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As a comprehensive and affordable environment, polymedia lays the groundwork for exploring platform-swinging and offers a theoretical framework for investigating its dynamics. Platform-swinging and its unique niche characteristics provide a novel lens to examine the interplay between media dependency and psychological well-being. Using a survey questionnaire, this study collected data from 1210 university students in the Yangtze River Delta, China's most economically developed region, to examine the relationship between media dependency, platform-swinging, and psychological depression. Our findings suggest that the affordances of platform-swinging influence media dependency, whereas the nature of media dependency shapes psychological depression. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of how young adults navigate various media platforms and sheds light on the complex interrelations between media use and mental health. Focusing on platform-swinging in the environment of polymedia explores the relationship between media dependency, platform-swinging, and psychological depression. Moreover, it also compensates for the one-sided understanding caused by simply examining media dependency and psychological depression. This study has practical value and theoretical significance for the psychological health of college students and the research and development of the media dependency theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a concept of interfacing as a heterogeneous zone of interaction, a relational space created by users as they bring together interact with and draw on a range of digital and analogue materials, sources and technologies. It examines the ways tourists and travellers access, engage, use, transfer and blend multiple media sources drawing across both analogue and digital sources as they plan, execute and reflect on the trips and visits they make. It derives from a series of in depth 'show and tell' style interviews with 18 participants recruited in the UK. It contributes to the growing literature on digital geographies by exploring the relational spatiality by which individuals build interfacing activities around specific tasks and experiences as heterogeneous and contingent socio-material spaces. It develops a conception of interfacing around two interrelated and iterative sets of embodied practices. These are firstly, assembling and mobilising and secondly intermediating and sense making. Using this twin conception of interfacing as an active making, the paper discusses how and where a conception of interfacing as embodied practice might contribute to understandings of human digital relationships within complex poly media situations and environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the authors' own ethnographic research, this article discusses the importance of developing polymedia literacy as a key step toward ethical online research on social networking sites (SNS). Polymedia literacy entails the ability to critically analyze the vast landscape of SNS, their affordances, and users' social motivations for choosing specific SNS for their interactions. Internet researchers face several ethical challenges, including issues of informed consent, "public" and "private" online spaces, and data protection. Even when research ethics committees waive the need for a formal ethics approval process, researchers of online spaces need to ensure that their studies are conducted and presented in an ethical and responsible manner. This is particularly important in research contexts that pertain to vulnerable populations in online communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of the increasing trend of inter-Asian migration within China, this qualitative research explores the socio-cultural and technological implications of the de-territorial and digitally-mediated acculturation journeys of Pakistani higher education students in China. A comprehensive analysis of the polymedia experiences of Pakistani higher education students reveals paradoxical trends. The research findings illustrate China's controlled approach to cultural and technological diversity. The study highlights the dominance of Chinese apps, notably WeChat, and VPN services in strengthening co-national bonds, fostering transnational connections, and cultivating cultural belonging. Conversely, the article contends that the students' polymedia interactions demonstrate China's evolving cultural and technological landscape. For instance, digital access, availability, and literacy empower sojourners to reinforce their ethnic identities and communities, promote increased usage of US-based digital platforms, and further accelerate the adoption of the English language within China's socio-cultural landscape. Understanding these digitally influenced creative pathways and information ecologies presents a significant opportunity for Chinese institutions to foster stronger connections with the expanding South Asian student communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the ever-evolving landscape of globalisation and technological convergence, social media emerges as a polymedia environment rich in communication opportunities. Against the backdrop of China as an increasingly prominent global player, the above phenomenon is particularly evident among China’s vast and varied international student population. Employing a qualitative approach underpinned by interpretivism, we conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with 20 tertiary-level Chinese-as-an-additional-language (CAL) international students in emerging adulthood (18-to-29-year-old) to explore their perceptions and practices of acculturation in mainland China. Informed by thematic analysis, we categorised how participants positioned themselves into four groups: experience-oriented students, achievement-tasked students, integration-motivated students, and self-identified ambassador students. Our findings indicate that participants perceive and use home- and Chinese social media within relational nexuses, strategically navigating this integrated mediated environment to facilitate acculturation beyond mere technical considerations. Moreover, our study deepens the debate on acculturation by challenging negative inclinations common to leisure-related products and informal practices in individuals’ acculturation journeys, and this conceptual expansion holds pedagogical promise for strengthening the connection between formal schooling and personalised, adaptive learning in the digital wilds. We conclude by highlighting the role of training and support systems provided by international students’ home countries and host societies in facilitating acculturation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender and sexuality are contentious political issues in the US, with a resurgence of traditional master narratives for gender following decades of advances for gender equality. To understand how today’s LGBTQ+ youth navigate this narrative landscape in a polymedia context, we conducted social media tour interviews with 20 LGBTQ+ adolescents (aged 16–19), recording audiovisual data as they guided us through important posts on their top three public social media platforms. Through reflexive thematic analysis, we found that our participants were engaging with both longstanding master narratives (e.g., traditional gender roles) and contemporary alternative narratives (e.g., gender as non-binary) using three key navigational strategies for engaging with narratives on social media platforms: seeking and sharing information, creating queer community, and making choices about visibility and permanence. The meaning and purpose of these strategies for participants, both individually and collectively, could not be fully understood apart from three key navigational contexts: the traditional gender narrative, white liberal community context, and platform affordances. Our results demonstrate that narrative engagement for contemporary LGBTQ+ adolescents is deeply influenced by personal polymedia environments, identity intersections, and power structures shaping possibilities for individual identity expression and collective cultural transformation.

This study seeks to advance the scholarship on the phenomenon of social media platform-swinging in the context of the polymedia environment in China. Specifically, drawing on the theoretical frameworks of uses and gratifications and channel complementarity theory, we propose that the platform-swinging behavior is driven by users' various complementary and supplementary needs. Drawing on 32 semi-structured interviews, we identify four distinct types of platform-swinging behavior: social connecting, impression managing, information seeking, and aimless swinging. We further reveal that, depending on various complementary and supplementary needs, each type of platform-swinging behavior has distinct media affordance preferences. By profiling the distinct platform-swinging behaviors and examining their preferred affordances, the study advances our theoretical understanding of the dynamics between the polymedia ecology and users' gratifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two different media platforms played a key role in keeping Tema Port in Ghana afloat during the period immediately leading up to and during the three-week COVID-19 pandemic-related lockdown in late March–April of 2020. The one media platform, Eye on Port, is a weekly broadcast television show by the port's authorities, which caters primarily to external commercial stakeholders of the port. The other platform is a closed WhatsApp forum used by stakeholders working at the operational level of the port. Both platforms served specific needs among their users, who had been restricted in their mobility but had to keep the port operational. Combining 'scalable sociality' with the concept of polymedia, we identify how the two media functioned to meet the different informational and conversational needs of their respective users. We argue that either medium alone could not fulfil the communicative needs necessary to keep the port operational during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the assumptions that digital media are used as integrated structures or “polymedia repertoires” and that media practices cannot be treated as unrelated practices performed on distinct platforms, the present study examined the digital sociability of young people and their media prosumption in a polymedia environment. Data were collected from group interviews of 67 12- to 19-year-olds and 59 personal visualised media sketches. The study focused on teenage engagement with news as part of their media repertoires and their understanding of what news is in the context of general platform sociability conditions, including a state of permanent connectedness and constant anticipation of something new. Their sociability based on permanent activity and affective engagement was enabled and framed by the algorithmically produced regime of visibility and the promise of liveness. The findings indicated that an important consequence of the increased fragmentation of activities is the naturalisation of the performance of multiple media practices at the same time. Although the complexity of such performance, even among teenagers, revealed socially distinctive categories, clear hierarchies between types of practices—such as watching news or pop culture, online shopping and doing homework—and the cultural differentiation of the dominant contexts for these practices—such as school and leisure—were eroded. The contexts of school, home, and leisure thus collapse, and the definition of important news journalism becomes highly unstable, with the distinction between pop and politics generally disintegrating.

This article focusses on the courtship rituals and practices of intimacy among young dating app users, aged between 20 and 33, in Berlin. Dating app users participate in 'rituals of transition' as they signal mutual interest and heightened intimacy by moving conversations from dating apps to social media messaging platforms such as WhatsApp. These rituals of transition play a far more prominent role in signalling romantic interest than the matching-mechanisms inherent in the design of dating apps. Drawing on ethnographic data incorporating 36 semistructured interviews and 45 chat interviews across three popular dating apps, Tinder, Bumble and OkCupid, the study finds that users code the apps installed on their smartphones as hosting spheres of varying intimacy. These spheres are substantiated through the infrastructure of notifications on users' devices. Rather than drastically altering how users communicate across different apps, rituals of transition are a key moment of communication in themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the assumptions that digital media are used as integrated structures or "polymedia repertoires" and that media practices cannot be treated as unrelated practices performed on distinct platforms, the present study examined the digital sociability of young people and their media prosumption in a polymedia environment. Data were collected from group interviews of 67 12- to 19-year-olds and 59 personal visualised media sketches. The study focused on teenage engagement with news as part of their media repertoires and their understanding of what news is in the context of general platform sociability conditions, including a state of permanent connectedness and constant anticipation of something new. Their sociability based on permanent activity and affective engagement was enabled and framed by the algorithmically produced regime of visibility and the promise of liveness. The findings indicated that an important consequence of the increased fragmentation of activities is the naturalisation of the performance of multiple media practices at the same time. Although the complexity of such performance, even among teenagers, revealed socially distinctive categories, clear hierarchies between types of practices--such as watching news or pop culture, online shopping and doing homework--and the cultural differentiation of the dominant contexts for these practices--such as school and leisure--were eroded. The contexts of school, home, and leisure thus collapse, and the definition of important news journalism becomes highly unstable, with the distinction between pop and politics generally disintegrating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study employs polymedia theory to analyze how Iranian students use information communication technologies (ICTs) to sustain relationships with their homeland-based parents under extended separation caused by the Travel Ban or Muslim Ban. The study draws on in-depth interviews to analyze the impact of the Ban on child-parent relationships in the context of the following three consequences of polymedia: sociality, power distribution, and emotional expression. Findings reveal that prolonged separation combined with how students and parents use ICTs shift the established cultural norms. Students use ICTs to represent their personas selectively and practice ambient concealing. The reversed asymmetry in relational power distribution grants them greater relationship control. Students also actively engage in dialogues with their parents to compensate for their absence. This study extends the existing research by examining how cultural norms influence the use of ICTs in distance relationships, and by turning attention to political factors exacerbating family separation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, both performance and polymedia serve as important conceptual lenses to examine how university students in the Global South handle the social media landscape in enacting cultural identity. Based on 17 focus groups with 105 students from Bolivian universities, we argue that in performing their multiplex identities, this group of Bolivian young people navigate social media as polymedia environments, taking advantage of its possibilities and testing its constraints. The research generated three key findings: (1) students mainly reported examples of cosmopolitan and national identity performances; (2) performances of national belonging showed an ambiguous mixture of self-glorification and self-reflexivity; (3) indigenous identities were rarely performed on the platforms used.

This article considers the ways in which the super-sticky all-in-one platform WeChat acts as the coordinator of a polymedia environment – and not just part of the polymedia environment – in mediating intercultural romantic relationships in the Greater Bay Area of China. Based on qualitative interviews, the article explores how WeChat coordinates a diverse range of digital communication tools for typical intercultural couples (Chinese women and foreign men) to mediate and maintain intimacy. The article contends that WeChat mainly derives its coordinator legitimacy and power from the government's prohibition of non-Chinese social media, WeChat's multi-functionality and its 'local' nature – Chinese language, social networking capacities and connectivity to other Chinese applications. Finally, this article finds that the power asymmetry caused by WeChat coordinating ecosystem of converged communication has significantly empowered middle-class Chinese women to take control of their intimate intercultural relationships. Research limitations and theoretical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WhatsApp is one the world's most popular social media apps, as well as one of the most popular chat-based, closed platforms. Utilizing the insights from 19 in-depth interviews, we approach WhatsApp from a cultural perspective of ritual communication, seeking to understand how people make sense of WhatsApp use in their daily lives. We found WhatsApp is largely used to maintain community and fellowship with friends, coworkers, family, and even acquaintances or strangers. However, WhatsApp use is not wholly cohesive or harmonious. Social life on WhatsApp can become highly fragmented given numerous groups, and more groups mean more messages that individuals struggle to keep up with. We define the central nature of WhatsApp in Indian social life as India's WhatsApp imaginary, in which ritualized mobile media practices intertwine with cultural contexts to transcend borders, connect people via mobile affordances, and sustain daily social and business lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the perspective of the concept of generations and generationally specific digital sociality, the paper analyses the transformation of reading as a practice and as an experience. Based on analysis of interviews with teenagers, it is argued that in today’s polymedia environment users are constantly shifting between platforms and live in constant anticipation of something new, being permanently occupied, and constant affective engagement represent a condition for an algorithmically produced regime of visibility that normalises the distracted multitasking they engage in. In the context of constant digital work, there remains little space for practices beyond social platforms. The authors argue that in the young interviewees’ perception book reading does not hold the status of a cultural authority and that the role played by reading in distributing cultural capital has been reshaped.

The growing phenomenon of transnational families where the mothers work abroad has reinvigorated the debate on the fluidity of contemporary families. Family is no longer defined as household-bound, and family obligations are constantly negotiated. Research shows migrant mothers utilize communication technologies, most recently smartphones, to (re)constitute family intimacy and maternal identity from afar through everyday family practices. However, most research has focused on the material reconfiguration of family practices, essentially sidelining the discursive workings of intimacy and identity via mobile media. To address this gap, this ethnographic study draws on the narrative theories, particularly the small stories approach, to examine the narratives of Indonesian mothers in Hong Kong as embedded in their smartphone communication. The participant observation and narrative interviews with 25 migrant mothers revealed that maternal storytelling on smartphones is routine, eclectic, and personalized. These enable migrant mothers to craft and tell family stories to (1) rationalize distance and (2) bolster family resilience. This article concludes by reflecting upon the authorial privilege in constructing family narratives on mobile media. The implications on our understanding of the contextualizing power of narrative and power dynamics underlying mediated family communication are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, both performance and polymedia serve as important conceptual lenses to examine how university students in the Global South handle the social media landscape in enacting cultural identity. Based on 17 focus groups with 105 students from Bolivian universities, we argue that in performing their multiplex identities, this group of Bolivian young people navigate social media as polymedia environments, taking advantage of its possibilities and testing its constraints. The research generated three key findings: (1) students mainly reported examples of cosmopolitan and national identity performances; (2) performances of national belonging showed an ambiguous mixture of self-glorification and self-reflexivity; (3) indigenous identities were rarely performed on the platforms used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The sending of migrant workers abroad results in neglected children. These children are prone to be 'left behind' due to the lack of care from their parents or foster parents (caregiver). This study aimed to examine collaborative parenting mediated by community cadres that involved the role of the migrant workers with the utilization of digital media to prevent the children from being left behind. Methods: This study applied the descriptive method by interviewing 39 informants. This research found that the community of migrant workers' senders developed collaborative parenting to prevent the children from being left behind. Collaborative parenting referred to parenting of Migrant Worker's Children mediated by community cadres by involving the role of Indonesian migrant workers (IMWs) living abroad and the use of digital media. Results:: The diverse media alternatives available today have made the parenting process more "natural". In this sense, the parents can undergo the effective parenting process as in reality although living separately from their children. Conclusions: Media has transformed distant-parenting patterns enabling parenting styles closer to what they will normally do at home. Therefore, advanced communication has restored the parents' ability to control and discipline their children as well as oversee them in more effective ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Comunicación is the property of Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This research explores how and why TikTok users from Turkey choose to make TikTok content. Drawing from the concept of polymedia and debates on digital connection and disconnection, which center on individuals' choices whether to connect or detach from digital media based on the affordances they offer, the article highlights an affordance shaping users' choices of media that have not received sufficient emphasis in these discussions: namely, the ability of a platform to foster intimacy. Based on qualitative research combining structured and semistructured interviews with 14 individuals, the article discusses how and why TikTok has come to be perceived either as an object of attachment with which individuals have intimate relations or as a site for individuals to fashion a shared sense of intimate, safe space with other users. I also illustrate that the ways individuals talk about intimacy intersect with how they talk about the algorithmic systems. Combining approaches from critical algorithm studies, media choices, and research on mediated intimacies, the article demonstrates that (a) individuals choose TikTok to foster intimacies and (b) users connect seemingly contradictory concepts of intimacy and algorithms in their choices of TikTok. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Družboslovne Razprave is the property of Druzboslovne Razprave and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article analyzes the idioms of practice and media ideologies of adolescents and older adults regarding mobile digital media usage, and how they are negotiated within and between age cohorts. We formed aged-based focus groups in Rome and Barcelona (four groups of 16- to 19-year-olds and four of 65- to 85-year-olds). The comparison provides new insights on older individuals' communication practices, often overshadowed by the focus on youth. Participants of both age groups explained they do media in their own way, which is perceived as "the right" (or legitimate) way. Strategies and hierarchies differ with age, according to meanings and rankings attributed to media choices in a communicative environment of affordances, or polymedia. The results suggest that differentiated generation-based idioms of practice and media ideologies are in operation in each cohort while, in both cases, refer to adaptative and goal-oriented communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital communication remains largely unexplored in sociolinguistic research on diaspora and language. In this paper, ethnographically collected data from Norway‐based families of Senegalese heritage are explored to identify how family members use digital media to engage with diaspora concerns and projects, and how this engagement shapes their multilingual practices online. We re‐contextualize the concept of polycentricity (Blommaert et al.) from the physical setting of a neighbourhood or region to complex ecologies of digital media, and identify four 'centres', that is, distinct orientations for participants' digital language and literacy practices, in which linguistic choices are associated with diaspora discourses, genres, and imagery. Each centre constrains the deployment of linguistic and semiotic resources in ways that are related both to historically rooted sociolinguistic hierarchies and affordances of digital media. The findings support a key claim in language and diaspora research, that is, the fine‐grained patterning of linguistic resources in diaspora communities. They also underscore the need to extend the empirical scope of a sociolinguistics of diaspora from co‐present to mediated interaction, and to explore the interplay between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we investigate the use of social media in contemporary family interaction from a linguistic ethnographic perspective. Inspired by Auer's (1998) work on code-switching in conversation, we study how family members choose and sometimes alternate between digitally mediated and face-to-face modes of communication in various family settings. Based on ethnographic observations, the participants' metapragmatic reflections, and their interactional orientations to mode choices, we show how such choices serve social and metapragmatic functions in the interaction between family members who are present in the same house or even in the same room. Accordingly, we argue in favor of situating peoples' polymedia repertoires in a broader framework of communicative repertoires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on data from a comparative ethnographic study on media usage in transnational families this paper contributes to a reappraisal of polymedia theory. Two main theoretical assumptions are reconsidered. First, it is demonstrated why the equal availability assumption has to be revised in light of the complex interactions between the corporeal, communicative and social mobilities which together constitute transnational migration. Second, it is argued that the techno-socially accomplished co-presence in transnational families depends more on the creative appropriation and combination of different media channels and communication forms than on the choice between them. In order to empirically investigate the specific needs for, and forms of co-presence in families, the concept of 'registers of presence' is proposed. It allows us to understand in detail in what ways and in which constellations transnational families create togetherness with the help of communication technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the concept of the polymedia repertoire to explore how social meaning is indexed through the interplay of communicative resources at different levels of expression (from choice of media to individual signs) in digitally mediated interactions. The multi-layered polymedia repertoire highlights how people move fluidly between media platforms, semiotic modes and linguistic resources in the course of their everyday interactions, and enables us to locate digital communications within individuals' wider practices. The potential of our theoretical contribution is illustrated through analysis of mobile phone messaging between participants in a large multi-sited ethnography of the communicative practices of multilingual migrants working in linguistically diverse UK city neighbourhoods. Our analysis of mobile messaging exchanges in a day-in-the-life of these networked individuals reveals the importance of device attention in shaping interpersonal interactions, as well as the complex ways in which choices at different levels of a polymedia repertoire are structured by social relationships, communicative purpose and (dis)identification processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the authors make an attempt to compare the processes of media consumption and media use in the Russian countryside in the early 20th and early 21st centuries, in particular the problems of the rural people learning the new language of screen arts. Today, the media consumption of the Russian village is not actively explored, so empirical material based on five expeditions to the Russian countryside in the period from 2012 to 2018 is of particular importance. The materials on the 20th century are archival documents and testimonies of the participants in the cinema of the village. Based on the difference between oral and written cultures, the authors show that, both in the beginning of the 20th and both in the beginning of the 21st century the villagers lack media literacy to perceive the diversity of the language of screen arts. And it is compensated by the figure of the commentator. But if at the beginning of the 20th century the commentator is located next to the cine-camera, then in the 21st century it is already placed inside the screen. The article suggests that a modern TV presenter, placed inside the screen, is a remediation of the commentator who conducted explanatory work among villagers in the early 20th century in the Soviet cinema process. At the same time, the commentator’s figure keeps the Russian village from forming a polymedia environment, since the choice of content is still limited by insufficient media literacy. В статье авторы предпринимают попытку сравнить феномены медиапотребления и медиаиспользования в российском селе, в частности, проблемы освоения сельскими жителями нового языка экранных искусств в начале XX и начале XXI веков. На сегодняшний день медиапотребление российского села исследуется недостаточно активно, поэтому обширный эмпирический материал, базирующийся на пяти экспедициях в российскую сельскую местность в период с 2012 по 2018 гг., представляет особую значимость. Материалами о XX веке послужили архивные документы и свидетельства участников кинофикации села. Опираясь на разницу между устной и письменной культурами, авторы показывают, что как в начале XX, так и в начале XXI века сельским жителям России не хватает медиаграмотности для восприятия всего многообразия языка экранных искусств, что компенсируется фигурой комментатора. Но если в начале XX века комментатор находился рядом с киноаппаратом, то в XXI веке он уже помещен внутрь экрана. В статье выдвигается предположение, что современный телеведущий, находящийся внутри экрана, представляет собой ремедиацию того комментатора, который в начале XX века проводил разъяснительную работу среди сельчан в процессе советской кинофикации. В то же время фигура комментатора удерживает российское село от формирования полимедийной среды, поскольку выбор контента все еще ограничивается недостаточной медийной грамотностью.

With growing evidence that media plays a vital role in shaping public understanding of suicidality and influencing behaviours, media portrayals of suicidality have for some time been the focus of suicide prevention efforts. Traditional media has changed, and now exists alongside and within an instantaneous, interactive sharing of information created and controlled by anyone; the way most people use it today incorporates a wide variety of online communication media. Polymedia describes media communication as both a product and process, where anyone can contribute and act as producers, consumers, audiences, and critics. In a “Polymediated age,” media exposure becomes much more complex. To understand how media exposure to suicide influences and impacts on others, it is important to take into account the communicative ecology of media technologies and the different interactions we can have with them. We researched the effects of this type of exposure by conducting in-depth interviews with a purposive sample of individuals who have lived experience and/or knowledge of suicide exposure via polymediated communication in the aftermath of a suicide. Using thematic analysis, our data demonstrates how exposure to suicide has become more complex as a result of new communicative media technology: it can be both a gift and a curse, difficult to distinguish, predict or control. Polymedia has the power to determine new forms of narrative and new forms of behaviour that on the one hand can provide support and prevention efforts, while on the other hand can promote conflict and cast an adverse influence on suicidal behaviour. Polymedia provides novel affordances for very intimate collective exposure to suicide. Our findings shed important new light on how the interplay between news media and social media has transformed our relationship with the information to which we’re exposed. We highlight important suggestions for those working in suicide prevention to develop (1) media strategies that recognise the multiple ways in which users are exposed and impacted, and (2) mechanisms for a strategic amplification and moderation of specific types of content. Media organisations and users of social media alike can contribute to maximising the beneficial capacity of polymediated exposure to suicide.

With growing evidence that media plays a vital role in shaping public understanding of suicidality and influencing behaviours, media portrayals of suicidality have for some time been the focus of suicide prevention efforts. Traditional media has changed, and now exists alongside and within an instantaneous, interactive sharing of information created and controlled by anyone; the way most people use it today incorporates a wide variety of online communication media. Polymedia describes media communication as both a product and process, where anyone can contribute and act as producers, consumers, audiences, and critics. In a "Polymediated age," media exposure becomes much more complex. To understand how media exposure to suicide influences and impacts on others, it is important to take into account the communicative ecology of media technologies and the different interactions we can have with them. We researched the effects of this type of exposure by conducting in-depth interviews with a purposive sample of individuals who have lived experience and/or knowledge of suicide exposure via polymediated communication in the aftermath of a suicide. Using thematic analysis, our data demonstrates how exposure to suicide has become more complex as a result of new communicative media technology: it can be both a gift and a curse, difficult to distinguish, predict or control. Polymedia has the power to determine new forms of narrative and new forms of behaviour that on the one hand can provide support and prevention efforts, while on the other hand can promote conflict and cast an adverse influence on suicidal behaviour. Polymedia provides novel affordances for very intimate collective exposure to suicide. Our findings shed important new light on how the interplay between news media and social media has transformed our relationship with the information to which we're exposed. We highlight important suggestions for those working in suicide prevention to develop (1) media strategies that recognise the multiple ways in which users are exposed and impacted, and (2) mechanisms for a strategic amplification and moderation of specific types of content. Media organisations and users of social media alike can contribute to maximising the beneficial capacity of polymediated exposure to suicide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the rise of polymedia as a global phenomenon, this study bridges the theory of polymedia with one strand of migration research that focuses on gender identity negotiation of marginalised migrant women. Especially, this study aims to capture how traditionally defined gender constraints and nascent desires for modernity may possibly encounter and act upon each other when migrant women navigate the complicated environment of polymedia. This examination is situated in the transitioning post-Mao China, with an emphasis on digital media and technology usage of Dagongmei – the group of young, single female rural-urban migrant workers. Confined physical and social mobility between rural and urban China tends to contribute to their specifically exacerbated gender struggles with the collisions between tradition and modernity, which are reflected in their media practices. Ethnographic fieldwork in a medium-size factory in Northeast China enables this study to unfold the dynamic experiences of these migrant women with the alternate separation, convergence, and clashes between tradition and modernity in polymedia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ethnographic article examines how Ghanaian urbanites choose between new media platforms under inadequate infrastructures. By combining participant observation with digital ethnography, the case studies described here show how informants change their media choosing and switching habits due to unstable electricity and dysfunctional inter-city roads. Thus, moral and social choices face an infrastructural 'noise' that diverts people's digital practices. These findings contribute to Madianou and Miller's theory of polymedia by suggesting that constraints of economy, access, literacy, or infrastructure cannot be exempt from the analysis of media choice, especially in Africa. It suggests the term 'noisy polymedia' as an expansive version that acknowledges how people use digital tools under unstable infrastructural conditions. Furthermore, this article demonstrates how smartphones became essential tools for 'leapfrogging' inadequate infrastructure in Africa as informants choose strategically between devices, payment plans, applications, and usage patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We highlight the complex and multidirectional dynamics of transnational familyhood where flows of care involve multilateral negotiations of competing interests, aspirations, and subjectivities. Drawing on the findings from a mixed-method study among migrant-sending families in the Philippines , we explore how the discourses and practices of transnational parenting are negotiated and contested from the perspective of left-behind children and proximate non-parental carers. By attending to the way 'proxy' but proximate care in the homeland intersects with the long-distance care provided by migrant parents, we show how a 'hierarchy of care access' is facilitated by differential use of and access to ICTs. This creates disparities in the way care is received, given, and experienced. This not only reveals the mediating power of communication technologies in shaping care relationships and normative familial values that hold together the transnational family, but complicates binary understandings of proximity and distance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses female migrants' 'transnational daughterhood' within the context of transnational Taiwanese families as a case to examine how culturally constructed ideals of eldercare and information and communication technologies (ICTs) are interwoven in the context of transnational families. Filial piety is the traditional cultural norm in Confucian societies, which form parent–child relationships and eldercare practices in Taiwanese families. Through this research on transnational eldercare, the results will demonstrate how adult daughters construct their 'transnational daughterhood' by evoking filial norms, guiding their use of ICTs in polymedia environments. Through in-depth interviews with single migrant daughters from Taiwan to Australia, this research identifies ICTs that are stratified into three levels of filial piety, based on the principle that the more 'social cues' a particular media technology affords, the more filial it is. The findings in this study fill in the gaps in the existing literature by illustrating 'transnational daughterhood' and demonstrating that ICT-based filial practices are not only exercised by ICT-based co-presence, but also allow women, through virtual absence, to avoid unnecessary conflicts and worries with their aging parents at home. Therefore, daughters utilize different levels of filial ICTs to successfully manage their emotional relationship with their parents and fulfill their sense of filial responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to current sociolinguistic research on the rapidly-changing landscape of digitally mediated communication (Androutsopoulos and Stæhr 2018) by presenting mediagrams, a new method for research on transnational mediated interaction. Based on an ethnographic study of mediated multilingual communication in four families with Senegalese-background living in Norway, we develop a visualisation scheme for the documentation and analysis of individual mediational repertoires. Starting with a review of visualisations used in relevant research and an outline of the context of our study, we present the production of mediagrams as a collaborative research process and their subsequent use in further data collection and analysis. Based on participants' language portraits, media maps, and self-selected excerpts of digital conversations, the collected data is coded and visualised in graphs that represent individual networks of interlocutors, language choices, language modalities, and media channels. Follow-up interviews lead to amended versions of mediagrams, which eventually form the basis for the analysis of individual mediational repertoires. In concluding we assess mediagram research as a contribution to citizen sociolinguistics (Svendsen 2018) and discuss blind spots of the method and its potential for wider application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tertiary-level students from Bangladesh usually migrate to Germany for the purpose of higher studies. These international student migrants use communication media to maintain connections with family members and friends in Bangladesh and social networks with friends, classmates, and Bangladeshi community members in Germany. Drawing on the experiences of Bangladeshi student migrants in Germany and using polymedia theory, this paper investigates how the migrant students use the polymedia environment to maintain the transnational social networks and connections. This paper is based on qualitative data derived from 18 in-depth interviews with Bangladeshi migrant students in Germany. Findings suggest that using the polymedia environment, Bachelor migrant students receive emotional support from their family members back home, while Masters and PhD students are responsible for providing emotional and practical support to their left-behind families, relatives, and friends. Migrant students’ media usage with families and friends living in Bangladesh is influenced by their marital status and gender as well as their familial and social structure in Bangladesh. Their use of communication media with the members of the Bangladeshi community and foreign classmates living in Germany is comparatively less frequent and more education-oriented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Indonesian Muslim women successfully convened the world's first congress of women Muslim scholars (KUPI). This is only one segment of the story of Indonesian Muslim women. There are many narratives regarding Indonesian Muslim women and their diverse agenda. This article focuses on what has been brought by KUPI into a broader discussion of Islam in Indonesia. Drawing on intermittent offline research predominantly conducted in Jakarta and online research from 2017 to 2018, this article argues that KUPI, with its symbolic preferences, has strengthened the voices of civil Islam in Indonesia. KUPI has productively generated global attention due to its progressive emphasis that women can be ulama. However, there are other women's voices of Islam and gender that are robust, particularly due to their rigorous use of information and communication technology. At the same time, this might be seen as promoting conservatism. Within the local context, this ideological position that is contrary to KUPI has gained more traction. Additionally, this article argues that progressive and conservative Indonesian Muslim women feature not only in the democratic pluralism of religious expression in the Indonesian offline and online spheres but also in the ongoing intricate interplay between Islam, civil society and gender equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the concepts of polymedia and accentuated ambivalence to analyse the results of an interview study with New Zealand migrants in Australia. The participants in the study exploited the polymedia environment they have access to in relation to three areas of interest: consuming media representations of New Zealand, staying connected with people they have left behind and engaging with special interests such as music and sports from New Zealand. The article argues that in order to comprehend contemporary migrant audiences, scholars need to take into account the entire range of media that migrants have at their disposal. An expansion of the concepts of polymedia and accentuated ambivalence can facilitate this perspective. Polymedia theory is a vital tool for the analysis of how migrants manage their affective relationships with places and people through media consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines images circulated through mobile media to emphasise the emotion work invested into familial relationships that are defined by place. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Trinidad, the article contributes a cross-cultural perspective to literature in digital visual communication and digital media in family relationships that has typically focused on peer-to-peer relationships between youth or that has focused on nuclear households in predominantly Western contexts. The consequences of uses of digital media platforms are strongly intertwined with the category of relationship (mother and daughter, or couples for example), their cultural inflections, relationship hierarchies and the life-stages of individuals. Digital visual communication functions to navigate, maintain and acknowledge relationships that varies across different platforms. The more public uses of images over Facebook to the more private circulation of images over WhatsApp provide examples that illustrate positive aspects of intimacy through constant contact as well as ambivalent feelings of obligation to reciprocate communication compelled by the availability afforded by mobile media. This article advances the understanding of the relationship between emotions, intimacy and mobile media by revealing how norms, ideals and expectations of familyhood and digital practices that are often essentialised are context-driven and specific. • The digital circulation of images illustrate 'kinwork' and 'doing family' practices. • Increased communication can also result in ambivalence for family members. • Families collectively perpetuate and display ideals of correct relationships. • The conditions of polymedia facilitate family relationships to varying degrees. • Motivations and expectations for digital exchanges are highly culturally contextual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The VoIP and instant messaging platform Discord has seen immense user growth over the past few years, including among fans involved with transformative works. Analyzing Discord from a framework of polymedia and play provides new insights into what Discord affords these fans and how they navigate the platform as part of their fan practices. It shows how the platform has been adopted and adapted in ways that facilitate fan play and allow for play moods to be created, strengthened, or maintained. Discord provides a suitable playground for fans, because it allows fans to negotiate closed online spaces where they can play freely, without outside disruption. These spaces can be organized in ways that distinguish between play and nonplay and maintain fannish principles of warning and consent. In addition, Discord provides an extra dimension to the experience of taking part in fan fiction exchanges, creating a compelling, collective mood in servers that people can continually come back to. Positioning this within a broader network of platforms and affordances that fans navigate shows how Discord fulfills particular needs and niches, especially with regard to Not Safe For Work material. More generally, this study provides a framework for understanding the reciprocal and dynamic relationships between users, affordances, rules, and structures in contemporary platform society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Polymedia”, a concept introduced by Madianou and Miller (2012), refers to the everyday conditions of abundant media resources. Whereas such conditions imply that the classificatory processes concerning media as cultural properties become increasingly complex, few studies have tried to produce a general picture of how interpersonal media practices are part of sociocultural reproduction. This study is based on a nationwide survey conducted in Sweden in 2012 and focuses on mediated communication among “polymedia couples” (39 percent of all Swedish couples). The article demonstrates that sociocultural factors are important for explaining media uses, also when media accessibility is more or less unlimited, and pinpoints how preferences for certain modalities of communication are linked to other lifestyle practices as markers of taste. Most notably, email communication attains a higher sociocultural status than online chat functions and social media, testifying to the enduring significance of asynchronous, text-based communication in a longer format as a culturally distinctive mode of intimate communication.

Guided by the frameworks of niche and polymedia theories, this study sought to understand the phenomenon of platform-swinging on social media, which refers to the routine use of multiple social media platforms that has become commonplace across different ages. Based on focus group discussions (FGDs) with 62 social media users in Singapore, this study found that social media users engage in platform-swinging for relationship management and self-presentation gratifications. While these gratifications are also served by individual social media platforms, platform-swinging allows social media users to navigate structural, social, and norm barriers to obtain greater gratification opportunities. This has implications on how social media users subsequently regard and segment their personal relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the mobile phone is the world's most popular media device, it is actually not one single medium, but is effectively used as a different medium by different user groups. The article characterizes polymodal differences in mobile apps usage among different user groups, including gender, education, occupation, screen size, and price. We monitored the complete app usage of 10,725 smartphone users for one month each (56 million sessions, recording almost 1 million hours). Our key contribution consists in developing and analyzing a theoretical framework to classify the over 16,000 apps used into five categories. Exploring nine research questions we provide a broad characterization by asking who, with which characteristics, uses which kinds of apps in what extensity and intensity? For example, it is not the young and high occupational grades that use the mobile phone as a human-to-machine computer (including gaming and artificial intelligence tools). Large screen size is related to extensive long sessions, while a small screen size is related to intensive frequent usage. The results go beyond providing ample empirical evidence for the inherently polymodal nature of the mobile phone, but also proposes a framework on how to deal with it analytically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]