Ties that Bond: Mobile Phones and the Chinese in Prato

Abstract

Increasingly, researchers are amazed by the extensive adoption of mobile phones by migrants worldwide (Benítez, 2006; Kluzer & Haché, 2009; Panagakos & Horst, 2006). This applies especially to the use of mobile phones by internal and international Chinese migrants (Qiu, 2008). A plethora of research has focused on the effect of the ‘mobile phone explosion’ (Madianou & Miller, 2011b, p. 461), something Katz (2006) refers to as ‘mobile magic’ that includes efficiencies in personal communications; personal and cultural identity; improvement of the lives of labourers; the democratisation of knowledge sources; and social, economic and political well-being. The ‘information revolution’ has been overtaken by a ‘mobile phone revolution’. This prompted Damm (2008, p. 2) to claim that ‘ethnography has entered cyberspace, the ultimate domain of collapsed time and space’.