Polymedia: Towards a new theory of digital media in interpersonal communication

TLDR

The article proposes a new theory of polymedia to explain how digital media affect interpersonal communication. The theory is grounded in comparative ethnographic examples from Filipino and Caribbean transnational families. The study shows that users view new media as an affordance‑rich environment, shifting focus from individual medium constraints to the social, emotional, and moral implications of media choice, thereby linking medium selection to the experience and management of interpersonal relationships and redefining the relationship between social and technology.

Abstract

This article develops a new theory of polymedia in order to understand the consequences of digital media in the context of interpersonal communication. Drawing on illustrative examples from a comparative ethnography of Filipino and Caribbean transnational families, the article develops the contours of a theory of polymedia. We demonstrate how users avail themselves of new media as a communicative environment of affordances rather than as a catalogue of ever proliferating but discrete technologies. As a consequence, with polymedia the primary concern shifts from the constraints imposed by each individual medium to an emphasis upon the social, emotional and moral consequences of choosing between those different media. As the choice of medium acquires communicative intent, navigating the environment of polymedia becomes inextricably linked to the ways in which interpersonal relationships are experienced and managed. Polymedia is ultimately about a new relationship between the social and the technological, rather than merely a shift in the technology itself.