Digitally Enhanced? Mediated Migration and ‘Fourth Wave’ Chileans in Australia

Abstract

This paper examines the contemporary experience of migration for Chileans arriving in Australia in the last two decades. It specifically explores the increasing role of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) and its mediating effects on experiences of departure, arrival, ‘being’ and ‘belonging’. In doing so, the paper considers some of the tensions between ‘hyper-digital’ transnationalism and dominant discourses of nationalism. The findings indicate diversity of experience, but highlight that these recent Chilean migrants utilise ICT to suspend and manage physical relocation and to engage both on and offline with wide and shallow networks of Chileans and non-Chileans in local and transnational spaces. At the same time, they reflect a more cultural, issues-based orientation towards the structural and discursive dimensions of migration in both ‘home’ and ‘host’ countries suggesting that ICT is imbricated in wider processes of distancing the ‘migrant’ from the national core. This highlights some of the possibilities and limitations of ‘hyper-digital’ transnationalism.

Keywords:

• Chile
• Transnationalism
• Information Communication Technologies
• Migration
• Australia

Notes

[1] In 2012, 45,763 Australians visited Chile – a 37.3 per cent increase on 2011 (Niner 2013).