%0 Journal Article
%T Careful Co
%A Donya Alinejad
%J Social Media + Society
%@ 2056-3051
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/2056305119854222
%X This article investigates how migrants experience ¡°co-presence¡± with their loved ones through social media. On the basis of empirical investigation, the article engages with current debates about how social media shape emotional experiences. It draws on short-term ethnographic research of everyday social media practices among second-generation Turkish-Dutch migrants who grew up in the Netherlands and migrated to Istanbul in adulthood. The article focuses on transnational family intimacy within this migration phenomenon as an in-depth case study for understanding the role of social media platforms and mobile devices in producing emotional experiences of togetherness under conditions of long-distance, long-term separation. The author shows how social media platforms afford not only ambient, fast-paced, background communications¡ªwhich have been emphasized in the literature, thus far¡ªbut also more direct, immersive, conversational modes of communication. The article argues that people¡¯s practices of carefully shifting between these modes of social media communication produce their experiences of transnational emotional intimacy. The author develops the notion of careful co-presence through a discussion of how social media practices that produce intimacy reflect both discerning selectivity and emotional care. This argument builds on scholarship that has advanced practice-based approaches to understanding how emotion is mediated through digital media
%K emotional affordances
%K social media practices
%K transnational migrants
%K careful co-presence
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305119854222