Paper short abstract:

Mobile Facebook and always-on webcam transform the internet from a means to connect people in distinct locations to a place within which people in some sense live. This can destabilise our assumptions about the significance of presence and raise fears about attention and transience.

Paper long abstract:

. The ideology of home and the domestic are based on several presumptions about the implications of mere physical presence. Evidence from the Philippines, Trinidad and London suggests that the advent of new media may produce a Copernican shift in perception. With always-on webcam and Facebook available through mobile media such as the smart phone we may be transforming the internet from a technology that connects people in distinct places, to a site within which people find that they in some sense live. This can destabilise our presumptions about the home as a domestic space. First they lead to uncertainty around the implications of presence and the attention of the co-present individual. Is the other person actually there or there for you? Then the teenager in their bedroom may be physically at home but seems more absent than present. An inability to relate to new digital technologies can lead to digital exclusion and alienation or sense of redundancy. Rather than linking people separated by migration new media can make it more difficult to be reconciled to absence, lead to a failure to relate to one's new home and increase the sense of ambivalence and transience. In all these ways new media confirm the suggestion in the workshop abstract that new forms of the domestic are emerging as signs of disquiet and the disrupted conditions of modernity.