Digital media and East Asian diaspora

Transnational mobility of young people from East Asia has increased massively since the 1990s, and women now constitute a considerable proportion of this cross-border flow and diasporic population. Providing detailed empirical data on Korean, Japanese and Chinese women, this chapter explores the highly visible yet little studied phenomenon of women’s transnational mobility and its relationship to the impact of media consumption in everyday life. It draws attention to the digital media and mediated networks that facilitate women’s transnational movements creating new and complex conditions for identity formation in digital diaspora. The digital media, mostly taken for granted, go along with diasporic subjects. This plausibly powerful capacity of the media, deeply ingrained in what people take for granted, should be recognized in any attempt to understand the present phenomenon of transnational mobility in a digital age.