Connecting ‘Home’ With ‘Here’: Personal Homepages in Everyday Transnational Lives

Abstract

The study of migrant transnationalism focuses on the ways in which (certain) individuals are able to act socially, economically or politically in more than one locale. One crucial element to such action is the use of communication technologies—and in particular the internet—as a means to bridge the gaps between different places. In this paper I focus on the use of personal homepages amongst South Korean international students in Auckland, New Zealand, to investigate the ways in which this communication technology (CT) serves to connect idealised notions of ‘home’ (South Korea) with the physical realities of ‘here’ (Auckland). This connection with ‘home’, however, is shown to be Janus-like in its effects on students’ everyday transnational lives—both facilitating and constraining their actions. I argue that a reading of transnational communication practices that conceives access as necessarily positive is naïve in that it fails to recognise the ways that engagement with spaces of belonging—personal, familial or national—are also characterised by inclusion and exclusion and by the processes of surveillance and disciplining that seek to police the borders between bodies and subjectivities, both on and offline.

Keywords:

• Transnationalism
• Internet
• International Education
• Home

Notes

1. The romanisation of Korean words in this paper is based on the new Ministry of Education system retrieved from http://www.glossika.com/en/dict/korpin.html. Words like ‘Cyworld’, that have commonly romanised versions, are used where applicable.

2. All names used are fictional.

3. South Korean internet websites usually require the use of individuals’ national identification number. Non-Koreans must use their foreigners’ registration number if they live in South Korea or provide verified passport information.

4. For example sam-chon, which literally means third relative, is the word for uncle in Korean; sa-chon, fourth relative, is equivalent to cousin. As such il-chon, first relative, is best understood to mean brother or sister, even though it is not used in this way here.

5. My aim is not to undertake a comprehensive analysis of material on personal websites. Such a task is well beyond the scope of this paper, particularly because the nature of Cyworld minihompy means that some have literally thousands of continuously growing entries and photographs, so that even full analysis of one minihompy might require months of research.

6. In 2004–05 a dispute emerged between South Korea and Japan over sovereignty of the Dok-do/Takeshima islets. In South Korean popular culture, including Cyworld, expressions of national pride and ownership of the islets became both common and fervent during the period of this research.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francis Leo Collins

Francis Leo Collins is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore