks, they smoked their Mexican cigarettes one after the other and, before starting a game of cards, they switched on their transistor radio, tuning it to a Latino station broadcasting for Mexican immigrants. As soon as one of them found the right frequency, he cried out: ‘Ah! Por fin … eeeeso es el sonido de casa’ (This is the sound of home). Right then I realised I missed the opening theme of the news programme of Milan’s Radio Popolare, which in my mind represented the threshold, the boundary-limen between being ‘away from home’ and returning home. That is when I first had the idea of starting this research project. We went on playing all night. With the radio on, obviously.

Notes

1. In Uganda, 15,000 phone centres have been established using mobile networks (see Ferrazza, 2008).

2. The research, of an ethnographic kind, involved 50 families and analysed their use of mobile phones, the money they spent on calls and the list of names saved in their phone books.

3. The research was based on in-depth interviews with both migrants in Australia and their families in their respective countries of origin.

4. The real name of Roy has been hidden for privacy reasons.5. See Vertovec (2004). Between 1995 and 2001, the price of phone calls made from countries

such as the United States, Canada, Germany and the UK increased more in comparison to calls


made from countries which migrants had left (Pakistan, India, Mexico, Turkey, etc.). But those working abroad have (or should have, in the opinion of relatives back home) more money to cover telephone costs.

6. Roy uses YouTube in its broadcast function, in the sense that he sees it as an alternative to television. He does not own a TV set, he claims, ‘because of the immorality of what they show’. He does not use YouTube to ‘broadcast himself’, uploading on the website videos he shot himself, but simply uses is it as a database, as an archive in which to find information programmes and Filipino TV shows. It is in any case an active use of the medium, because he searches for texts that he deems interesting, refusing to be subjected to the television’s ‘flow’, within which he could encounter content that he does not like. I completely agree with Menduni (2007), who detects the signs of a crisis of television in YouTube’s success, summing it up effectively with the expression ‘the end of transmissions’.

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Media as Home Making Tools - MC&S 2011