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The essays in Click and Kin: Transnational Identity and Quick Media explore, in various ways, the implications of communication technology use and transnationalism in the renegotiation of kinship. Arguing for an expansion of the idea of kinship, as connections made rather than those one is born into, and using the transnational as a device for illuminating prejudices of identity and culture, the editors have brought together ten chapters investigating expressions of selfhood in relation to digital technology use and digital spheres. Focusing particularly upon "quick media"—"cheap, easily accessible, and omnipresent tools of communication" (4) that enable impromptu connection—these essays lean into the confusions, transitions, and changes emergent in digital technology use. While all of the chapters examine the ways in which quick media enable the development of modes of identification, they use different critical lenses to do so. Considering the effects of quick media in a wide variety of contexts, they also make use of quick media messages as evidence to varying degrees. More traditional scholarly chapters sit alongside provocatively experimental personal essays, which cleverly deploy theory as a creative jumping-off point for deeper meditations on the meaning of these technologies in our lives, the ways in which they enable, inhibit, and reshape identity, experience, and relationships.
The volume is divided into four sections. The three chapters in the first section examine the relationships among individuals, the nation, and nationality through imagined communities enabled through communication technology and created or reassembled online. Moving into the ways in which quick media shape an individual's understanding of self, the two chapters of the second section examine the role of literary phenomena—lesbian web series and epistolary young adult novels using the form...