‘Everybody needs friends’: Emotions,social networks and digital media in the friendships of international students

Methodology and findings: a comparative study of Australia and Singapore

Both Australia and Singapore are attractive countries for temporary migrants. Australia encourages international students and working holiday makers to contribute to its economy as both consumers and producers. All working holiday makers and a number of international students work casually or seasonally as unskilled/low-skilled or mid-level skilled workers. Meanwhile, Singapore recruits workers with a diverse range of skills as essential human resources to supplement its varied sectors.

Initially, Singapore sought to attract international students to gain global recognition as an international education hub but, more recently, it sees international students as a potential workforce. As part of its national agenda for building a workforce for the future, Singapore actively recruits and invests in high-achieving international students by providing generous scholarships. Singapore’s two oldest and most internationally respected state universities – the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University – are part of a regional consortium of top Asian universities aiming to recruit promising students from Asia and other parts of the world into postgraduate programs. By contrast, international postgraduate students recruited to Australia are not promised future employment. Studies show that at least one fifth of students intend to stay as permanent residents (Harrison, 2010) while only 16% successfully transition to permanent residency (Australian Government, 2018: 21).

This following brief context frames the background for the larger, comparative study. Between 2013 and 2014, Gomes conducted 30- to 60-minute face-to-face interviews and distributed short surveys which had 101 respondents; she also carried out a document analysis of journals covering a two-week period written by 20 respondents, and a quantitative data collection through online surveys with 193 respondents studying in Australia and 192 respondents studying in Singapore. This data was analysed through a thematic approach, identifying the strategies of temporary migrants to navigate everyday life. The key findings were: first, temporary migrants are highly adaptive and creatively strategize to secure their own sense of well-being in their experience of transience; second, temporary migrant identities are created in transience, which may or may not correspond with connecting to ‘home’ or ‘host’ countries; and, last, temporary migrants tend to feel disconnected from local communities, thus they seek sociability with others based on their identities as temporary migrants or diasporic nationals. Themes from the wider research project resonate with the findings presented in this article as is discussed later. As well as having comparable and contrasting factors as regional neighbours, Melbourne and Singapore were chosen as sites for the study as both are international student hubs.

International education: an economic strategy

The state of Victoria, Australia, where Melbourne is the capital city, hosts approximately 227,000 international students with numbers projected to annually increase (Victoria State Government, 2019). Most students attend public-funded or private institutions of higher learning, Vocational, Education and Training (VET) institutes or English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) colleges, while approximately 5750 students undertake non-tertiary and non-post-secondary education (e.g. high schools) (Cook, 2019). Most of the international students in Victoria are enrolled in institutions in the municipality of Melbourne with the remaining cohort attending classes on regional campuses. This has resulted in accommodation providers investing heavily in residential housing for international students. Recognizing Melbourne as an international student city, the City of Melbourne and the Victoria State Government has invested in programs dedicated to international student welfare, including the Melbourne Student Welcome Desk at Melbourne’s main airport and a support centre for international students. Known as the ‘Study Melbourne Support Centre’, this initiative provides international students with free advice and contacts concerning tenancy and work rights. These introduction initiatives to Australia capture how – at least symbolically – students are positioned to live alongside and socialize with other international students rather than Australians and Australian migrant.

More broadly, international education is an economic pillar not only for the state of Victoria and the municipality of Melbourne but for the entire country. In 2018, international education contributed AUD $33 billion to the Australian economy, making it the third highest earning foreign export, as all international students in Australia pay full fees compared to domestic students whose education is heavily subsidized by the government. Approximately 21% of Australia’s on-campus students in Australia are international (StudyMove, 2017), with the states of Victoria and New South Wales sharing half of this overall percentage (Australian Government, 2019). This contextual background highlights the circumstances in which international students find themselves: they are positioned to generate revenue alongside policies of multiculturalism and temporary visas. These factors and uncertain futures, in terms of careers and employment, shape their experiences of living, studying and forging friendships.

Transnational migration friendships

Existing research in the field of migration studies have placed importance on family and neighbourhood networks. A consequence of this narrow focus is that other forms of relationships that emerge through migrant experiences have received less attention (Conradson and Latham, 2005; Ryan, 2015). Scholarship that does focus on friendship examines more ‘lateral’ forms of mobilities: professional migration for work, international students and expatriates, where consideration has been given to population flows of the middle class or those who are relatively more affluent within and between ‘Western’ countries (Robertson, 2018; Ryan, 2015; Westcott and Vazquez Maggio, 2016). We contribute to this area of migration research by emphasizing the emotional dimension of friendships as interpersonal relationships.

Friends can provide informal sources of knowledge and support that complement formal ones such as state and community institutions and online resources, facilitating logistical resources such as information for transition upon arrival, including accommodation and employment opportunities (Conradson and Latham, 2005: 294). As anthropological and sociological literatures on friendship have observed, the informal cultivation of relationships based on choice can be more rewarding than relationships based on structures such as kinship, which incur obligations that are not assumed evenly across relations (Miller and Sinanan, 2014). Friendships are considered more recreational than relationships based on kinship: individuals choose to spend leisure time together; it is a type of relationship built on autonomy, and it is a key site for self-identification and development; it teaches individuals how to view themselves and perhaps how to realize individual and shared aspirations (Allan, 1989; Bell and Coleman, 1999; Pahl, 2000). Importantly for migrant experiences, where time spent away may be temporary, friendship is also highly contextual and may persist only in certain contexts such as work or education (Carter, 2008).

The autonomous and affective dimensions of friendship have also received less attention than the more instrumental aspects, which can facilitate economic mobility within migration. Toshiko Tsujimoto (2016: 324) argues that because studies tend to emphasize friendship as providing a source of social capital and resources for moving and settling in, friendship is viewed as emerging out of an affinity between those who have shared regions of origin and who are now part of the diaspora, but still retain a sense of shared ethnicity or collective identity. By contrast, other scholars have examined migrant friendships as the potential to forge new and different networks and experiences that have emerged out of the structures enabled by mobility (Kathiravelu and Bunnell, 2018; Robertson, 2018; Ryan, 2015). These authors capture the asymmetries that exist within friendships and locate the experiences of friendship in the intersection between place and structures that shape wider migrant experiences. Shanthi Robertson (2018) examines the ways that international students negotiate arrival and settling in with periodic return visits to their hometowns and cities. She frames these affectual and individual experiences against the backdrop of Australia’s migrant policies since the late 1990s that intertwine international education and skilled migration (Robertson, 2018: 539). Robertson (2018) draws attention to the dual nature of friendships forged within this context: they are often intense or at the other extreme tentative, and degrees of intimacy and reciprocity vary over time. Further, local friendships made (and unmade) between international students are part of a constellation of support that includes wider transnational networks of friends and family. From a perspective complementary to that of Gomes (2015), Robertson (2018: 540) observes that one of the limitations of research in the affective experiences of international students is the absence of longitudinal perspectives, which follow students’ narratives once they leave university, and how these have shaped perceptions for returning home or onward migration.

Louise Ryan (2015) draws on three streams of scholarship – social networks, migration and friendship – to analyse how professional migrants leverage ‘in-place opportunity structures’ of mobility to make new friends in new places. She argues against the idea of reciprocal networks emerging out of diasporic identities by drawing attention to the time and effort spent in navigating arrival and forging new networks that become situated sources or support and sociality over time (Ryan, 2015: 1679). Laavanya Kathiravelu and Tim Bunnell (2018: 493) further examine the temporal dimensions of emplaced friendships by asserting that although these relationships are made with the ideals of autonomy, reciprocity, trust and leisure as their basis, they are often fraught and characterized by ambivalences and tensions – aspects of friendships that are largely under-studied.

Gomes (2016, 2018, 2019a) attempts to address the ambivalences and tensions in migrant friendships, particularly temporary migrant friendships. She notes that temporary migrants forge meaningful relationships with individuals in order to navigate everyday life, while living away. These meaningful relationships create a bespoke community of needs based on key identity markers. These identity markers can be based on structural categories such as nationality or characterized by temporality, such as being a temporary, foreign worker. Identity markers, which differentiate transient migrants from ‘locals’ are drawn on to create networks of solidarity and significant relationships such as friendships, which provide logistical and affective resources for international students.

International students interviewed for this study suggested that while they were abroad, their friends were like their immediate family. For students in Australia, all international students reflected that they were primarily friends with fellow international students who were co-nationals. International students from the same region were often friends with each other, such as Malaysian students befriending students from mainland China, whereas students from different countries or regions were less likely to be friends. Yet these friendships occurred more than being friends with local Australian students. When asked why their friendship groups were solidly international students, students most frequently responded that this is was primarily due to other international students understanding their everyday lives. Furthermore, other international students were a trusted source of information. An international student interviewed in Melbourne neatly generalized: ‘Only international students know how to open a bank account.’ As international students undertaking undergraduate degrees often arrived in Australia in their teens without family members to assist them, they tended to feel most comfortable seeking out assistance from peers with shared circumstances.In Singapore, international students noted that their friendship groups were almost exclusively made up by international student co-nationals. This was a significant finding since the majority of international students had been studying in Singapore since secondary (middle) school and junior college (high school). Despite having spent more time living and studying in Singapore than the international students in Australia – who were there for an average of two years – these international students felt that being friends with co-nationals provided them with a sense of being grounded, belonging and identity. For example, Indonesian international students suggested they ‘hang out’ with other Indonesian students because Singaporean students have families to return home to while they only had each other. The same students also generalized that a societal trait of Singaporeans is to work hard and that Singaporean students expressed this through ‘mugging’ – a colloquial term for studying hard. The gulf between Indonesian and domestic students – and to a broader degree, Singaporean society – is wide despite regional (Southeast Asian) similarities and physical proximity between students and wider local society.

Friendships as relationships predominantly based on choice and autonomy contrast with perspectives of social networks as emerging out of migrant experiences. These friendships were shaped by group or community identifications, based on diasporic or ethnic relations and experience. The emotional and social support provided by friendships resonates with scholarship in migration that focuses on the circulation of care, mostly within transnational families. In the following sections, we briefly revisit themes of emotions, intimacy and care in transnational relationships. We provide an overview of the role of digital media and present in-depth illustrations that capture how international students in Melbourne and Singapore navigate place-based relationships through communication technologies.

Emotions and maintaining intimacy across mobilities

Maintaining relationships, intimacy and care within migration and mobilities research has largely been studied in relation to transnational families (Baldassar, 2016; Robertson et al., 2016; Wilding, 2006). Within this body of literature, ‘caring about’ means expressing affection and concern for family members, investing time and effort into maintaining bonds of relationships, and meeting care needs and obligations (Lynch and McLaughlin, 1995; McKay, 2007; Yeates, 2004).

An anthropological perspective views emotions as experienced in situ, contextually: personal experiences of emotions are transformed by cultural shaping and social interactions (Durkheim, 1961; Lutz and White, 1986). Grounding a consideration of emotions within cultural and social contexts lends itself to arguing that emotions, although they might be experienced by individuals, are culturally specific, and are produced by social relations in migration settings. Migrant life experiences offer a space for investigation into emotional life ‘on the move’ over time and space (Boccagni and Baldassar, 2015: 73).

Paolo Boccagni and Loretta Baldassar (2015: 74) argue that the migration process represents a powerful instigator of change in emotional life, ‘as people move away from home or between “homes”, emotions themselves are on the move. They evolve and are negotiated across novel settings, life circumstances and points of reference.’ Examining the intersection between emotional life and the cultivation and maintenance of new relations reveals some of the ways in which migrants, especially transient ones, navigate being away from home and the structural opportunities that might accompany mobilities.

The kinds of choices and capacities for expanding social networks through experiences of migration deepen an engagement with diverse kinds of mobilities. Middle-income, ‘middle-class’ or privileged mobilities have received less scholarly attention (Baldassar and Merla, 2014; Polson, 2016). Several perspectives consider the importance of acting and doing in roles of caregiving, cultivating and maintaining familial bonds across distance (Madianou, 2017, 2019; Miller, 2007; Morgan, 1996). Through their daily practices and routines – which are not bound by living in fixed locations or face-to-face proximity – members ‘do family’ by incorporating the creative efforts into their use of communication technologies (Madianou, 2017, 2019). For friendships that become solidified through migrant experiences, the practices of making and doing friendship also draw attention to the individual and creative aspects of maintaining relationships. This perspective counters observations in much of the literature on transnational families and migrant experiences that emphasize relationships based on structures such as class and nationality (Robertson, 2018; Tsujimoto, 2016).

Everyday routines that incorporate digital practices within transnational families reflect the ‘normal’ and ‘regular’ practices of ‘doing family’, which typically involve overcoming challenges associated with coordinating time over distance. By contrast, the illustrations that appear in this article reveal the different kinds of efforts that are based in shared experience of place and circumstances that might be temporary.

Digital media in friendships built on migrant experiences

Research on youth, digital media and friendship highlights reciprocity of time and effort in maintaining relationships. In her study of the virtual community Cybertown, Denise Carter (2008) shows how this ‘gift of time’ becomes important in generating trust, intimacy and disclosure, albeit solely in an online context. In their extended study of webcam practices, Daniel Miller and Jolynna Sinanan (2014) go further to explain the significance of investing efforts into routines when maintaining transnational communication depends on webcam use. Videocalls may require a sustained effort by one person or the other to overcome inconvenient times that may clash with work or other commitments. In their study, webcam use exemplified friendship as shared time, where the respondents built on school-based peer experiences as children who socialized together. The friends who were the focus of the study lived within the same region and synchronized routines using webcams. For example, friendships had begun using webcams while studying in school, having to complete the same assignment and sharing the sense that ‘we are all in the same boat’. Close friends who used webcams to speak with each other frequently described this form of communication as contributing to an emotional bond which intensified to compensate for the physical distance between them.

Other studies investigating video calls used within transnational relationships emphasize the asymmetries and tensions which emerged in digital exchanges, particularly within family rituals (Marino, 2019). Sara Marino (2019) focuses on the performative aspects of familyhood and the role of webcams in facilitating how families perform themselves to each other, where emotions are heightened, and as a result contribute to intensified feelings of belonging. Further research on the relationship between emotions, transnational relationships and digital media has also highlighted the feelings of ambivalence associated with the constant contact afforded by digital media (Alinejad, 2019; Baldassar, 2015; Cabalquinto, 2018; Madianou, 2017). Donya Alinejad (2019: 9) argues that the strategies involved in maintaining communication across distance as a way of balancing intimacy and closeness include silence, omission and absence. In a similar way, Earvin Charles Cabalquinto (2018: 41) argues that mobile devices become imbricated in the communicative tactics of maintaining intimate connections, where balancing distance and absence is inextricable from creating feelings of closeness. These authors highlight how the use and frequency of digital communications strive to keep proximity, closeness and distance at degrees that are ‘just right’. By contrast, literature on digital media and transient migrants tends to emphasize the instrumental more than the affective aspects of digital practices.

Literature on international students and their uses of digital media has predominantly focused on how they retrieve information across areas of study and everyday logistics (e.g. where to look for information regarding accommodation and health services) (Chang and Gomes, 2017). In their work on Chinese international students in Melbourne, Fran Martin and Fazal Rizvi (2014) argue that digital media create a ‘glocal’ experience for international students. Although they were physically in Melbourne, students were also virtually in China, since they often immersed themselves in the Chinese social media environment, which incorporated their friends in China and their Chinese international student friends residing in Melbourne. Similarly, in her work on international students and digital media, Gomes (2019a, 2019b) describes how international students felt involved in the lives of the friends they had left behind through lurking rather than direct messaging. Students scrolled through their social media contacts’ photographs and posts to keep up to date with what their friends were doing and with what was happening in their home countries, in almost real time. The function of these friendships was twofold: they were places for sharing and recognizing relatable experiences; and, were sites for seeking information on specific or general issues pertaining to living abroad. Generally, friendships are important for international students to adjust to the environment in which they are living and studying for their ongoing well-being, and digital media can play a significant role in this.

‘With a little help from my friends’: international students and social media for finding friends and maintaining friendships

In this section, we present illustrative examples of how friendship networks and friendships through social media are part of the strategies of living and studying abroad. The stories that follow reflect themes that have been long-standing in migration research, such as belonging and navigating identity, but they also reflect the points at which digital media become imbricated in providing instrumental and affective support. These examples also reflect Marino’s (2015) notion of ‘digital togetherness’: a particular feeling of belonging and shared identity through sharing experiences, being of the same nationality, being online, speaking the same language and being away from home. Further, we highlight how friendships are navigated based on autonomy and choice, which mitigates feelings of ambivalence and obligation that are characteristic of relationships within transnational families.

Conclusion: transient friendships in transient migrant experiences

In this article, we have explored the relationship between the experiences of international students, the varying friendships they construct and maintain, and the emotions that become part of these relationships. We have located our discussion in the scholarly literature in digital media and migration that tend to highlight kinship, family and neighbourhood-based relationships, where the migration experience is characterized by long-term norms of reciprocity and obligation. By contrast, friendships forged by international students, as a more transient migrant population, tend to be characterized by sharing mutual time over a common interest, where the positive affective dimensions tend to be ‘in the now’, present and short lived. The support provided by, and also the fragility of friendships developed in situ are exacerbated when social media are introduced to the creation and maintenance of friendships. These relationships tend to be more instrumental or purpose oriented, where seeking information becomes a primary motivation for engaging with social media networks.

We have presented illustrations of diverse student cohorts as an example of middle-class migration, where exercising autonomy and choice within lifestyles experienced as part of being an international student is part of achieving aspirations for upward mobility. Our illustrations provide contrast between face-to-face relationships as providing support and feelings of belonging, and uses of social media, which tend to provide an informal and familiar means to access information. International students deliberately employ social media platforms to reaffirm their sense of cultural identity, feelings of belonging or to remain informed of news at events for connections ‘at home’ as well as logistically supporting their daily routines while living away. However, our study has been limited by the lack of longitudinal data to indicate whether these friendships endure once students have returned home. As friendships form an integral lens for self-identification and development (Allan, 1989), the lasting impacts of friendships forged within these transient experiences remain to be seen. Further research is also needed to gauge more in-depth exploration of the intersection of digital media and migration where the experience and expression of emotions from cross-cultural perspectives are an explicit focus.