Glocal Intimacies, Digital Media and the Transnational Lives of Elite Filipino Migrants during a Global Pandemic

Abstract

This chapter examines the ways everyday lives of these migrants have been reconfigured by immobility and increased dependence on digital media to maintain relationships with family and friends in the homeland. It focuses on the distinct moment of the global pandemic and how this has reconfigured digital media's role in transnational everyday life and people's experiences of glocal intimacies. The chapter argues that due to the conditions of the global pandemic, elite Filipino migrants experience changes in their transnational cosmopolitan lives. It demonstrates, digital media have the capacity to reinforce existing bonds and enact new forms of digital intimacies for transnational migrants. The chapter describes the complexity of digital media use as elite migrants also experience digital fatigue and a reappearance of social obligations they had previously avoided. The concept of glocal intimacies emphasizes the role of digital media in normalizing and intensifying people's relationships with each other simultaneously on a global and local level.