Introduction

In this introductory chapter we begin with one of our participants, Rika, as she uses her smartphone practices to help create a sense of care at a distance with her aging mother—what we call Digital Kinship. We then turn to contextualizing the methods deployed over the three years in three locations and how each of the three cultural contexts informs different rituals around data use. We discuss how Digital Kinship can make sense of the paradoxical role of surveillance in an age of datafication through “friendly surveillance” and “care at a distance.”