Making Melbourne: digital connectivity and international students' experience of locality

Recent scholarship across a range of disciplines has sought to understand how people’s relationship with place is increasingly produced by their interactions with digital entertainment and communications media. This scholarship has pointed to the capacity of social media to foster new ways of experiencing locality, culture and belonging, including for mobile populations and transnational communities. In this article, we draw upon original qualitative research to explore how international students in Australian higher education from China and India use local and transnational media to experience, thus produce, Melbourne as a place. We show how for this generation of international students their senses of both home and Australia are fragmented, deterritorialized and syncretic, woven in and through each other, as the Australia that they inhabit is fundamentally conditioned by the fluctuating mediated co-presence of home, derived from the simultaneity offered by digital media. Such a proposal goes beyond arguments about media’s role in the pluralization and hybridization of places, suggesting a more fundamental transformation in the very meaning of place itself as a result of the experiential ubiquity of transnational media connections