Mediated sense of place: Effects of mediation and mobility on the place perception of German professionals in Singapore

Abstract

This article examines the differences that digital media (Internet and mobile communications) and mobility create for sense of place. Based on in-depth interviews with 30 German professionals in Singapore, it analyses digital media choices and use during the relocation and settlement process in the destination of migration and the effect of these practices on migrants’ perception of place. It demonstrates how the primary reason to use digital media conversed from individual interests and needs in relation to the relocation and/or initial exploration of the city to the social and emotional ramifications of their use the longer the interviewees stayed in Singapore. It makes a theoretical contribution to the understanding of how digital and offline places combine in the construction of sense of place, how the digital sphere affects engagements with place, attachment to it and sensuous experiences of it.

‘Refugees are not welcome’: Digital racism, online place-making and the evolving categorization of Syrians in Turkey

“…Today, interaction has moved from streets to cyberspace, where digital urbanism, deep mapping, neogeography, and e-government converge to create interactive online spaces. Digital place-making also involves the production of place through its representations on the Internet (see Bork-Hüffer, 2016;Karduni and Sauda, 2020).…”

(Cyber)Bullying in schools – when bullying stretches across cON/FFlating spaces

“…As has been noted earlier (e.g. by Crang, Crang, and May 1999;Leander and McKim 2003;Jackson and Valentine 2014;Bork-Hüffer 2016), an analysis of the coming together of digital and offline spaces must not cause us to dismiss their divergent spatialities, specificities, heterogeneities and multiplicities (cf. Massey 2005), which is thus an additional focus of our analysis.…”

Mobile communicating place and place-inscribed communicative mobilities: Shaping alternative consumer cultures in mobile media communication

“…Mobilities of media devices complicate how mobile populations or sedentary individuals sense and make places. Mobile media afford diverse modes of belonging to and perceptions of places, such as through virtual navigation and relocation among migrant professionals (Bork-Hüffer, 2016), sense of belonging to a community that extends across a series of local places for global expatriates (Polson, 2015), place-based labor migrant identity across China and other countries (Xie & Witteborn, 2019), and dual public and private spatial imagination among lesbians in HK (Choy, 2018). Moreover, because mobile media devices are nowadays primarily built to represent and react to places of operation and people’s networking, synchronization, and coordination via locative media, new relations with places and spaces are emerging (Humphreys, 2007), such as “net locality” (Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011) and “hybrid mediated spatiality” (de Souza e Silva & Sheller, 2014).…”

“…However, mobile communication studies rarely explicate such mobility–place interactions and the notions of their interconnectedness. Meanwhile, existing research concerning mobile place-making (Bork-Hüffer, 2016; Polson, 2015), mobile-device-enabled spatiality (de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2012; Humphreys, 2007), and mobile-device-enabled mobilities (Choy, 2018; Frith, 2012) has paid more attention to the hallmark of shifting experiences of mobilities and spaces, thus treating practices of mobile communication as relatively fixed and taken-for-granted contexts in their discussions. To fill the literature gap, this research foregrounds the mobile communication processes/practices that alter the nexus of place-making and enactment of mobilities (physical, virtual, and imaginative forms of mobility).…”