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xix Introduction to B Being Available and Reachable Research and popular opinion on what the new communication media can do or what they are doing, usually pay attention on how easy people can maintain relationships in the contemporary world of the internet and the mobile phone. Being Available and Reachable falls within this research framework and interest; it examines and reveals what has become of Cameroonian transnational friendship and family social ties in the age of the mobile phone and the internet. These are ties that are dis-embedded from co-local sociality owing to the fact that one partner has migrated out of Cameroon. Evidently, the relevance of the book is within the context of changing historical and technological reality that space between home and abroad is virtually shrinking and opening up avenues of communication and virtual interaction that were not possible about one and a half decades ago (Portes 1999, Smith 2002, Burrell & Anderson 2008). The emergent new forms of social interactions as described in this book uncover what it means to be directly available and reachable across borders for Cameroonians who share their new media contacts with people who are identified either as friends or members of the family. A study on availability and reachability through the new media develops within the context of studies that focus on the significance of the media in transforming urban cultures in Africa under the theme Passages of Culture funded by the VW Foundation. While investigating what has become of the Cameroonian transnational social ties, the work digs deep and unveils the localisation of these media. This means, the significance of the study is more connected to these global tools of interaction within the localised setting of Cameroon cross-border ties. One example of such localisation of the global media is seen in Heather Horst’s description of the mobile phone as having an “unadulterated blessing” in the Jamaican transnational families (Horst 2006:143). Her conclusion derives mainly from the fact that the new communication media de-emphasise distance across borders by offering the chance for communication and sociality for people who are close. Sociality is narrowly used as a variant term for interaction and is meant to convey the reality that people still interact instantly even when they do not share the same physical space anymore. Sociality conveys the message that actors interact based on existing relationships and that they have intentions and expectations when they use the new media to nurture their social xx relationships. It should not be confused with sociability which describes liveliness and the ease at interacting with others. The introduction orients the book on theoretical, technological, historical and methodological issues which situate the work within existing anthropological questions on ICT and social relationships. There is plenty of theoretical and empirical literature that describes and details the interaction of the new communication media with the life-worlds of the migrants and non-migrants, their imaginations, transformation of subjectivities and identities. This literature also talks of the (re)organisation of social life around the information and communication technologies (Miller and Slater 2000; Horst 2006; Horst and Miller 2006; Wanning 2005; Appadurai 1991; Ginsburg et al 2002). Unfortunately, cases on transnational social relationships that incorporate migrants and non-migrants’ perspectives are still lacking. Many studies have either focused on the migrants or the nonmigrants . This book attempts to fill the gap in that it is based on multi-sited fieldwork conducted among the migrants and non-migrants. The field sites and methodology are mentioned later in the Introduction. Before studies on transnational social practices and relationships gained much currency especially in migration studies, many scholarly works on migrants speculated on their integration in the host societies with the assumption that they were disinterested in social ties that are located at the place of origin. This assumption, purely unsupported by empirical finding, is challenged by practices of transnationalism; rather than cut all ties and alliances, those who move and those who stay back keep in touch and increasingly so in the age of the mobile phone, the internet and cheap means of transportation especially travel by air. In other words, these communication and transportation technologies potentially liberate people from restrictions ‘imposed’ by physical space and time by offering them the chance to easily maintain ties across borders (Vertovec 2009; Schiller 2004:462; Faist 2004:247). The communication between families and friends across borders has gained prominence in anthropology considering the fact that interacting across these borders has become part...

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