Visible, controlled, and persistent: An affordances approach to understanding social media for transnational parenting among migrant mothers

Social media facilitates the emergence of various virtual caregiving practices, including mediated mothering. However, these virtual practices are often theorized in the shadow of their offline version, perpetuating the oversimplified conclusion that mediated mothering is a substandard attempt at recreating physical, co-present parenting. To understand mediated parenting as an online phenomenon, this chapter adopts the affordances approach to investigate the sociotechnical consequences of social media for transnational parenting. This approach shifts the analytical focus to how migrant mothers reflexively interpret and leverage the actionable potentials of social media - affordances - to redefine rather than reproduce family caregiving during migration. Drawing on participant observation and narrative interviews with 22 Indonesian mothers in Hong Kong, this article discusses three affordances characterizing mothering practices on social media: visibility, controlled connectivity, and persistence. The findings demonstrate how affordances reinforce emergent patterns of virtual caregiving with the potential to destabilize the socio-normative idea of family.