Distant close ties: Jamaican immigrants, mediated communication, and the primacy of voice

Jamaican immigrants in New York City and returned migrants in Jamaica have a wide array of information and communication technologies that they can deploy to communicate with their close ties overseas. Close ties were self-defined were variously defined as kin and non-kin, and their communication was frequent, intense, and enduring. Telephonic communication was used most frequently to meet these individuals’ needs for synchronicity, spontaneity, vocal cues, and immediate turn-taking. Such reliance on the telephone reinforced their communicative goals for relational communication such as phatic, routine conversations, intimate romantic and platonic exchanges, and conflict enactment and resolution. Jamaican immigrants and non-immigrants alike developed strategies to cope with separation from their close ties by exercising emotional pragmatism and emotional resiliency. They also engaged in acts of commitment and reciprocity to support their communicative goals, to reaffirm their bonds with each other, to exchange material resources, as they negotiated the distance between them. As a qualitative thematic analysis, this research focuses on two countries as research sites: the U.S.A. and Jamaica. It seeks to discover the ways in which Jamaican returned migrants in Jamaica and Jamaican immigrants in New York City communicate with their close ties overseas, and the information and communication technologies they engage to do so. This study employed communication ecology (Ball-Rokeach, 1998) as its theoretical framework to inform this two-country study of communicative goals and ICT choices. This qualitative study arranged respondents in pairs and interviewed each partner. Face-to-face interviews, using purposive snowball samples inform the findings of this project.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Marian Stewart Titu