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Digital technologies and mobile apps provide migrants connectivity that helps alleviate the distressing experience of being separated from their families, as they endeavour to integrate socially and culturally into a new nation. In this article, we highlight the role played by communications technologies in maintaining family ties and emotional support transnationally among middle-class individuals. Building on the notions of transnational families, social media research and emotions, we examine the particularities with which migrant family members stay in touch across borders. In this context, emotions arise from the heartache experienced due to the separation from family. Drawing from qualitative data collected in 2010–2011 and in 2021 among middle-class Mexicans living in Australia, we show how digital communications are used to connect with the homeland and analyse the emotions associated with being separated from family. Given the middle-class status and aspirations of these migrants, it is noteworthy to highlight the relevance they attribute to kin in the homeland and contact with them. Existing research about Mexican im/migrants in Australia is limited. This study contributes to the growing body of research on the intersection of transnational family life, emotions arising from mobility, and digital media use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media emerged with a broad understanding that egalitarian practices would become the standard approach to publishing and distributing content. In recent times we have seen this flat hierarchical approach fade as commercial stakeholders, platform providers and content publishers continue to design and practice exclusionary processes to ensure their work is visible. This current practice limits the capacity for all voices to be heard, prompting the question how can digital activism remain visible in a media-saturated social media environment? This paper draws on a content analysis of the most popular YouTube users in Australia to illustrate the absence of digital activism within its visual culture. It maps the process of fragmented platformization, called here micro-platformization, to highlight the content production and publishing strategies digital activists should adopt. While successful commercial YouTube practitioners adhere closely to the principles of social media logics (Van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2014). Understanding Social Media Logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2–14), this paper argues that stakeholders engaging in the practice of digital activism need to adopt similar strategies to their commercial counterparts. By including strategies that reflect the successful practices of social media logics, digital activism can not only become visible across social media spaces, but also engage public discourse on civic matters and public affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]