Digital borders in spatial-temporal mobility: Social inclusion and exclusion of Chinese migrant students in Macao

Abstract

While mobile social media has increasingly become embedded in migrants’ daily lives, how mobile social media affects migrants’ cross-border experiences remains under-researched. Based on a 2-year ethnographic study, this article demonstrates a more complex relationship among mobile social media, migrants’ spatial-temporal mobility, and their subjective experience of social inclusion and exclusion. Situated in a Chinese cross-border context (Macao Special Administrative Region), this article elaborates on how mobile social media leads to heterogeneous and synchronous spatial-temporal mobility in a homogeneous time-narrative. This article further explains how and why mainland students’ social exclusion transforms into digital inclusion, where the blurring boundaries create the possibility of digital and social inclusion but also risk deeper exclusion and internal borders. The article argues for a new epistemology of the border, which is complicated, heterogeneous, and paradoxical, while mobile social media reinvigorates the border concept in how it constructs and deconstructs territorial/internal boundaries and inclusion/exclusion dynamics.