Polymedia: Towards a new theory of digital media in interpersonal communication

The starting point: media as an integrated structure

One of the first observations to emerge from our data is the evidence that users conceive of each medium in relation to an integrated structure of different media. This becomes clearer if we compare the environment of polymedia to historical situations when users wishing to communicate at a distance only had access to a couple of media, such as letters and voice-recorded audio-cassettes sent through the post (Madianou and Miller, 2011a). Although we recognize that even in those cases we can find early evidence of users treating media as a structure of opportunities (for example when choosing to write a letter rather than record their voice on tape, [Madianou and Miller, 2011a]) it is clear that the limited choice of media had an impact on interpersonal communication. The time lag of letters and audio tapes (since these were also sent through the post) would often cause frustration. So even though letter-writing is fondly remembered by our participants both in the Philippines and Trinidad, there is evidence that it shaped the relationships that depended on it in particular ways. For instance, Filipino participants would acknowledge how letter writing would often conceal problems and suppress conflict, often leading to situations of deception (Madianou and Miller, 2012).

Even in the early days of internet-based communication, which were dominated by email, we find that communication was shaped by particular medium qualities: for example, email has low levels of social cues which can often lead to misunderstandings. What changes with polymedia is that email is used seamlessly with, or alternatively to other media such as IM, social networking sites, webcam and texting. Users switch between these to achieve their purposes: what cannot be achieved by email, can be accomplished by webcam, or instant messaging or a phone call. Email is not simply email; it is defined relationally as also not a letter, not a text message and not a conversation via webcam; which, in turn, is not a phone call. This is very different from perspectives on media technologies which focus on each individual medium and its affordances (Hutchby, 2001). Our approach owes more to structuralism as developed by Lévi-Strauss (1963). His central point was that an entity was determined as much by its relationship to that which it is not as to that which it appears to be. So our first step towards polymedia is understanding media as defined by their relationship to each other rather than in themselves. We argue that this is a new phenomenon, despite early historical iterations (Madianou and Miller, 2012), as it is only through the recent proliferation of platforms that users can truly exploit a variety of opportunities for communication freed from the constraints of each medium’s functionalities.

Preconditions: access, affordability, literacy

In this article we fully recognize that polymedia remains an aspiration and not the current state for much of the world. Much of our fieldwork has been concerned with conditions of considerable poverty in the Philippines where one of the reasons texting is so prolific is simply that it remains relatively cheap. ² Our point is rather that polymedia is sufficiently common, and the trajectory to its further spread is evidence that this is the right time to try to comprehend its future consequences. It is already clearly present among many of our UK participants, but also in Trinidad, especially among our younger and educated participants who had broadband connection at home and for whom a ‘BlackBerry’ smartphone seemed an almost essential accessory. Even in the Philippines, polymedia is becoming a reality for an urban, young and middle-class demographic.

The empirical environment that best equates with polymedia is that described by Gershon (2010). College students in the US pay for their computers as one-off purchases while the cost of connection is through post-paid plans. In their case, any single communication is almost entirely separated from the cost of that act. What emerged from our work in Trinidad (though much less so from the Philippines where pre-paid communication is prevalent even for mobile broadband subscriptions) was that the significant change represented by polymedia may be linked to the issue of overall cost of communication. Even when the price of a phone call declined people remained conscious of that price. But when middle-class Trinidadians take on monthly plans with unlimited broadband access either for a computer or a smartphone then the cost of each individual act of communication became less relevant (as it was subsumed in the overall cost of a monthly plan).

The rising popularity of smartphones also contributes to the emergence of polymedia. This was more prevalent in Trinidad where once computer-based media are to be found in people’s pockets (see Miller, 2011). For smartphone users the choice of medium is no longer determined by access, although as these technologies evolve users constantly have to update and improve both access and their media literacies (Livingstone, 2004). Apart from access and cost the other prerequisite for polymedia is media literacy (Livingstone, 2004). According to a skills-based approach media literacy consists of four parallel processes: access, analysis, evaluation and content production (Livingstone, 2004). Users need to be able not only to analyse and evaluate media content, but also to produce their own. Discussions of the second-level digital divide (Hargittai, 2002, 2007) note that although access is a prerequisite it does not guarantee a particular user’s media literacy. Further, inequalities can even be heightened in the new online environments (Hargittai, 2007). Our research confirms the continued asymmetrical distribution of communication technologies transnationally (first-level digital divide), but also those arguments relating to second-level digital divides (Hargittai, 2002). For example, in both the Philippines and Trinidad our older participants were less likely to produce their own content, for example, blogs, and relied more on familiar technologies such as voice calls.

In the Philippines first- and second-level digital divides were often present in the same transnational family. International calls are still prohibitively expensive in the Philippines, even with the use of pre-paid international cards (Madianou and Miller, 2011b). So for those left behind calling was not an option. On the other hand, migrants themselves often lacked the necessary digital media literacy to fully exploit internet-based platforms (second-level digital divide). Left-behind children who were more media literate faced parents who could more afford the costs of communication but who did not always have the media literacy to make use of the technologies’ full potential. Many of our informants developed media literacy skills precisely in order to be able to communicate in conditions of separation, such as Filipina migrant mothers and grandmothers who first went online in order to see their children and grandchildren through a webcam.

As we have noted, polymedia is not merely the proliferation of new media and the choices this provides. It is only fully achieved when the decision between media that constitute parts of one environment can no longer be referred back to issues of either access, cost or media literacy by either of those involved in the act of communication. The following discussion of the dimensions of polymedia needs to be couched in this acknowledgement of the existing structural limitations. We are on a trajectory towards polymedia and, although we acknowledge the constraints, to give them too much weight would mean that we would ignore an opportunity to understand a fundamental transformation of mediated interpersonal communication.

Dimensions of polymedia: remediation

Polymedia emerges gradually involving a period of remediation (Bolter and Grusin, 2000). Bolter and Grusin’s theory seems to apply particularly during the initial development of a new medium. Remediation is important because the core technologies often evolve incrementally. If we take the example of voice communication in the life histories of Filipino transnational families we see the situation evolves from the phone in a village store, to the neighbour’s phone then a landline in one’s own house, then expensive mobile phones, then texting and now internet calls through VOIP and potentially smartphones. This is equally a movement from the phone as a very special instrument used for ceremonial gatherings of the family at Christmas, to a contemporary situation where a mother can ‘chase’ her teenage daughter via texting all night until she is found to have reached home safely.

Remediation is also a theory of relationality, but applied diachronically (vertically) through time rather than in the present (horizontally). Nisha was one of many Trinidadian respondents who noted that at first emails were simply regarded as computer-based letters and in effect the solution to the lack of interactivity consequential upon the excessive time lag in responses to letters. So initial emails between herself and her sister were often three or four pages long, inspired by their excitement in the potential for more immediate response. Only gradually did emails transform to become mainly very brief spontaneous messages that also lose much of the orthography and care that was associated with letters, such that emails today bear little relationship to their predecessor. Although the technology remains constant, the process of remediation controls the transformation in its usage as a communicative genre.

Nisha’s relationship to the telephone is equally one of remediation. Rather than being more intimate, spontaneous and informal, at first Nisha sees quite the opposite qualities in phone calls, partly because the phone first emerges as a very expensive medium. She recalls very stilted communal family calls mainly at Christmas and other festivals. The precursor for this kind of phone call was actually the traditional message sent out by those living abroad to their families through radio. As a result, for a long time Nisha felt very awkward about the phone, which she could not regard as neither personal, nor authentic.

Because of this kind of time lag associated with remediation, people retain associations of technical limitations for particular media even when these are long gone. For Nisha, using Facebook was at first predicated on the huge popularity of ICQ for several years in Trinidad (Miller and Slater, 2000). With its facility for random contacts and instant messaging ICQ prepared people for the idea that communication could now be with pretty much anyone from anywhere. It therefore took her a while to appreciate that, in many ways, Facebook is quite the opposite of ICQ, since this openness in ICQ was associated with anonymity and people you didn’t know and often didn’t expect to know. By contrast, Facebook was in many respects the elimination of anonymity and soon became a medium where you only accepted requests from people you thought you had known face-to-face at some point.

In most cases remediation falls away as an aspect of polymedia which then facilitates quite unprecedented possibilities of new media. Many of our UK-based Filipino participants are now grandparents as their children have grown up and have children of their own. The development of webcams is creating a whole new world of relationships between toddler-age children and grandparents. While such young children do not readily comprehend a relationship only with a voice on a telephone, they can quickly become responsive to someone on a webcam. We found cases of grandparents able to effectively babysit for hours and play with huge mutual satisfaction from both ends of this relationship (Madianou and Miller, 2012).

Even for those without grandchildren, webcam was seen as a blessing for older people who were either technophobic or who had never learnt to type. It could be set up for them with a minimum of technical mediation and become instrumental in maintaining contact with their families. As a Trini reported:

Yes my mother uses Skype, my mother is wheelchair-bound and has been for quite a number of years and especially after my father died but even before my father died it was like this. My older brother, who is very computer savvy, decided that he would help my mother to stay in touch with all the family abroad in the easiest way right in the comfort of her home so he got her a computer, taught her how to use it, got her the webcam and the microphone and everything and she speaks to the family in Canada and so on, quite frequently.

To conclude, this third stage recognizes that media come with histories that continue to impact upon their contemporary usage.

Dimensions of polymedia: affordances and emotional management

In this section we will observe how the vertical relations of remediation are increasingly replaced by the horizontal relationships among digital media. In Migration and New Media (Madianou and Miller, 2012) we provide many examples of the way different aspects of relationships exploit differences between the media. Here, for the sake of brevity, we will include just one example of polymedia: the way they become part of the control and expression of emotions and in turn of personal relationships themselves.

The mere coexistence of media can be used for affective intent. Raj, a 30 year-old Trini, is in constant Skype contact with his partner back in Trinidad but still he sends her a text her first thing in the morning:

[I say things like] hope you have a good day, be safe, make sure you take your break, eat properly, drink your water – because she doesn’t like to drink water … just be on the look out. I miss you and I love you, hope everything is good, I think about you all the time.

Similarly, a participant on Facebook who is starting to get into a quarrel may at that point shift from the more public side of Facebook to the use of its private messaging or IM-like facility for chat. Sandra, a Filipina mother to two grown-up children likes to Skype her children as she can see them and feel confident that they are well. However, there are occasions when she would prefer not to use it, as when she is sad or upset and doesn’t want her children to sense that she might be having problems. On those occasions she feels email gives her more security and control over these communications.

Polymedia is particularly important in Filipino mother–child relationships because the medium is constitutive of the relationships itself. For some a key attraction of email was simply that it was not voice, and used at times when voice would have caused embarrassment. A child who is embarrassed to ask for money from their parent may resort to texting instead. Others avoid voice for any particularly bad news, or during a quarrel when a conversation might turn into an argument. Texting avoids having to hear a riposte that may be negative and stressful. Patricia, a 23-year-old Trini notes:

if there is a problem that you need to work through or if you are upset about something the phone is definitely better. I mean email is useless if you are emotional … whereas a phone call you can just blab on, cry or whatever. Yeah well in my final year my boyfriend and I broke up. This was the guy I had been with the whole three years I was in England … and I would call my mother all the time and just cry with her on the phone.

So, long after the days of letters and cassettes, the distinction between voice and text continues to be a major parameter of choice. For a Filipina parent, listening to the voice of their child remains paramount as a means of gauging their feelings. Yet when things are fraught, the telephone can be experienced as disturbance, surveillance and rupture, with a particular depth of feelings perhaps because the media create a particular focus on the acts of listening and speaking.

Polymedia may correspond to distinctions between media, but also distinctions within a medium. For example social networking can be differentiated in various ways. A young Trinidadian living in the UK used MySpace for her friends in general, but Facebook specifically for friends and relatives in Trinidad. Some of our gay male informants in the Philippines used a different social networking site, or a different profile within the same site to keep relatives separated from their contacts with other gay friends.

As might be expected, there could be different interpretations of the capacity of any given medium for emotional revelation and emotional consequences. Most people felt webcam revealed more than phone. But Jason, a Trini, discussing his communication with his mother in Canada notes that with phone conversation:

we’re that close, strange enough, she could just, from tone of voice, she could know exactly what’s wrong with me. If I am coming down with the flu, if I had a rough day, if somebody had a falling out, she could tell everything. And the same, if something is wrong with her, or if anything.… It’s not that easy to do from a internet conversation and usually when you speak to somebody on Skype they would usually talk to you about a happier time. Like someone is down and depressed they wouldn’t really show their face on Skype, so I think the phone conversation is the reality of it, it’s almost equivalent to face-to-face. You can’t see the expression but you could feel it.

Polymedia means not just that certain kinds of media become seen as more or less appropriate to certain kinds of relationship. Most relationships create a particular configuration of media that works best for their particular communicative needs. This becomes very clear with the Trinidadian couple Burton and Fay. At first Burton notes:

We had a huge problem with emails, because she would probably write an email that was 1000 or 2000 words long and I would have trouble trying to finish it and do my work as well, like respond to everything she says, and not knowing what this means or what context its coming from, because like one email for one day will end up for the whole week with me trying to figure out what the person said.

Behind this was the more basic discrepancy between Fay’s preference for text and his for voice.

It’s her, it’s in her DNA or blood to be more sensitized, or be more influenced … she prefers to read than … prefer to read a book than see a movie, I would prefer to see the movie and read the book after. That’s how it is, I don’t know, a lot of people it’s probably the same thing, but she would always tell me that words would turn her on then, rather than … sight or whatever it is.

By contrast, Burton found voice to be natural and much easier to interpret while he would struggle to work out quite what he viewed as each of the 50 or 60 points made in an email actually meant. As a result this couple constructed their own idiosyncratic primary media for transnational relationships which was to send each other daily little voice files between 2 and 7 minutes long, a sort of voice-based email. In a situation where Fay didn’t like phone calls and Burton became confused by emails, this worked for them. Few individuals confine themselves to a single medium, most operate a repertoire of alternative media which may relate to different people, different kinds of messages, but also to these issues of emotional control and expression. For each individual, polymedia represents their personal repertoire of communication media and of emotional registers.

This helps to clarify what we mean by a re-socializing of the media. First, issues of access, cost and literacy move from foreground to background. This development ties in with the rise and proliferation of new media, allowing people to consider media as an integrated environment of affordances and propensities such as the issues of temporality or storage capacity discussed by Baym (2010) and Broadbent (2011). But, in turn, each of these corresponds to aspects of social relationships so each affordance (Hutchby, 2001) is not an abstract attribute of media, but a quality likely to be exploited within an emergent social relationship. Our discussions in both fieldsites are replete with comments such as ‘Maybe if you are sad the phone works best, it depends, if you are angry then the phone doesn’t work that well.’ Some of children in the Philippines found it difficult to say ‘I love you’ to their mothers in actual co-presence, but could express this by phone or text, while others found that the ambiguous position of communication by webcam, between absence and presence, allowed this to become their ‘I love you’ medium where all others failed.

People manage their social relationships through an increasing exploitation of differences within the composite structure of polymedia. While these may be legitimated as technological differences, in practice people may have quite idiosyncratic interpretations of those technological propensities. This point becomes still more important when we turn from this general socialization of the media towards the more specific issue of moral responsibility.

Polymedia as increased moral responsibility

The idea that polymedia creates a new condition of moral responsibility is most clearly presented in Gershon’s (2010) study of relationship break-up among US college students. As her book makes clear, an individual who ends a relationship may be judged as much for the medium they employ in that break-up as for the decision to break up. The clear implication is, first, that some media are considered morally more appropriate than others, and that once we reach polymedia an individual has no external excuse as to the choice that they made, so they are held personally responsible for that decision. But where our conclusions differ from Gershon’s is that, while she explains the misunderstandings that arise as a consequence of her participants’ different ‘media ideologies’ and lack of standardization of usage (2010), we have generally observed the development of considerable normativity regarding what is generally seen as acceptable mediated behaviour.

One likely explanation for our different conclusion may be cultural. There is quite likely a kind of cultural gradation that is brought out through our comparative studies. It would not be that surprising that, with its ideology of individualism, the US is the least normative, while the Philippines most quickly re-establishes normative expectations and Trinidad lies somewhere in between. In our research we found, for example, that texting in the diaspora was very different from the genres that have developed around texting within the Philippines (see Pertierra, 2010; Pertierra et al., 2002) but has already developed clear and recognizable norms. One is a pragmatic genre for giving sequential instructions such as the working of remittances or investments in a property, or how an older sibling should deal with younger siblings. They may be used as signals for other types of communication (to signal that a remittance has arrived for instance), and to organize communication as a whole. Two further genres include the circulation of religious homilies and the circulation of jokes. The establishment of these given genres shifts polymedia from an emphasis upon individual choice to one of the cultural construction of agreed norms of usage. But this can equally imply individual moral responsibility for appropriate usage.

The same applies to social networking. As McKay (2010) has recently noted from a study of Filipino use of Friendster and Facebook, the basis of usage has little in common with arguments about networked individualism (see Boase and Wellman, 2006), which see networking as essentially linkages between individuals. A Filipino who uses Facebook does so not as an individual but as part of an extended family, where they are responsible for representing a wider social community in the same way that Hjorth (2009) and others have shown that CyWorld in Korea reflects the Korean kinship system, with strong normative constraints on how people should behave online – which is very different from western individualism. In practice, usage quickly comes to embrace often quite conservative ideas of gender, class or other social categories. Filipinos could discourse at some length on the different ways in which males and females used texting. As one Filipina participant put it:

A woman would be more likely to text with the shortcuts, and the smiley faces, what people tend to call ‘text-speak’.… Men would not generally shortcut but type it out in the actual sentence. And women are more likely to use terms of affection when texting. Not so much the men.

An important contribution of our comparative study is that while we could also examine the establishment of norms around the use of Facebook in Trinidad, these would appear to be entirely different from those found in the Philippines. In the Philippines the core issues are around the avoidance of public embarrassment and a dominant circumspection. By contrast, Miller (2011) has a chapter in his recent book devoted to the issue of what makes Facebook Trinidadian and this is dominated by the term ‘bacchanal’, which is perhaps the most common word used to describe Trinidadian culture. It highlights the constant potential for scandal and gossip. This has become so important to the use of Facebook that the local terms for Facebook that is Fasbook and Macobook are both terms that signify gossip and scandal derived from the implicit nosiness and voyeurism of Facebook. Trinidadians openly admit their love for scandal as a kind of revelation of underlying truth. So although both the Philippines and Trinidad seem to demonstrate a far more rapid turn to the normative than implied in Gershon’s (2010) account, the nature of this normativity is entirely different.

Juxtaposing the evidence from Trinidad with that of the Philippines and, in this case, comparing both to the western context, where there has been much more research on new media and interpersonal relationships (among others, see boyd, 2010; boyd and Ellison, 2007; Livingstone, 2008; Papacharissi, 2009; Whitty and Carr, 2006), helps to clarify those aspects of polymedia that do seem to lend themselves to wider generalization and those that remain more parochial and specific. So, while we concur with Gershon (2010) that polymedia sees a trend towards individuals being held as morally responsible for their choice of media, we find that this can be true just as much when there are clear normative cultural genres against which an individual’s behaviour can be judged, as against the situation where a stress on individualism leads to common misunderstandings between people as to what the implications of choosing a particular medium might be.

Polymedia and mediation

As we explore each dimension of the theory and its inner workings we move towards a broader context within polymedia that includes marked social and moral consequences. In this final section we return to the notion of mediation or mediatization discussed earlier in the article to consider the ways in which polymedia might be implicated in social transformations. This is especially evident in the work of Qiu (2009) on ICT use among what he terms the ‘information have-not’ and ‘information have-less’ in China. Long before such low-income groups ever reach the condition of polymedia, they experience the unintended consequences of new media, which transcend the initial intent of technology design (Qiu, 2009: 246). Qiu argues that these changes have become instrumental to the formation of a new working class in China today. He observes the new spaces such as urban villages where the location of new media outlets such as internet cafés and long-distance phone bars become the setting for this new class formation (Qiu, 2009: 174–5).

The best example of this wider historical conjuncture emergent from our own work is the way we first came to an understanding of polymedia, not in the abstract, but as part of our study of the long-distance relationships among members of transnational families in the Philippines and Trinidad. The point being that we are not just interested in the impact of one specific medium; our task was to understand the overall consequences of polymedia as an integrated structure upon the relationship between Filipino migrant parents and their children. This is the reason we worked with both the mothers in the UK and then travelled to visit their children in the Philippines (Madianou and Miller, 2012). In our book we show how expectations that the advent of cheap and varied media would resolve the negative issues of separation were far too simplistic. About half of the children we worked with reported that new media had made their relationship with their absent parents worse rather than better. As a result we began to appreciate that much of what was taking place included struggles over power and attempts to use these media to transform and control the way the person at one end of this communication appeared to the other. So to observe that digitally mediated communication does not always help ease the problems of separation within families is not to argue that digital media have no consequences. As we have shown, the new media are now integral to the enactment and experience of these relationships. Children may counter the fact that their parents have greater financial resources to command media with the fact they have greater technical skills, especially with computer-based communications. A young adult Filipino man in Manila notes, in relation to his communication with his migrant parents:

They never really found a way to get close to me because I always found a way to shield myself from them. Like with emails, what I do is I take a long time to reply. Like, I’ve read the email today but I’ll reply next week. Usually, my dad would pester me like, ‘You’re not updating. Are we still your parents?’

Another son, for similar reasons, insisted that communication centred upon email alone, and then took weeks before replying, a delay whose significance was certainly not lost on his father. In reverse, a mother in London uses email to stop herself getting angry with her son, who tends to get drunk and make incessant demands for money. More generally, the children tried to use polymedia to push their parents in the direction of a greater recognition of their maturity. In this one of the main instruments had become their choice of which particular media to use. It was these observations that made polymedia itself clear to us for the first time. So in our analysis, polymedia is part of a much larger picture of historical conjuncture, in this case the rise of transnational migration and its consequences.