Social Technologies

Social Media and Information Technologies for Human Interaction and Communication by @bacigalupe

January 17, 2012 • 7:51 am 0

Adding, Not the Same as Including: Making Family Research Relevant for All

Adding, Not the Same as Including: Making Family Research Relevant for All by Gonzalo Bacigalupe (2012) in The Family Psychologist, 28(1), 12-14

As a researcher that holds a strong allegiance to a non-dominant group, I have had the opportunity to become a member of the privileged. However, I am often reminded that I am truly not a part of the ruling class. Despite being a highly educated tenured faculty member, I can still be a subaltern—the other. Every now and then, a university adjunct professor will automatically assume that I am one of the cleaning staff and will address me as such if I speak Spanish with the Dominican janitor who picks up the trash every evening at my office. In the struggle with marginalization, as one of the few professors in my college who can claim a similar heritage to the janitor (although he cannot claim some of my privileges), I am often compelled to name reality, to deconstruct it, and to be attentive to what is silencing the vulnerable. Being a subaltern, therefore, makes me particularly aware of institutionalized “isms” and being able to see what is generally invisible to the privileged is nothing less than a privilege too. It teaches me to pay attention to how stereotypes define people and how institutionalized racism continues to play a role in educational and healthcare institutions.

CONTINUE READING (PDF).

Filed under: Community, Family, Psychology, Research, Transnational

December 21, 2011 • 11:56 am 3

Los 80: Fiction, Reality, Memory and Trauma in Chile.

Los 80: Fiction, Reality, Memory and Trauma in Chile.

Gonzalo Bacigalupe published in Spanish at Movimiento Generacion 80 Blog

Memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously. … That’s why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory. (Isabel Allende in the House of the Spirits)

The fourth season of the Chilean television series Los 80 (dirigida por Boris Quercia) ended this week with record ratings in viewership. The reaction to the series by television viewers took over social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook. Despite the dissatisfaction of many with the fictional plot based on historical facts, the memories that the series evoked and its success debunked the notion that Chileans wish to be amnesic about their past. For some of us, the Chilean diaspora abroad, watching the series through an Internet videostream, watching the series is even a more intense experience that is not softened with the interruption of shampoo and car commercial spots.

For my generation, the one that lived its adolescence during the worst repressive years of the military dictatorship and then played an active role in the opposition to Pinochet during the 1980s, the series brings back the emotional tone and the remembering of the crazy repressive circumstances in which we grew up from adolescence to adulthood.

Some of the facts may be distorted to make the series more palatable to the large majority of Chileans. However, the plot as a whole, not only reminds us of a military and police repressive regime via its thread of detention, torture, and death, but also the authoritarian tone that permeated every institution—family, school, and work. Reflecting about this was in itself a dangerous task even in families. Questioning your teacher could be costly academically or personally. And obviously, to stand pacifically protesting the detention and torture of a classmate or friend was considered a delinquent act.

Los 80 move us to struggle with the difficult task of identifying the torturer with an actual human being, a person who may in its daily life have similar feelings to the rest of us. The plural identity of those who held the authority during that time is hard to accept though. This is particularly difficult since those responsible and those that defended the government-institutionalized violence have not made amends, have not offered to restore some of what was lost to the family of those that were victimized, nor have fully acknowledged the pain that they inflicted on their compatriots.

The fictional plot intermingled with radio and television footage offers us the opportunity to learn about, quoting Allende again, “the deepest truths with the lies of fiction”.  Andres Wood, the producer of Los 80—the director of the most acclaimed Chilean film dealing with the aftermath of the dictatorship from the perspective of a child—Machuca—leads us into reclaiming a piece of history that is made even more painful today in lieu of the continuous and ferocious rejection of the traumatic truth by those who still defend the military dictatorship human rights violation legacy.

To still be a witness to the denial of historical facts and the traumatic consequences, in commentaries by television viewers is, however, excruciating. The denial is vast. There is little acknowledgement by many of my fellow compatriots of the suffering by the families of the disappeared, the existence of an immense group of exiles who are not accepted as part of today’s Chile, and the lives of so many that were forever changed because of a savage dictatorship. For those of us who survived, suffered through, and/or were witness of the tragedy around us, the denial and lack of accountability is tremendously painful. The denial of facts and its consequences is a reminder that reconstructing memory in itself does not necessarily still change the soul of a large segment of the Chilean population.

The series is not at fault. Its success is based on the ability to engage the various truths that have been constructed based on historical facts. The death of a journalist as form of vengeance on the part of the Chilean secret service is undeniable. However, for some the facts are still considered a fiction, are minimized, or justified in the name of patriotic unity, economic development, or any other utilitarian goal that sustains the atrocious human rights legacy of the military dictatorship.

Version en Espanol: Movimiento Generacion 80 Blog

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Filed under: Community, Family, Psychology, Research, technology, Transnational, , , , , ,

May 11, 2011 • 9:47 am 0

Children Playing with iPhones

Filed under: Family, Psychology, Research, technology

April 14, 2011 • 4:38 pm 0

Virtualizing Intimacy: Information Communication Technologies and Transnational Families in Therapy

Virtualizing Intimacy: Information Communication Technologies and Transnational Families in Therapy
By Gonzalo Bacigalupe and Susan Lambe
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Download as PDF


All abstracts are available in Spanish and Mandarin Chinese on Wiley Online Library (http:// wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/famp). Please pass this information on to your international colleagues and students.

Information communication technologies (ICTs) are a ubiquitous feature of immigrant family life. Affordable, widely accessible, and highly adaptable ICTs have transformed the immigrant experience into a transnational process with family networks redesigned but not lost. Being a transnational family is not a new phenomenon. Transnationalism, however, has historically been reserved for the wealthier professional and political immigrant class who were able to freely travel and use expensive forms of communication before the emergence of accessible technologies. This paper systematically reviews the research literature to investigate the potential impact of ICTs on the lives of transnational families and how these families utilize them. The wide penetration of ICTs also puts into question some of the ways in which scholars have conceptualized the immigrant experience. The appropriate use of technology in family therapy should strengthen culturally competent and equity-based approaches to ad- dress the needs of these families. A family therapy with a transnational family illuminates some of the potential that these technologies introduce in the practice of relational clinicians.

Keywords: Immigration; Families; Transnational; Information Communication Technologies Fam Proc 50:12-26, 2011

An increasing number of recent immigrants maintain intense connections with their countries and extended families. (Falicov, 2007, p. 157)

In her seminal Family Process article, Celia Falicov draws on migration studies to formulate an ecosystemic and culturally affirmative therapeutic framework for use with immigrant families. Falicov briefly addresses the impact of information com- munication technologies (ICTs) in shaping immigrant family communications not- withstanding geographical and time barriers. However, this is not at the core of her thesis and requires further consideration. Owing to the advances and wide availability of ICTs in the last decade, these technologies have not only influenced families’ relations but have changed families’ identities as well. For instance, families make core life cycle as well as mundane decisions with members located in different countries.

In the recent past, only a minority of immigrant families were able to maintain continuous exchanges and communication with their relatives abroad. Unlike political refugees or economic immigrants, upper-level executives, diplomats, and other weal thy families could afford the cost of frequent travel as well as expensive phone calls. The mainstreaming of ICTs, which are tools available to most immigrants, has increasingly transformed these families into transnational entities that maintain un- interrupted social ties across national borders. Like Falicov and others in family therapy (Hardy & Laszloffy, 2002; McGoldrick & Hardy, 2008), we concur with the principle that including community and sociopolitical contexts is essential to a sound ecosystemic assessment and intervention. Thus, an equity-based and ecosystemic framework informs our analysis of the impact of technologies on immigrant families. We propose that ICTs involve deep changes in immigrants’ lives. Consequently, family psychology and family therapy concepts that have been used to characterize the psychological and relational make up of the immigrant experience may require revision in these new circumstances.

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Filed under: Family, Psychology, Research, technology, Transnational

April 4, 2011 • 3:39 pm 0

I am working on the impact that the ICTs have on family relations

Ikerbasque researcher: Gonzalo Bacigalupe

Gonzalo2

What’s your research agenda?

There are several projects I am working on as a result of becoming an Ikerbasque Research Professor. I am very passionate about one project I have been able to write, prepare proposals, and carry on fieldwork. The general inquiry questions asks what is the impact that the adoption of information communication technologies (ICTs)  have on family relations. We know a lot about computer-mediated-communication from an individual perspective but very little on how family process is modified and how in turn the same family processes impact ICTs usage.  Three connected projects are in course at the present. With my team, we are surveying and interviewing family clinicians in Spanish and English speaking countries to assess how families seeking help are being affected by the adoption of emerging technologies. Similarly, we are beginning fieldwork in Mexico and the U.S. to learn of how transnational families utilize emerging technologies. I believe that the wide penetration of new technologies questions some of the ways in which scholars have conceptualized the immigrant experience and thus how professionals and policy-makers design interventions directed to them. Finally, we have found that ICTs are a core aspect of the teenage experience, interviews with teenagers in the Basque Country, as part of another study, teaches about the relevancy of moving beyond media stereotypes about their adoption by youth. In sum, this research line connects technology, families, and adds a cross-cultural and transnational dimension.

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Filed under: Family, Psychology, Research, technology, Transnational

October 25, 2010 • 9:48 am 0

Toddlers’ Favorite Toy: The iPhone by Hilary Stout at NYT

The bedroom door opened and a light went on, signaling an end to nap time. The toddler, tousle-haired and sleepy-eyed, clambered to a wobbly stand in his crib. He smiled, reached out to his father, and uttered what is fast becoming the cry of his generation: “iPhone!”

The iPhone has revolutionized telecommunications. It has also become the most effective tool in human history to mollify a fussy toddler, much to the delight of parents reveling in their newfound freedom to have a conversation in a restaurant or roam the supermarket aisles in peace. But just as adults have a hard time putting down their iPhones, so the device is now the Toy of Choice — akin to a treasured stuffed animal — for many 1-, 2- and 3-year-olds. It’s a phenomenon that is attracting the attention and concern of some childhood development specialists.

Natasha Sykes, a mother of two in Atlanta, remembers the first time her daughter, Kelsey, now 3 1/2 but then barely 2 years old, held her husband’s iPhone. “She pressed the button and it lit up. I just remember her eyes. It was like ‘Whoa!’ ”

The parents were charmed by their daughter’s fascination. But then, said Ms. Sykes (herself a BlackBerry user), “She got serious about the phone.”

Kelsey would ask for it. Then she’d cry for it. “It was like she’d always want the phone,” Ms. Sykes said. After a six-hour search one day, she and her husband found the iPhone tucked away under Kelsey’s bed. They laughed. But they also felt vague concern. Kelsey, and her 2-year-old brother, Chase, have blocks, Legos, bouncing balls, toy cars and books galore. (“They love books,” Ms. Sykes said.) But nothing compares to the iPhone.

“If they know they have the option of the phone or toys, it will be the phone, ” Ms. Sykes said

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Filed under: Family, technology

October 25, 2010 • 9:40 am 0

Japanese Teenagers Teach Us Something About Being In Two Places At Once by Alva Noe (NPR)

Japanese Teens On Tokyo Subway 

Owenstache/via Flickr 

When teacher calls attendance, you answer “here!” In this way, you let her know you’re there. But notice, you don’t tell her that you’re there. You show it, or signal it. You might have raised your hand in response to her query. By raising your hand, or saying “here!,” you make your presence felt.

This use of language to signal presence is important. In particular, it sheds light on the transformations that are occurring as new technological practices such as cell phone use and social networking sites, etc, get embedded in our lives.

Consider a fascinating study of the text messaging behavior of Tokyo teenagers that was conducted as part of a much larger investigation of “digital youth” by Mimi Ito, the late Peter Lyman and their colleagues. The kids text back and forth all day. What are they writing? What is so pressing that it can’t wait till they see each other?

Anthropologists looking at the matter were surprised to discover that the kids rarely send informative or detailed messages. As a general rule, they are not telling each other anything. Rather, they are just letting each other know that they are “there,” that they are online, in reach. Texting for the kids is a way of “pinging” each other. They bounce pings back and forth and so signal their presence for each other.

Perhaps it would be better to say that the kids are not so much signaling their presence as they are literally making themselves present to each other by establishing and then continuously verifying the existence of a communication channel. And there is need for this as well, it turns out.

Tokyo is a huge city. Kids commute great distances on the way to and from school, sometimes traveling as much as an hour in each direction. In the context of such a spatially distributed social reality, there is a need to find new modalities of presence. And this is what cell phone technology, in the hands of the teenagers, is able to do.

It makes what is far, near, not by changing physical distances, but by, so to speak, demoting the importance of physical relationships in place of a whole new set of relationships. The children remain far from each other in the physical space in which the commute takes place; but they achieve a closeness, even an intimacy, in a different, virtual space.

Actually, I don’t like the term “virtual” in this context, for it suggests that virtual space is somehow secondary or unreal and that physical space is the only real and true one. When really both spaces are, as far as human experience is concerned, on a par. Pinging with a cell phone is a method for scanning one’s environment. You can scan your office with your eyes. You can scan your buddies after school by SMS. And just as you don’t need to pick up and examine everything that falls within the range of your scan, so you don’t to go into details with your friends using the SMS-channel.

What is a space anyway? I don’t mean what is space (that is, the thing physics studies). I mean, what is a space? Without getting technical, a space is a structure of relations that can be characterized in terms of near and far. We can speak of locationsonly relative to a space in this sense.

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Filed under: Family, Research, technology

October 9, 2009 • 8:10 pm 0

The Drummer, The Reader, and Revolutionary Road: The Continuous Search for What Really Matters


Summer is often a time during which our family watches the latest summer blockbusters at the local movie theater, but it is also a time in which I treasure the opportunity to check out the latest films appearing in DVD format, often of a more serious tone. Three movies that definitely fall under the heading of serious drama are “must see” and that I will be recommend- ing to trainees, clients, and friends: The Drummer (Bi, 2007), The Reader (Daldry, 2008), and Revolutionary Road (Mendes, 20 08). The dynamic interplay of context, family, and individual desires are richly narrated in what appear as very different plots in quiet different localities and historical locations: contemporary Hong Kong and Taiwan, a Connecticut suburb in the mid 1950’s, and Germany during the Nazi and after the liberation periods.

http://afta.org/files/Afta.Update.October2009_0.pdf

Filed under: Family, Psychology

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