411006 MCS33610.

1177/0163443711411006BoniniMedia, Culture & Society

Article

Media, Culture & Society

The media as ‘home-making’

33(6) 869­–883
© The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission:
tools: life story of a Filipino sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0163443711411006
migrant in Milan mcs.sagepub.com

Tiziano Bonini
IULM University of Milan, Italy

Abstract
According 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.

Keywords
diaspora, 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: tiziano.bonini@iulm.it; tiziano.bonini@gmail.com

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870 Media, Culture & Society 33(6)

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 phone

Chongo, 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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Bonini 871

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

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872 Media, Culture & Society 33(6)

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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Bonini 873

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

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874 Media, Culture & Society 33(6)

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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Bonini 875

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,

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876 Media, Culture & Society 33(6)

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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Bonini 877

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

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878 Media, Culture & Society 33(6)

‘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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Bonini 879

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:

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880 Media, Culture & Society 33(6)

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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Bonini 881

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

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882 Media, Culture & Society 33(6)

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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