The thesis of this book crystallizes the findings of Madianou and Miller’s research into the use of diverse online media by the Filipino diasporic community and their families. Driven by a simple yet well-defined motive, their book taps into convergent media and migration as two of the most important areas for studying transnational human flows. The focus on the Filipino diaspora is well selected; as documented in chapter three, the contextual significance of the Philippines is that its long history of women consigned to foreign places as domestic helpers is closely associated with economic globalization and its division of labor. Motherhood (and in a few cases, fatherhood) becomes the essence of the subject matter—how long-term and separated relationships between migrant women and their family would be negotiated through different online media. Summoning rigorous ethnographic data, the book demonstrates the gems of such labor-intensive methods well, as chapters four to six detail how sampled Filipino families engage in different media forms to maintain interaction. These narratives of human lives testify to the authors’ theorization of “polymedia,” a notion which the authors set out in chapter four, to be discussed more in chapters seven through nine.
