Transnational Media

This study explores how the domestication of media for people living in diaspora embeds the double consciousness of a “home away from home.” The domestication process reveals certain patterns of media practices in which the complex relationship between people in a diasporic situation and media technologies emerge as part of a transnational lifestyle. Interrogating this lifestyle opens a study of media that focuses on socio-cultural transformations where the interplay of media dependency or agency serves as a site of discourse as diasporic people re-appropriate discrete features of media into their everyday lives. Drawing from interviews with and participant observation of Filipino Americans coming from different professional backgrounds and experiences of migration, this study argues that active relationship with The Filipino Channel or TFC, a transnational media company, articulates a “mediatized” behavior that imbricates the dialectical tension between dependency and agency. It is a behavior where everyday struggles and aspirations of Filipino Americans are now performed with and in media as they navigate the double consciousness of a “home away from home” in the context of their de-territoriality.