ABSTRACT
The emphasis in the last two chapters has been on the nature of the relationships, while this and the following chapters will concentrate more on the media used within them. The task of the final theoretical chapter will be to find the right balance between these two different dimensions of our study. In Chapter 4 we examined letters and cassettes from the perspective of their propensities as technologies and then considered some of the issues they bring out such as temporality, materiality and privacy as precursors of new media. In so doing we recognise that a historical perspective can shed light on current uses of digital media, as suggested by recent writings on remediation (Bolter and Grusin, 2000; see also Marvin, 1988). In this chapter we will look at each of the new media that our participants use. While here we will focus on each particular new medium and its associated affordances (Hutchby, 2001), we recognise that in practice our participants, as well as others in long-distance relationships, do not rely on just one medium, but use a range of different media in parallel with one another. Analytically, it is still important to identify the particular functionalities and affordances (Hutchby, 2001) of each discrete medium. This is because users exploit these functionalities and affordances when navigating the communication environment which we term polymedia. In this sense this chapter is a precursor for Chapter 8 where the focus is on polymedia as an integrated communicative environment within which each particular medium is defined relationally to the other media. As we have already noted, although the seeds of polymedia can be found even in the early days of letters and cassettes, the proliferation of communicative opportunities made possible through new media developments have only existed to any great extent for the last two years for populations such as Filipino transnational families. Most people are still in a transition to polymedia, but given that we are never likely to retreat back into a simpler state, we need to confront its consequences now.
