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Living Across Connectivity Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 June 2025
‘I’m sorry, Mum. My journey abroad hasn't succeeded’ was the last message Pham Thi Tra My sent on 23 October 2019 to her mother via LINE, a few moments before losing her life together with other 38 Vietnamese migrants inside a container en route to the United Kingdom. Falling prey to human trafficking, Pham was travelling from Vietnam to the United Kingdom through China, France and Belgium (Irish Independent 2019; Gavard-Suaire 2020). Yet, lacking signals inside a container when entering the United Kingdom from Belgium, that message remained unsent. The inhumanity suffered by Pham and her fellow migrants tragically brings us to the reality that connectivity enabled by smartphones may be a promise lost to the reality of a physical world that disconnects home and abroad.
Growing Digital Connectivity
Digital connectivity has become part and parcel of migrants’ daily experiences. Moving beyond a traditional push-pull approach, which portrays migrants as economic agents seeking opportunities and betterment in the society of arrival, transnationalism offers a different analytical framework for migration studies (Glick Schiller et al. 1992; Vertovec 2009). It overcomes the long-lasting dichotomy between societies of departure and arrival by showing how transnational spaces are connected and interlinked socially, economically or culturally (Levitt 2001). A latest input to its theoretical pertinence is the significantly improved digital connectivity enabled by using social media platforms downloaded onto smartphones. In tandem with this ongoing digital transformation of migrants’ everyday life and their social, economic and cultural practices, scholarship about digital connectivity has developed at a strong rhythm over the last decade. Migrants use their online platforms for socialization and interaction, which affect their familial relations and affections, intimacy, gender identity, sexual practices and sense of belonging (Cassidy and Wang 2018; Chan 2021; Madianou 2016). Online platforms are also used for networking and community building, financial transactions, commerce and entrepreneurship (Martin 2017; Zani 2019, 2020), as well as activism and mobilization. Dana Diminescu's seminal work on the ‘connected migrant’ (2008) and Sandra Ponzanesi's important scholarship about migrant digital connectivity (2019) and digital diasporas (2020) illustrate this nexus between migration and digitality. Their works have guided this growing field, which is characterized by a new encounter, or even an overlap, between migration and media studies.
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