Communicative mobility and networked mediation in transnational lifeworlds: a case study of European expatriates in Australia

Abstract

Transnational lifeworlds of expatriates raise exciting questions on the use and meaning of media. Network communication, and its increased communicative connectivity, allows for a borderless communicative mobility which transforms experience and meaning by multiplying and diversifying content choices and ways of interpersonal communication. To capture the mediated transformations of expatriates’ lifeworlds, this dissertation introduces the term “networked mediation” as a descriptor for new forms of mediation emerging in the context of network communication. In the micro-perspective of the lifeworld, networked mediation comprises all forms of mediation—including their interrelation—that do not exclusively correspond to traditional ‘streamings’ of mediation, such as the strict patterns of consecutive and distinct consumptions of news in the mass media age. Therefore, networked mediation, as a multi-directional and multi-dimensional form of mediation, appears to constitute new ontological dimensions of subjective experience and meaning. The construction of more complex meaningfully lived-through mediated social realities and relations are investigated through a social-phenomenological approach illuminating the transnational communicative spaces of European expatriates in Melbourne. Results reveal new mobility cultures of communication characterized by network-based communicative internalization and communicative subjectivization. Consequently, in the case of expatriates’ transnational lifeworlds, even more complex forms of networked mediation occur as they display communicative orientations to 'dual' lifeworld attachments between home and host country. Seen from this angle, the exploration of networked mediation not only illustrates and clarifies transnational communicative spaces, but also sheds light on the complex dimensions and dynamics of contemporary cultures of mediation.