Читать книгу Metaphors of Internet - Группа авторов - Страница 19
Оглавлениеtijana hirsch
“My kids say ‘shit’ occasionally but pronounced ‘sheet’ so at least I know it is not coming from me as the only English speaking parent in our house. Unfortunately I can’t blame gan1 for the ‘for fucks sake’ usage from our little ones—whoops.”
Dania is a transnational settler,2 a working, now multilingual, professional woman, and a mother to four daughters. She and her Swedish-English-Israeli husband relocated to Israel in 2007, when Dania was in advanced stages of her first pregnancy. I met her at a ‘mommy and me’ gathering for English speakers initially organized by one of the fellow moms whom I met through a Yahoo Groups posting. Since, Dania and I have met many times, with our growing families and alone, and have over the years had many conversations, online and off, on the topic of migration: the translocation, the settlement, and the language(s). In this piece, I focus on how Dania embraced her networked life “in media” (Deuze, 2011)—in particular in Facebook—after arriving to Israel. I briefly pan, scan, and zoom in ←55 | 56→on (Stephens, 1998) her trajectories as an immigrant and a mother, and how those shaped her life in the internet.
Dania already had a Facebook account when she moved to Israel, and considered herself an active internet user. Facebook reached 100 million users in 2008, when Dania’s first child was born, and 500 million active users in 2010, when her twins and the Israeli Facebook Baby-Community she helped to co-create were born. As the babies and Facebook grew, so did the number of communities that Dania as an immigrant mother needed, created or joined. Some of the mothers, who had initially been involved in the Baby community with Dania, created a Kid community, then the City Specific Kid community, then many more after that. For Dania, Facebook became a tool for co-creating a digitally mediated and networked communal life. Each community served as a (co)created, (re)used, shared place that different users frequented depending on their stable and/or fleeting interests, needs, desires and hopes. Dania’s description of that period of her life paints a picture of fluid movement between various Facebook communities while by those very moves creating those communities and their boundaries. She used the space(s) as needed—for respite and information—as part of her being both an immigrant and a mother. “My Israeli aunt came over and was shocked that our six year old after three months in school could not read fluently … given that Hebrew is her third language I decided to ignore.”
Like so many others, she used her Facebook communities as an informational tool to ask for and get recommendations for services, places, and businesses within the new, initially strange place that Israel was for her. Similarly, Dania and her peers entered their Facebook communities as places to overcome isolation and loneliness that often comes with early stages of both motherhood and relocation. There they could share their challenges with pregnancies, birth, nursing, and childcare; seek advice or just vent. As Dania made her way to the stores or businesses recommended to her in the Facebook communities, her understanding of the geography of her own life became more and more entwined with the information, the sharing, and the communities themselves. Her mothering was shaped by the advice and experiences of similar others, those new to the country and sharing the difficult task of raising their children in a linguistically, culturally, and geographically new environment. These Facebook communities permeated and represented their lived experiences to an extent where Dania no longer made sense of them as tools or places, but rather, together, her way of being. Nowhere is it clearer than within the City-Specific Facebook Baby Community, where the internet as a tool and place most obviously collide. Listening to how Dania describes the City Specific Facebook Baby Community, it becomes obvious that it was a community online, as opposed to an online community. Of course, members utilized the community as a tool for scheduling and updating others regarding meet-ups, events, and gatherings in physical, material places. However, in the process, these scheduling ←56 | 57→conversations turned a tool into a place for a much-needed chat or where one could vent and be heard. “Let’s do the park tomorrow. It looks like the weather will hold for another day and I am sure there will be plenty of rainy days to come where we need to stay indoors” could invite a response as simple as: “we’ll be there x” to: “looks like we won’t make it today …. struck down with a bug have fun x” to “A couple of our kids are still coughing and wheezing badly after getting through another virus or flu … any experiences on what help them …” As suggested by Markham (2003) these tools for reaching others transformed into a place (and places) to be, hang out, and have a chat. The transition is fluid and natural, not one way. So one could return back to the understanding that this was a conduit or even a prosthesis.
Through seemingly simple observations, Dania and others entered deep explorations of what it meant to be raising their “ ‘Israeli’ kids” while navigating motherhood as a transnational settler (Hirsch & Lee, 2018) in Israel. “What is it with our ‘Israeli’ kids” Dania once posted: “… none of them, including ours, eat potatoes … which are a huge staple of British kids’ diets. …weird. …just an observation!” Talk such as this made the communities into places of belonging, wherein similar observations would make sense, be understood, perhaps even eagerly welcomed, as they allowed the members to briefly pause and focus on their experiences of mothering in a new place, maybe sprinkle it with some comic relief. So, when one of Dania’s peers, who was new to Israel and its preschool system, turned to her trusted community with how “mortified” she was by the language her child was picking up in preschool, Dania responded with the curse word related confession that started this piece. She shared, cared, and provided some comic relief to a mother who was, in that moment, struggling with the newness of it all.
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1 Gan—transliterated Hebrew word for daycare/preschool/Pre-K/ Kindergarten.
2 Transnational Settler denotes transnational living patterns in which permanency in the current transnational living situation is a factor but not a given, i.e. a return to the country of origin and/or additional host countries is possible. Transnational settlers maintain significant relationships in countries of origin and/or prior countries of residence, while forging new relationships and viewing their current host country/living situation as potentially permanent (cf. Hirsch and Lee, 2018).
