DigiMig Webinar: Networked Mobility Divide among Older Migrants and their Fragmented Social Networks

This presentation by Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto offers a critical framework to better understand and rethink the digital divide by centring the networked and transnational lives of ageing migrants and their social circles navigating a digital and global society. In this webinar, he critically investigates the ways 96 older Filipino Australians in Victoria, Australia, and their social networks in Victoria, Australia and across the Philippines navigate the consequences of the digital divide. By presenting several vignettes, the study unravels how the participants’ changing physical, psychological, social and environmental conditions over time and space inform and reconfigure perceptions, experiences, and negotiations of digital media use. Additionally, it pays close attention to the ways datafication reproduces affective communicative opportunities and challenges, ranging from enabling networked connections or personalised contents to amplifying digital threats. Importantly, the findings reveal the coping mechanisms deployed by the participants to address and negotiate exclusion and vulnerability in digital environments. By analysing these insights through multiple lenses, including mobilities (Urry, 2007), socio-digital inequalities (Helsper, 2021), and digital ageism (Rosales et al., 2023), the study proposes the conceptual lens of a ‘networked mobility divide’ to capture and articulate how relational, situated, affective and uneven mobilities are produced, embedded and constantly negotiated through an assemblage of tightly entwined human and non-human entities influenced by social, cultural, material, economic, technological, and structural forces.