Mobile Communication and the Family

Sun Sun Lim (PhD, LSE) is Associate Professor at the Department of Communications and New Media and Assistant Dean at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. She studies the social implications of technology domestication by young people and families, charting the ethnographies of their Internet and mobile phone use. Her recent research has focused attention on understudied and marginalised populations including young children, youths-at-risk and migrants. She also conducts research on new media literacies, with a special focus on literacy challenges in parental mediation and young people’s Internet skills. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Asia including in China, Indonesia, Singapore and South Korea. She has  published more than 50 articles and book chapters in notable edited volumes and leading international journals including the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media and New Media & Society. She is an Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Children and Media, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Social Media + Society and Mobile Media & Communication. Her other book Asian Perspectives on Digital Culture: Emerging Phenomena, Enduring Concepts (Routledge) is forthcoming in 2016.

Chapter 1: Asymmetries in Asian Families’ Domestication of Mobile Communication.- Values.- Chapter 2: Desiring Mobiles, Desiring Education: Mobile Phones and Families in a Rural Chinese Town.- Chapter 3: Balancing Religion, Technology and Parenthood: Indonesian Muslim Mothers’ Supervision of Children’s Internet Use.- Chapter 4: Helping the helpers: Understanding Family Storytelling by Domestic Helpers in Singapore.- Intimacies.- Chapter 5: Mobile Technology and "Doing Family" in a Global World: Indian Migrants in Cambodia.- Chapter 6: The Cultural Appropriation of Smartphones in Korean Transnational Families.- Chapter 7: Empowering Interactions, Sustaining Ties: Vietnamese Migrant Students’ Communication with Left-Behind Family and Friends.- Strategies.- Chapter 8: Restricting, Distracting, and Reasoning: Parental Mediation of Young Children’s Use of Mobile Communication Technology in Indonesia.- Chapter 9: Paradoxes in the Mobile Parenting Experiences of Filipino Mothers inDiaspora.- Chapter 10: The Value of the Life Course Perspective in the Design of Mobile Technologies for Older Adults.

“The book clarifies the importance of mobile connectivity among a variety of immigrant groups, making the book relevant well beyond Asia. … The book’s greatest strengths are that it extends the focus of migration and mobile communication research from North America and Europe to Asia, and that it takes seriously the understudied groups of migrants. … the book aids understanding why people who cross borders and leave their families behind … have a firm grip on their smartphones.” (Sakari Taipale, Asian Journal of Communication, June, 2016)