ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores how digital media affect the mobile lives of minorities in their complexity and paradox within major arenas of use in everyday life, based on long-term ethnographic research on global nannies in Paris. It recognizes and analyzes how power relations and structures shape digital media cultures in everyday contexts. The book considers the mundane, banal yet profound presence of digital media in everyday life; in the multifaceted contexts of work life, power and freedom, family life and intimacy, particularly mother-daughter relationships, personal life, leisure and the self, social relationships, belonging and identity in multicultural society and finally, reflections on what this digital experience means in a world of cosmopolitan humanity. It moves beyond the assumed power of technological determinism in the lives of users, but it moves closer to the users' relational, situational, embodied experiences of being digital.
