De-demonizing distance in mobile family lives:

co-presence, care circulation and polymedia

as vibrant matter

LORETTA BALDASSAR

Anthropology and Sociology, University of Western Australia,

35 Stirling Hwy, Perth WA 6009, Australia
Loretta.baldassar@uwa.edu.au

Abstract A growing literature is addressing the impact of information and com-

munication technologies (ICTs) on transnational family relationships and the ability
of family members to be co-present (emotionally ‘there’ for each other) across
distance. In this article, I examine how relatively wealthy, middle-class Australian
migrants use ICTs to achieve a sense of satisfactory distant co-presence with their
transnational family members. I draw on the concepts of polymedia, vibrant matter
and care circulation to explore how families are using ICTs in ways that are trans-
forming forms of co-presence, as well as some of the pitfalls inherent in their use. I
argue that these new forms of co-presence augment existing reciprocities and
obligations and are facilitating ever-more dynamic and multifaceted relationships
across distance.

Keywords TRANSNATIONAL CAREGIVING, TRANSNATIONAL FAMILIES, AGEING AND

MIGRATION, SOCIAL USES OF ICTS, POLYMEDIA, VIBRANT MATTER

Co-presence through polymedia:1 being there through distant care

Caregiving through the emotional support of ‘being there’ and, in particular, the
exchange of informal (unpaid) care between family members separated by distance, is
the prism through which I examine how information and communication technologies
(ICTs) are transforming the experience of co-presence in transnational family life. For
the purposes of this article, I define co-presence as the emotional support experienced
as a sense of emotional closeness or ‘being there’ for each other (Brownlie 2011). I
focus on care exchange because I view these practices as ‘the glue’ of most kin and
kin-like relationships. In other words, caregiving is constitutive of most family and
friendship relationships, whether physically ‘proximate’ (face to face) or ‘distant’
(across distance). Thus, the ability to be co-present across distance is important in
sustaining transnational family relations.

Global Networks 16, 2 (2016) 145–163. ISSN 1470–2266. © 2016 The Author(s)
Global Networks © 2016 Global Networks Partnership & John Wiley & Sons Ltd 145
Loretta Baldassar

Growing, though somewhat disconnected, areas of research are examining a

variety of forms of kin/kin-like relationships carried out across distance in which the
impact of ICTs is an important focus. These include studies of ‘Living Apart
Together’ (LAT) couples (Duncan et al. 2014), as well as the multi-local families that
result from divorce (Schier 2015). These family types tend to be separated by distance
within the same nation state and are often characterized by mobile forms of labour
(for example, fly-in fly-out). Then there are studies of the many and varied trans-
national migrants. These include the more middle-class migrations associated with
retirement (King et al. 2000); expatriates (Walsh 2008); nuclear families juggling
employment and educational choices (Pe-Pua et al. 1998); and poor labour migrants,
particularly female domestic care workers (Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2012). Not
surprisingly, much of the literature on this latter group, especially that concerned with
transnational mothering (of dependent children), tends to focus on the negative
impacts of caring across distance. This is partly because the role of ICTs in delivering
and transforming transnational caregiving is not usually the focus of this research.
Rather, the negative impacts of the separation that characterizes labour migrant fami-
lies and the resultant ‘care chains’ are of central concern, and for good reason,
(Gardner 2012; Parreñas 2005), for these are the families most debilitated by distance.
Scholars have rightly highlighted domestic migrant mothers separated from young
children left behind in poor countries as the families that are particularly vulnerable in
distant care scenarios.
However, one of the dangers of focusing on the ‘distance and separation’ of
distant care is that it can lead to an implicit assumption that transnational caregiving is
less than ideal or somehow inadequate, certainly a lesser form of care to proximate
(physically co-present) care. This ‘deficit’ approach to the technologies of distant care
is partly due to the dominant assumption that distance is an actual roadblock to the
delivery of care and, as a result, most approaches to distance have harboured an
implicit conceptual roadblock to its analysis. Consequently, ‘distant care’ (at least in
the migration literature) is generally considered an aberrant or lesser form of care-
giving, because of the very powerful normative notions of care and intimacy as
inherently proximate forms of relatedness and of our taken for granted assumptions
about emotional closeness and ‘being there’ requiring physical co-presence.2
The recent work of Madianou and Miller is especially valuable on this point. They
argue that if we fail to question taken for granted assumptions about the negative
impact of distance and mobility, ‘we might then associate all the problematic aspects
of caregiving and care relationships with distance and absence and the issue of how
that distance and absence is mediated, which would be quite misleading’ (Madianou
and Miller 2012: 149). While care can break down because of distance, it can also
break down in families where distance is not an issue. Kin can live close to each other
and not ‘be there’ for each other. Kin can live in the same house but have a poor
relationship. Similarly, kin can live far away yet share a positive relationship. Of
course, this indicates that not all families, whether proximate or distant, are equal.
One way in which families are ‘unequal’, and one particularly relevant to this
discussion, is in their access to new technologies. Factors such as age, gender, social

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class, and culture have an enormous impact on issues of access, which are also
intrinsically related to ‘media ideologies’ or how people experience and understand
new media (Gershon 2010). To this end, Madianou and Miller (2012) call for research
on middle-class and elite families operating in polymedia conditions where high
levels of access to a variety of forms of communication permit a degree of choice
about how, when and how often people can ‘be there’ for transnational kin. Arguably,
it is in analysing families characterized by the conditions of polymedia that it is easier
to theorize distance as a factor for consideration, rather than an inevitable barrier to
co-presence and being there across distance.
Below I examine case studies of middle-class transnational families comprising
adult migrants living at a distance from their ageing parents who have a relatively
high degree of access to ICTs (in all their forms), particularly in their ability to choose
when, how and how often to ‘be there’ for each other. These findings come from over
a decade of research that has yielded a large body of qualitative data on transnational
family caregiving. The data include more than 200 ‘double-ended’ ethnographic inter-
views and participant observation with adult migrants in Australia and their ageing
parents living overseas and they cover a range of family and migration types.
Australian immigration – and middle-class migration patterns more generally – often
produce families in which migrants live with their children, but far away from their
ageing parents. These particular transnational families are characterized by the
reciprocal, though uneven, exchange of mostly informal care within families. The two
case studies3 that feature in this article draw closely on a total of 12 formal interviews
I conducted between 2010 and 2014 with members of families living in Pisa,
Florence, Perth and Albany (including one Skype and one phone interview, as well as
several informal conversations during visits to each of these places).
In examining care exchanges in these transnational families, I employ a frame-
work of care circulation as a methodological tool with which to trace the patterns and
flows of care across distance and over time as well as its intersections with various
dimensions of social reproduction (Kofman 2012). As already noted, I selected the
case studies as examples of families living in ‘conditions of polymedia’ (Madianou
and Miller 2012), with relatively unlimited access to a variety of communication tech-
nologies. The fundamental role that technologies play in the caregiving relationships
of these families resonates with Jane Bennett’s (2009) concept of ‘vibrant matter’.
These methodological and conceptual frameworks are employed to examine the use
of ICTs, and mobility and technologies generally, as a new paradigm for revaluing
care in transnational families. In particular, to examine how communication technolo-
gies are not only sustaining the exchange of distant care, but are also transforming
forms of co-presence.4
This re-evaluation of ICTs and family life is inspired by Bennett’s political
ecology of matter and the literature on ‘new materialisms’ more broadly, which
foregrounds the idea of ‘things’ as agents (cf. Coole and Frost 2010). This revisiting
of materialism is a response to the ethical and political issues raised by recent
scientific and technological advances, in particular those dealing with living matter,
but also ‘the saturation of our intimate and physical lives by digital, wireless and

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Loretta Baldassar

virtual technologies’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 5). Coole and Frost (2010: 6) argue that
these developments ‘call upon us to reorient ourselves profoundly in relation to the
world, to one another, and to ourselves’. Without a doubt, ICTs are having a profound
influence on these relations. I hypothesize that the communication technologies that
comprise polymedia environments are an example of vibrant matter in Bennett’s
rendering. This is because, in addition to facilitating and even constituting the ability
to be there across distance, they also have ‘the capacity … not only to impede or
block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with
trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’ (Bennett 2009: viii). I return to
this point below.

Case study: polymedia and care circulation

Nonna Anna, who was 80 at the time I interviewed her in 2011 in Pisa (Italy), has
lived alone since her husband died 15 years ago. She has three children. The eldest is
Clara (aged 50), an academic who lives in Florence with her husband, Bruno, a
librarian and their 23-year-old son, Simone, who is studying at university. Anna’s
youngest child Silvia (aged 43) lives in Ireland with her husband and two daughters
aged five and three. Anna’s son Roberto (aged 47) lives in Perth, Western Australia,
with his wife Linda and their son, Nicholas, who is the same age as his cousin
Simone.
Roberto, an engineer, phones his mother every Wednesday evening at around
8.00 p.m., which is usually when Anna has just finished her lunch. Linda, a teacher,
makes sure he does not forget to phone and always has a turn speaking to Anna. Linda
will routinely ask Anna what she has been eating and what produce is fresh in the
market that week. (Linda knows the market well, so they have quite a detailed
conversation about the place and produce.) Roberto and Linda are in frequent daily
SMS (text) and FaceTime (video-calls)5 contact with Clara about their everyday lives,
including regular updates and reflections on the health of their mother. Linda
particularly enjoys exchanging recipes with Clara by email and they regularly post
photos of their dishes on Facebook.
Clara phones her mother every morning to check how she has slept and to discuss
their plans for the day. Clara cooks extra food to take to Anna most weekends when
her family visits and it has become a symbol of what Linda calls ‘family solidarity’
that she often cooks the same meal on a Sunday when the two families routinely
Skype each other. Simone accompanies his parents on these visits at least once a
month and often more frequently. Simone explained that he is always happy to visit
his Nonna because they are very close. Anna was his main carer throughout his school
years because Clara and Bruno often worked long hours and were frequently away on
work trips, including an extended period of four years when Clara lived in the UK to
complete her Ph.D. Simone always brings his laptop computer and is in charge of
setting up the Skype call. Whenever convenient, he places the call to his cousin
Nicholas, whose computer has a better Skype reception than that of his parents. The
two cousins met on several occasions when Roberto’s family were visiting Italy, but

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helping their families to set up the Skype each weekend has consolidated their friend-
ship. They now also stay in touch on Facebook.
In general, Skype calls are long and meandering, facilitating a kind of passive
co-presence. The Sunday Skype call stays on for the duration of the lunch in Italy and
dinner in Perth. To give the call some structure, the families have developed a habit of
giving everyone a turn to speak about their week, but there are also long periods in
which the conversations are carried out within the ‘local’ parties only and there is not
much conversation between the two families. Anna explains that she enjoys the lazy,
never-ending feeling of the call. She loves the feeling of just ‘being there’ that it
creates, ‘like we are all here together’. Roberto, however, feels that the calls ‘drag on
a bit’ and he finds the decision about when to hang up quite stressful; ‘there is no
clear end point, when the Skype call naturally comes to an end, so you have to bring it
to an end’. The women are generally preoccupied with preparing and serving the
meal, which is also a focus of shared conversation between them. Bruno, Roberto,
Nicholas and Simone often fill in the silences by talking about sport. They sometimes
also text each other during the Skype call to make jokes about what is actually
happening or being said by the others and so share a contemporaneous private conver-
sation (known as backchannelling). This sometimes annoys the women who want to
know what they are saying.
Silvia, who is in a similar time zone as Anna, phones her mother every evening
and is in constant SMS contact with Clara. She tries to Skype Anna at least once a
week, but her busy lifestyle makes this difficult. Silvia is often out with her own
family on Sundays and so cannot always take advantage of Simone having his
computer at Anna’s place. Usually, they negotiate the Skype call time by SMS text
messages over the course of the weekend. Skype is important to Silvia and Anna’s
relationships because Silvia’s Irish husband does not speak fluent Italian and the
children are still too young to engage well on the phone; therefore, Skype really gives
Anna the feeling that she is able to connect with her son-in-law and watch her
grandchildren grow up, even though they are so far away. Given the partial language
barrier, the call becomes a kind of game of ‘show and tell’. Anna has numerous
photos of all the family members, which she holds up to the Skype camera and the
children are encouraged to talk about them with their grandmother, showing how well
they can name everyone and say where they live. Anna sends hand-knitted jumpers
and socks to the family who regularly model them on Skype. Silvia mails drawings
the children do in school to her mother who puts them on her fridge (pinned up with
magnets from Australia and Ireland) and she shows them to the others during the
Skype calls. Silvia wishes her mother could handle a mobile phone so that she could
FaceTime call her and send simple texts that say ‘I miss you’ or ‘I love you’
throughout the day.
The various family members use email if there are issues to discuss in more detail.
For example, in the week I visited them in Pisa in 2011, Clara emailed the specifics of
Anna’s health condition to update her siblings, which is something she does on a
regular basis. Silvia emailed for advice on treating her daughter’s eczema with diet
and Linda emailed her concerns about Nicholas being overly shy. They plan family

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reunions in Italy, Perth and Ireland, with the cousins also planning visits of their own.
The men share a dream of meeting up for a World Cup soccer game in the future. The
women, largely in response to this, talk about a pampering holiday in Bali. There are
daily SMS texts comparing the weather in the three locations. The women share
photos of the meals they cook and the men compare notes on sport and wine.
Anna would like to Skype more often but refuses to get her own computer.
Instead, she often visits her next-door neighbour, Emanuela, a long-term friend of a
similar age who has a computer and a live-in carer, Maria. Silvia often texts Maria to
ask if it is convenient to set up a Skype call for her with Anna. Emanuela and Maria
say they enjoy participating in the calls. Similarly, both elderly women relish the
visits of each other’s family members. Both Anna and Emanuela enjoy regular
outings to the local markets and to activities, such as bingo, which the local council
organizes for the elderly.
Thus far, what I have described are the routine forms of distant care in which
Anna’s extended family engage. It is interesting that the elderly and very young prefer
the visuality and materiality of self-presentation and co-presence afforded by Skype
(for example, watching children model their gifts), while the adults – especially the
men – seem to prefer the textual mediums, which facilitate greater agency in the
communication exchange (for example, backchannelling). In my earlier work with
Baldock and Wilding (Baldassar et al. 2007), we distinguished between routine and
crisis distant care, with the former following a regular pattern of communication and
the latter involving an increase in all forms of communication and often precipitating
a visit. In examining the case studies above, it could be argued that both passive and
active forms of co-presence characterize routine distant care, whereas the active form
predominates in crisis distant care.
It is possible to measure the distinction between passive and active co-presence
through calibrated expectations of attentiveness, the pace of reciprocity, and the depth
of emotional engagement. Therefore, when Anna suffered a stroke in January 2014, a
crisis mode of distant care communication began. Clara, who lives closest, rushed to
be at Anna’s hospital bedside. Silvia and Roberto desperately wanted to be there in
person to assist, particularly in the first few days after the event, for it was unclear if
Anna was in danger of passing away. Although feasible, given the internet access
provided in the hospital, Clara explained that they did not communicate via Skype
because of the time it takes (its ‘never-ending character’) and, more importantly, with
Anna semi-conscious and often confused, Clara felt that it was an inappropriate way
to maintain contact ‘unless things became dire and they needed to see her’. Here, the
visuality and materiality of self-presentation as well as the passive co-presence
afforded by Skype seemed unsuitable to the crisis care scenario.
Instead, Clara, at Simone’s suggestion, asked her siblings to download WhatsApp6
on their phones so that she could share updates more efficiently, including posting
photos, for example, of the doctor’s report. This meant that Silvia had to upgrade her
phone to a smartphone and Roberto had to ask his son Nicholas to help him download
the app. Once they all had the app, Simone created a group called ‘get well Mamma’.
The spouses and grandchildren also joined the group. Clara (or her husband or son)

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sent updates at least twice a day. The others sent get-well wishes, suggestions and
questions. For example, they discussed the various options for interventions over the
chat and everyone contributed their opinions. Phone calls, Skype, FaceTime calls and
regular SMS messages augmented the chat updates. Here the greater control over
textual media fosters an active form of co-presence characterized by highly attentive
and fully engaged exchanges. All the members of the ‘get well Mamma’ chat reported
that the benefit of WhatsApp was that they only needed to send messages once, for
everyone received them at the same time and no one felt left out. When Anna needed
to go to a rehabilitation hospital for ten weeks, both Clara and Roberto visited in turn
to assist with her care. Now that Anna is home again, the family has retained the
WhatsApp and begun a new group chat named ‘la famiglia’ (the family).
In this case study I have tried to capture how care circulates, in broad terms,
between transnational family members through the use of new technologies. One aim
in choosing this case study was to try to unfasten the conceptual frame of households
and nuclear families, in particular the focus on gendered dyads (mother–daughter) to
consider multidirectional flows of care. Care is exchanged between what we might
term ‘local and distant informal carers’, such as family, neighbours and friends, and
paid local carers, as well as community and religious support services. In this context,
Clara’s family are ‘local’ carers, while Roberto’s and Silvia’s are ‘distant’ or trans-
national7 ones. In my study with Baldock and Wilding (Baldassar et al. 2007), we
argued that a dialectic between the capacity (ability, opportunity, access), a culturally
informed sense of obligation, and individuals’ negotiated family commitments to
provide care within family networks, which broader social and political contexts
influence, mediates all family caregiving (both proximate and distant). The history of
relationships and the reciprocal obligations over time are evident in the interconnected
family and friendship relations between Anna and her neighbour Emanuela.
The exchange of informal care in families is seen here to be inherently reciprocal
and asymmetrical, governed by the ‘norm of generalized reciprocity’. Thus, care is
given and returned at different times and to varying degrees across the life course, as
in the case of Anna caring for her school age grandson, Simone, and this care being
returned through Simone’s weekly visits in Anna’s older age. In this way, the care
could be described as circulating among family members over time as well as
distance. A care circulation framework helps to capture all the actors involved in
family life as well as the full extent of the care activity that defines their membership
in a family, which can be practical, emotional and symbolic (Baldassar and Merla
2014). This broad setting of care exchange provides an excellent context in which to
examine the variety of distant co-presence afforded by new technologies.

Caregiving via polymedia: types of distant co-presence

In many ways, Nonna Anna’s family is the most ‘successful’ case of distant care-
giving I encountered in a decade of research on the topic. I selected this example
precisely because it comes closest to Madianou and Miller’s (2012) call to examine
cases where the conditions of polymedia are at their most salient. Anna’s extended

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family adopt new forms of technologies as they become aware of them and as they are
needed to better meet their distant care needs. Hence, the crisis care scenario when
Anna fell seriously ill spurred the suggestion to adopt WhatsApp technology. Unlike
the ICTs the family had previously been using to facilitate their routine distant care
exchanges, this new app better met the particular needs of crisis care and its demands
for a more active form of co-presence. The family share knowledge to ensure
proficient use of these new technologies and they make constant choices about which,
when, how and how often to employ them to communicate with each other. The case
study makes very clear how new technologies of communication are fundamental to,
as well as revolutionary in, the management and delivery of distant care.
Of particular interest in the context of this special issue is the way this case study
shows how conditions of polymedia provide increased opportunities to be co-present
or to ‘be there’ for each other. Taken together, the many and varied ways of being in
touch, which Anna’s extended family practised, perform what Madianou and Miller
(2012: 75) call the phatic function of communication exchange. Collectively, they
represent ‘an emotional reminder of the distant significant other’. In this example,
these include the acts of communication in and of themselves, as well as the recipes,
jokes and banter about sports, weather and shared plans. These reminders are simul-
taneously a sign of both the presence and absence of the significant other. In her
contribution to this issue, Madianou describes the phatic function of these acts as a
form of ‘ambient co-presence’. Using Anna’s family as a case study, and drawing on
previous research (Baldassar 2008), below I describe other forms of co-presence
(each perceived as an act of ‘being there’) that signify care in the form of emotional
support delivered through the use of a range of communication technologies.
Firstly, it is important to mention the role of physical co-presence, taken for
granted as the ‘gold standard’ in caregiving relationships. As noted above, people
assume that physical face-to-face attention is the best form of care and some
disciplines, such as nursing and gerontology, define care quite narrowly as ‘hands
on’ (Leira and Saraceno 2006). Urry (2007) has written about the need for moments
of physical co-presence in distant relationships. While there is no space to go into
great detail here, my own research shows that intermittent physical co-presence, in
the form of visits, is an integral part of the migration process (Baldassar et al. 2007)
and a feature of most transnational family relationships, particularly in moments of
crisis, as is evident in Anna’s case described above. However, the assumption that
physical co-presence is necessarily the best form of co-presence warrants careful
analysis. Clearly, stage of family life cycle, role of absent members, and age and
dependence of distant kin can make significant differences to the importance of
physical co-presence. In the families in our study, characterized by adult migrants
living great distances from ageing parents, several informants suggested that they get
on better with their kin when they are apart, although intermittent visits do also
feature in their transnational family lives. Furthermore, living at a distance encourages
some people to put more effort into staying in touch. For example, some of our
research participants stated that they would probably be in touch less if they were
living in the same city (Baldassar et al. 2007).

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In addition to physical co-presence, various forms of virtual co-presence charac-

terize transnational family care exchanges and relationships, and these are the focus of
this article. It is important to stress that virtual forms of co-presence, while different,
are no less real than physical co-presence. Virtual co-presence consists of the real-
time shared communication of voice over the telephone, video, Skype or FaceTime,
text over SMS mobile devices, and text and/or images on Facebook, Twitter or
WhatsApp chat. However, the differences between these types of virtual co-presences
are significant and warrant further analysis. For example, Skype and FaceTime deliver
a form of co-presence that could be described as ‘live or real time’, ‘streaming’ and
‘immediate’. As already noted, although very effective for delivering a cogent sense
of ‘being there’, these features give this form of co-presence a rather passive feel,
making it seem ‘long and meandering’ or ‘difficult to know when to hang up’.
Nonetheless, as Clara said, ‘it gives you the feeling that we are all here together’. We
might then argue that Clara felt it inappropriate to use Skype when her mother was in
hospital because Anna’s semi-conscious state seemed incongruous in the live, real-
time, immediacy – as well as the materiality of visuality – of streaming co-presence.
In contrast to streaming co-presence, texting by SMS or WhatsApp creates a form
of co-presence I described earlier as ‘active’, but that might equally be defined as
‘intermediate’, ‘selective’ or ‘discretionary’ because individuals choose when to read
and reply to the messages. A feature of these text-based communication platforms is
their excellent storage capacity and several members of Anna’s family mentioned the
benefit of being able to reread messages (particularly useful for clarifying details
about a medical condition) and return to photos whenever they liked, something that
can be done on mobile devices at any time or place. While this form of co-presence
fails to deliver the sense of ‘being there all together in the moment’, which streaming
and immediate co-presence do, it can provide a strong sense that kin and friends are
‘there for you’. As Silvia explained, the WhatsApp chat ‘get well Mamma’ made her
feel that everyone was ‘really close by’, that ‘we were all in this together’ and that
‘we are there for each other’. These discretionary forms of co-presence can also feel
passive, ambient, or continuous, creating an ever-present sense of ‘being there’, yet
always in the background. One feature of these modes of communication in the case
studies I examined was how people chose to engage with them at particular times.
While they succeeded in delivering an ambient sense of being together, people dipped
in and out of them selectively, thus confirming their ‘active’ quality.
Of course, the potential for positive impacts on the exchange of distant care
provided by the conditions of polymedia does not ensure that all communication
exchanges will be positive or flow evenly. The revolutionary communication options
of polymedia are not without their pitfalls. The moral element such options now carry
means that people’s choices of the mode of communication are evaluated as much as
the content. Nonna Anna’s family case study might suggest that all communication is
positive and enjoyable. However, both the form/format and content of communication
can create tension as well as harmonious relations (and tension and harmony are by
no means mutually exclusive characteristics of relationships). A short case is related
below that explores this aspect of polymedia and co-presence.

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Case study: polymedia pitfalls and distant care

Helen lives on the outskirts of a rural town about 700 kilometres from Perth (an eight-
hour journey by car or a one-and-a-half-hour flight away) where her mother, Cathy,
lives. Helen decided to phone Cathy to explain that her work commitments made it
impossible for her to visit on the day of her mother’s birthday, but that she would be
able to come a few days later. Helen was perplexed when Cathy responded with dis-
appointment and abruptly ended the call. Helen decided to compose an email, which
took her a long time to write, as she carefully considered the wording of her detailed
explanation as to why she could not make the visit as planned. Helen felt the long
email was the best way to explain, calmly and carefully, why she had too much
pressure on her to make the long journey in time for Cathy’s birthday. Helen thought
another phone call would be too fraught with emotion and could result in a tense and
heated exchange. Wanting to avoid an outright argument, Helen opted for the
composition and composure of an email instead.
Alas, Cathy did not appreciate Helen’s decision to communicate by email, which
she felt was a rude, impersonal and inconsiderate way to relate to one’s mother. On
receiving the email, Cathy decided to send an SMS text to Helen curtly explaining
that she found her email insulting. Helen was deeply hurt by this text message and felt
like ceasing all communication with Cathy, though she knew that Cathy’s reaction
was a result of her feeling Helen’s absence, particularly on her birthday. That both
women could retrieve and reread the email and SMS texts had the unfortunate effect
of deepening their feelings of anger, confusion and sadness. That the SMS text could
be sent so instantaneously, ‘in the heat of the moment’, was a technological facility
that Cathy later regretted and one she felt had ‘taught her an important lesson’ about
how to use these new communication devices.
Helen explained that it was only a few days after she found the wherewithal to
delete Cathy’s text, thus removing the reminder and source of (some of the) pain, that
she found the courage to phone her mother again. That she could no longer repeatedly
retrieve and reread the text allowed the hurt it had caused to recede and the memory
of it to dull a little. Over the phone, she apologized for the unintended insult of her
email and Cathy was able to accept the apology and tell Helen that she was looking
forward to her visit, even though she was still sad that Helen would miss her actual
birthday. Eventually, the two women enjoyed the visit and the time together helped
them both recover from the fractured communications. Cathy confided that she was
unable to read the email, but that she was also unable to delete it, electing instead to
store it in a folder of important correspondence in case she ever felt the need to look
at it again. This stored email could be thought of as a kind of vibrant matter (Bennett
2009), glowing with all sorts of potential emotionality, whether or not Cathy ever
reads it again. Just the knowledge that it is stored somewhere and that it can be
accessed gives it something of a life of its own. Just the knowledge that it is stored
somewhere and she can access it gives it a life of its own. Cathy might read it years
later and again experience the anger and insult, or she might feel entirely differently
and see the email and her relationship with her daughter in a new light. Helen might

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come across the email when borrowing her mother’s computer and revisit the episode
in new ways.
Even when carefully choosing the most appropriate mode of communication, as in
Helen agonizing over the composition of her email to her mother, the conditions of
polymedia and their nature as vibrant matter can make them fraught. According to
Gershon (2010), we have limited shared etiquette to govern the uses of these tech-
nologies because they are such new forms of communication. The lack of shared
etiquette means that media ideologies can vary a great deal between different people.
Not surprisingly, there is a growing literature on the new pressures generated by ICT
use in mobile families, including the experience of communication technologies as
forms of surveillance (Hannaford 2015; Tazanu 2012).

Evaluating distant care: polymedia as vibrant matter

In this section of the article, I examine the case studies above to shed light on what it
is about the use of ICTs in polymedia environments that makes them such effective,
and potentially tension ridden, forms of co-presence across distance. I also question
whether the same issues are pertinent to physically proximate co-presence; in other
words, what is the particular impact of distance on transnational care relationships?
Central to this discussion is the relationship between the contexts of caregiving, the
technologies (ICTs) employed, the access and agency of the people using them and
their joint purpose.
The limitations and possibilities of distant care scenarios define the context, which
I see specifically as the circulation and reciprocal exchange (albeit uneven and
unequal) of caregiving through the emotional support of ‘being there’ in transnational
family relationships. This context demands the use of ICTs, whether in the relatively
indirect and asynchronous form of a letter, or in the more direct form of video/voice
in (synchronous) real-time that Skype and FaceTime provide, as well as all the text-
based (intermediate) platforms in between (SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter). A
particular feature of the context and the technology under discussion here is that they
are defined by the conditions of polymedia. That is, the circulation of distant care in
the case studies under examination is facilitated by a high degree of choice of a range
of ICTs available to the family members to use (albeit with varying degrees of
different types of individual access). The potential this polymedia environment pro-
vides, and the distant care uses for which the family members employ it, can deliver a
variety of effective forms of co-presence experienced as a sense of ‘being there’ for
each other, despite the distance. The degree of agency and choice over which, when,
how and how often to employ ICTs to deliver distant care creates a strong moral
element to the human uses and selection of technologies to be employed to deliver
distant care in the form of co-presence. The resultant interaction between the person
and the technology underlines the importance of human relations to the material
world, of both technologies and nonhuman actors. Gille (2012) refers to this as
methodological materialism, namely the need to connect the social with the material.
More than this, however, the technologies themselves have a vibrancy (Bennett

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2009), which adds an additional layer of meaning and materiality (thingy-ness) with
which to deal.
Helen’s case shows clearly how polymedia environments introduce a moral
element into the decisions people make about which forms of technology to use to
stay in touch (Madianou and Miller 2012). The corollary of this choice is that others
can judge the choices we make and evaluate our decisions accordingly. An important
finding of our research was that if technologies are available then people feel a moral
obligation to use them (Baldassar et al. 2007). Because families living in today’s
polymedia environment have no excuse for not ‘being there’ for each other, the form
of co-presence that the constant and varied uses of ICTs delivers has become an
expected feature of daily life. That said, as in the specific case of Anna, who depends
on her family for opportunities to use Skype, there is a generational divide in uses of
technology. In general, the sense of obligation to participate in distant care extends to
members of the family whose involvement in the past would have been curtailed by
the limitations of the available technologies. Hence, the family members in our study
describe how it was mainly women (mothers and daughters) who wrote the regular
letters and made the special phone calls, with husbands and children participating in
minimal ways, with a brief ‘hello’ over the phone and by signing their names at the
bottom of a greeting card. New technologies, like Skype and WhatsApp, make it not
only possible, but also potentially obligatory, for extended kin of both genders to
participate in transnational caregiving because they have access to the technologies
necessary to do so. Hence, the transnational communication setting has broadened the
family network, where once migration would have truncated it. To borrow from
media studies literature, the range of ‘affordances’ (or design characteristics) offered
by new ICTs stipulate new forms of familial sociality, not only by enabling or
constraining distant care practices but also by imbuing them with relative value.
Furthermore, as Madianou and Miller (2012) point out, it is important to note that
these acts of communication ‘are not delivering some vague and impressionistic
presence of the other’. Informants comment on how well they feel they grow to know
their distant kin because of the frequent contact. For instance, Clara commented that
she especially liked ‘finding out about the little things that happen every day’ in
Anna’s life and that these minutiae of daily life gave her a sense that she was ‘with
her [mother] all the time’. Several informants commented that they have more distant
communication than proximate because they put more effort into staying in touch
with distant kin. People also spoke about showing more emotion and expressing more
overtly their feelings of love for each other because of the distance. Simone explained
that, though not normally given to overt expressions of emotion, ‘the fact that you
have to write out your feelings in a text message means you literally have to spell it
out’. Informants spoke about finding it easier to say more emotive things in emails
and text messages than in face-to-face encounters. These findings suggest that dis-
tance can bring people closer together. On this issue, Madianou and Miller (2012:
146) point to the potential of new media to create the ‘“ideal distance” necessary for a
relationship to flourish’. Here, the psychological literature on the important role of
distance and separation in relationships (to facilitate individuation) is relevant, where

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distance itself is not evaluated as positive or negative, but rather the focus is on how
distance is managed (Grotevant and Cooper 1986). Of course, the ability to express
emotions more easily using ICTs includes both positive ones of love and longing and
negative ones of anger and pain. Therefore, distance has the ability to force people
further apart as well.
However, the point I wish to focus on here is the effectiveness of ICTs in their
delivery of distant co-presence. As noted above, part of the reason emotions can be
intensified is that they are easily articulated and delivered using ICTs. The moral
dimension of choice adds another layer of potential meaning, making the message a
combination of both the content and the form used to deliver it. Applying Bennett’s
(2009) notion of vibrant matter, we might further argue that the technology itself has
an agency above and beyond its role as the vehicle of the message. Bennett is here
referring to instances when the material world does not behave in the expected way or
when it breaks free of human control. For example, she refers to cases where electric
circuits create major disturbances in power flows with no human involvement. My
field notes are littered with similar examples pertaining to the technologies of distant
care. These include when message banks become full and a distant mother has to
figure out which messages to delete or how to store them elsewhere; when technology
fails and family members are left waiting to be connected; and when technology is
faulty and people become increasingly frustrated, creating emotional responses that
have an impact on the relationships themselves. These are all common scenarios that
are rarely analysed. Here the vibrancy of the technologies of distant care is evident in
their capacity ‘not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to
act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’
(Bennett 2009: viii). Bennett’s argument is that we fail to acknowledge the vibrancy
of non-human matter and its role in our lives. Likewise, the new materialists aim to
raise our awareness sufficiently to develop a political ecology where we are more
respectful of the importance of the non-human elements.
I find Bennett’s concept of vibrant matter ‘good to think with’ when examining
human–non-human interactions and relationships with ICTs in distant care contexts.
This includes an awareness of the need to manage and/or interpret both the tech-
nology and the content of the care exchange across distance. This would include, for
example, decisions about which technology is most appropriate to use, as evident in
the selection of WhatsApp over Skype when Anna was unwell. It would also include
the new dimensions and dynamics added by the technology, as when Helen con-
fronted the divergent media ideologies of her mother and the consequent implications
of selecting the wrong one. In addition, people could experience the storage capacity
of new media as positive, as in the case of Anna’s family, or negative, as in Helen’s
case.
Elsewhere (Baldassar 2008) I described what I call ‘proxy co-presence’ and
‘imagined co-presence’. Imagined co-presence refers to the sense of togetherness that
people feel and believe they share even when they are not actively engaged in com-
munication with each other. The act of remembering family (both proximate and
distant) in nighty prayers is one example of this imagined co-presence. In contrast,

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Loretta Baldassar

proxy co-presence is delivered through the exchange of through the exchange of

special ‘transnational objects’, including photos, gifts (for example, knitted garments)
and recipes. Here, the vibrancy of the technology, evident in the way the technology
itself stands for and represents contact with others, is worth noting. The phone,
computer and mobile device are the means of contact and co-presence and can stand
in for the family member or friend. In addition, the visit of kin or kin-like family
members can be a proxy for other members. In Anna’s case, Clara’s family is a kind
of proxy for Roberto and Silvia’s families, particularly as they bring with them the
technology that makes forms of virtual co-presence contact with them possible.
Anna’s family case study is evidence of how the uses of new technologies are trans-
forming distant care. Caring through the acts of communication, proxy visits, writing
SMS and email, maintaining Facebook pages and so on, become themselves consti-
tutive of the actual relationships. For example, the Skype calls constitute Anna’s
relationship with her grandchildren in Ireland and Australia; Facebook constitutes the
cousin’s relationship and SMS traffic that of the siblings. Of particular relevance to
this discussion is Bennett’s (2009: xvii) notion of ‘a conception of self … as itself an
impure, human – non-human assemblage’. This human–non-human assemblage is
evident in the act of exchanging distant care, as people are obliged to use technology,
so in working the computer or typing the text message or holding the phone to one’s
ear we become, in both a physical and metaphysical sense, joined with the
technology. The technological advancements that offer the ability to wear the tech-
nology on our bodies in the form of sophisticated ear pieces and eye glasses (not to
mention the devices that can monitor vital signs and geographical location and
transmit these to the phones and computers of loved ones)8 are visibly human–non-
human assemblages.
A key question to emerge from this discussion about the effectiveness of ICTs in
delivering co-presence across distance is how distant co-presence differs from
proximate or physical co-presence. Madianou and Miller (2012) argue that ‘as
polymedia becomes more present and taken for granted, the range of encounters,
including very direct webcam conversation, may approach the nuance of traditional
co-presence in which the “actual person” is confronted more directly’. If polymedia
environments can increasingly deliver the actual person, and our selves can be a
human–non-human assemblage, then the epistemology of intersubjective selves
remains intact despite distance and absence. The anthropologist Christina Toren
(2011), writing about the intersubjectivities of the ethnographic co-present encounter,
unwittingly suggests we might collapse distance or at least dislodge it as a conceptual
roadblock:

Mind is a function of the whole person constituted over time in

intersubjective relations with others in the environing world. In the course of
social life, our propositional attitudes become objectified as part of the
socially appropriated environment that surrounds us, both in words and
practices, and in objects. Thus, it is not only that in order for two minds to
communicate they require a world external to them, but also that this world is

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always marked by the processes of communication that pre-date the new act of
communication. … In short, ultimately, there is no such thing as ‘virtual’
sociality. We must ‘triangulate’ between (1) our understanding, (2) the
thoughts and deeds of others, and (3) the physical world within which all
social life occurs.

Toren’s final sentence betrays her implicit ontology of the physicality of the
world, and yet the conditions of polymedia and the vibrancy of matter promise us an
actual virtual sociality, particularly in their capacity to store all acts of communi-
cation. Alternatively, should we instead take Toren at face value and so collapse any
distinction between the virtual and actual with regard to the intersubjectivies of
distant care? Another take on this argument is that all our experiences are both real
and virtual. Indeed Madianou and Miller (2012) argue that all communication is
mediated, including face-to-face proximate forms, through language, subjectivities,
cultural frames, social roles and so on.

Conclusion
The transformations in distant care brought about by ICTs begin to stretch the limits
of our distinctions between proximate and distant family life, in particular through
transformations in co-presence (the feeling of ‘being there’), which challenge the
epistemology of intersubjectivity. Bennett’s (2009: viii) aspiration is to articulate a
vibrant materiality that runs ‘alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of
political events might change if we gave the force of things more due’. While the
cases I am discussing here are not political in the sense that Bennett intended, I think
her notion of a political ecology of matter and her concept of vibrant matter are none-
theless very relevant. Her call to acknowledge ‘the material agency of technological
artifacts’ (Bennett 2009: xiii) adds a new dimension to analyses of the role of new
communication technologies in care exchanges, whether distant or proximate. Simi-
larly, Madianou and Miller’s thesis of polymedia highlights the mediated nature of all
forms of interpersonal communication. Hence, their important argument that ‘under-
standing separation is a route towards understanding the basis of human relatedness,
autonomy and dependence and thereby the very nature of relationships’ (Madianou
and Miller 2012: 2).
The idea that polymedia environments allow us to know the actual person despite
distance and the passage of time, contrasts enormously with the historical limitations
of the communication technologies of the past. While there is no space for an
extended analysis of the patterns of distant care in these middle-class transnational
families prior to the revolution in new communication technologies, a major point of
distinction is that their earlier exchanges were asynchronous forms of communication,
comprising letters and telegrams. The constraints of cost and access often limited the
synchronous communication that phone calls afforded when they first became
available, making them more ritualized forms of sporadic communication reserved,
for example, for significant anniversaries. While families continued to exchange care

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Loretta Baldassar

across distance despite the limited technologies available, they generally lacked
knowledge about, and the ability to share, the minutiae of each other’s everyday life
experiences and certainly not in the continuous co-presence modes that apps like
Skype and WhatsApp provide.
The polymedia environment available to these middle-class families offers them
the potential, perhaps for the first time in history, to control when and how they care
across distance and allows them to be in touch instantaneously and in real time. This
new environment of communicative opportunities is not yet a reality for most
people, but it already represents a qualitative shift in the way technologies and
mobilities mediate relationships. The increasing mobility and profound impact of new
communication technologies on our ability to care across distance and to manage
absence in family life makes an analysis of what Huang and her co-authors (2012:
131) call ‘the portability of care’, a fundamental topic of our contemporary lives. In
this regard, access to technologies – of both mobility and communication – could be
thought of as a contemporary human rights issue. This has important implications for
the issue of access and for the inequalities of resources and capabilities needed to
practice the various forms of distant care that different families need. Clearly, not all
distant relationships enjoy conditions of polymedia. Marina Ariza, writing about
Mexican transnational families, makes this point when she argues that ‘the different
conditions in which family exchange takes place denote some of the marked social
asymmetries characterizing today’s global world, in which freedom to move has
become, according to Bauman (1998), the main stratifying factor’ (Ariza 2014: 95). I
would add that, linked to the freedom to move, which evokes the politics of nation-
state borders, is the freedom to be connected, which evokes the politics of freedom of
information. The freedom to be connected depends on access to the conditions of
polymedia. In December 2003, the United Nations convened a World Summit on the
Information Society,9 which proposed a motion on the right to internet access. This
stipulated that, to exercise and enjoy their rights to freedom of expression and opinion
and other fundamental human rights, all people must be able to access the internet. In
other words, states have a responsibility to ensure that internet access is broadly
available and they must not arbitrarily restrict an individual’s access to it. I would add
that the freedom to connect to the internet today is also about the right to access care
and support networks.
There are of course undoubtedly limits to distant care; the ability to touch and be
physically intimate is one, and the ability to provide hands-on personal care when
family members are dependent is another. Not surprisingly, new technologies are also
pushing the limits of distant care and touch. Here, our data show that the role of the
visit in delivering these forms of care is paramount, but then so too is the delivery of
care by proxy. This leads me to argue that we need to examine distant and proximate
care together, for both form part of every kin and kin-like relationship. To this end, a
care circulation framework – along with the care circulation technologies that facili-
tate it – helps to capture all the actors involved in family life, as well as the full extent
(practical, emotional and symbolic) of the care activity that defines their membership
in a family.

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 De-demonizing distance in mobile family lives

By de-demonizing distance, or at least removing the assumption that distance is

implicitly a barrier to care exchange, it becomes possible to consider the ways in
which new technologies might contribute to the experience of geographic distance
actually bringing people closer emotionally, by supporting the creation of the ‘ideal
distance for a relationship to flourish’ (Madianou and Miller 2012: 146). I extend
Madianou and Miller’s point about ideal distance to argue that the conditions of
polymedia make it possible to achieve a sense of satisfactory care. This might be
defined as an ideal of shared co-presence, where the ideal of being there for each
other is met with the actual practice of being in touch and the feeling of being in touch
enough. In the families reported in the case studies above, communication tech-
nologies are vibrant matter that contain an inherent capacity to confound as well as
facilitate care exchange across distance. Despite the potential pitfalls, the conditions
of polymedia appear to provide the capacity to deliver a sense of adequate ‘distant
co-presence’ and adequate ‘distant care’.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers as well as Crystal Abidin and Ali Rogers for
their helpful feedback on this article.

Notes
1. ‘Polymedia’, like the other two concepts ‘vibrant matter’ and ‘care circulation’, which I use
throughout the article, are defined and developed by Madianou and Miller (2012), Bennett
(2009) and Baldassar and Merla (2014) respectively.
2. There are some important exceptions in the literature, where the focus of research has been
on the empowering potential of ICTs to transform relationships across distance, in
particular, through the explosion in mobile phone use. See, for example, Benítez (2006);
Hjorth (2008); Horst (2006); Vertovec (2004); and Wilding (2006). A growing body of
work is also examining the role of ICTs as sites of resistance, for example, Karatzogianni
and Kuntsman (2012).
3. To protect informant anonymity, I have changed certain personal details.
4. While not a focus of this article, also relevant to this discussion are new forms of ‘affective
technologies’, see for example, http://wishcrys.com/2015/09/21/ldrs-and-affective-technolo
gies/.
5. FaceTime is a video chat application that allows users to make video calls over the internet
from iPhones and other Apple products.
6. WhatsApp is an instant messaging application for smart phones that allows users to
exchange text messages, images, video, user location and audio media messages over the
internet.
7. In theory, we could add ‘online carers’ to the list of cases where people draw support from
online communities (Ferreday 2009). See also Brown’s article in this special issue.
8. Additional examples not examined in this article include the new app for ‘distant’ care to
elderly patients, see: http://yourhealth.asiaone.com/content/new-app-help-seniors-live-
more-independently/ and ‘borderless’ clinic: www.borderlessminders.com/singapore-laun
ches-the-worlds-first-mobile-clinic-app-on-smart-phone/.
9. See: www.itu.int/wsis/index.html.

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