Communicating Across Borders

Abstract

The recent and dramatic revolution in telecommunication technologies has transformed the ways in which people interact across distance. Many of the parents in our study are able to remember a time when it took several months for news and people to travel from one side of the world to the other. Now, entire family networks regularly and instantaneously share information across that same distance. This 'death of distance' (Cairncross, 1997) has important implications for transnational caregiving within family networks.