The term ‘home’ has been close to everyone’s life yet the manifold definitions of ‘home’ within the era of mobility seem to be more complex than ever. Everyone is moving homes, embarking journey to new places, choosing flexible jobs over stability, and while being at home becomes very limited, within the vast chronicle of mobility, we slowly are forgetting its existence of home as an origin – instead, replacing it with some vague, unorthodox definition of home. In micro context, the ideas of home that I was once thought simply as ‘house’, verily interpreted in many ways – ‘virtual space’, ‘privacy’, ‘imagined community’ or ‘place of origin’ (Morley: 2000). In the larger context, ‘home’ can be defined as ‘city’ that has a lot to do with borders, national policy, politic and economic situation within the country.
On the other hand, freedom that I thought was once only a part of western society that, non-western community needs to struggle for, had become everyone’s choice. Bauman’s theory examined how globalization has shaped a world of ‘individualized society’, where people roam for freedom and identity, treating world as their ‘home’ while excluding their origin, but yet facing the uncertainty, ambiguity, and incomplete life in hope to fill the needs to obtain self-assertion, and to ‘make good use of being on the move’ (Bauman, 2005). Paradoxically, on the other side of the spectrum, opposed to the affluent society, some people are forced to move in order to find a new shelter called home.
We live in the second modernity where society must respond to all the changes, from theoretical to political, simultaneously (Beck, 1996), and digital technology has somewhat been a primary agent of this change. What used to be unreachable becomes easily accessible, what used to be privacy of a country becomes an available data to many. The social, political and economical system that used to be stable now has become more dynamic and at risk. Bauman (2000) introduced the term ‘liquid life’ to describe the way society lived in today – an entity where members of the society act and change faster than ever. Flows freely like water, the rapidly transforming behaviors of ‘liquid life’ society kept overflowing uncertainty, bringing brought ‘home’ and ‘freedom’ into intersection.
What does home mean to us and what does it have to do with our desire to be free with our choice? Why is the solid term of ‘home’ that was once unornamented, become so much problematic? Through interview, case study and personal reflection, this paper will examine the relationship between the two nodes – ‘freedom’ and ‘home’ – in today’s complex landscape.
Home Away From Home: Baby Boomer VS Generation Y
‘Home’ has always brought a sense of joy to me, romanticized upon the image of comfort, family, safety, and security. I grew up in a family where parenting was adequate, and the bonding built between us is somehow supreme. My Mom has always been a full time mother that stayed with us 24/7 assembling values and norms that shaped our identity in a nutshell: Indonesian Muslim. As the eldest kid in the family, being responsible to my little brothers and being the closest to mom is also my overriding concern. This whole intimacy obtained from home has got me enraptured by Bachelard’s theory that represented the way I used to imagine my meaning of “home”. There is a sense of appreciation that home is more than just a physical entity, but rather built upon values and symbolic meanings. Bachelard (2005) called it as ‘an inhabited space that transcends geometrical space’, a place where kids shaped its knowledge and built a ‘template of memory and identity’. In other words also what Dietmar Dath called as ‘the origin stories’ (Bauman, 2005).
After being on the move for seven years, I realized my romanticized sense of home has slowly changed. I see home as ‘imagined community’ rather than ‘the origin stories’, as Benedict Anderson once argued upon. The desire to be on the move yet simultaneously missing the place I used to call “home” has reinforced me to build a new delineation of ‘home’ while being far away from home. Ganguly-Scrase and Lahiri-Dutt (2016) defined this as ‘rethinking displacement’ where me as a ‘mobile subject’ shifting through boundaries, dislocated, and recreate my home. I found the urge to quickly adapt to the unfamiliar things, to find people whom I feel comfortable with, to pick up all the missing pieces that I had. I found that my term of ‘home’ is no longer a place where I grew up, rather, a place where I feel comfortable based upon several factors: acceptance, tolerance, and solidarity. There is still a ‘psychological interaction’ that is needed to build a harmony within my ‘imagined home’. I define my ‘home key’ as assembled comfort that I created anywhere I go in hope to obtain my very own circle of privacy and to finally being settled in my new destination (Morley, 2000).
Agnes Heller argued that ‘home key’ is a ‘fixed point’ that provides safety and has most intense emotional bond – a ‘firm position’ where our life started, and where we will return. I introduced the theory of home and had a discourse over this topic with my housemate, Robert, a 60 years old man from Uruguay, South America. He migrated to Melbourne 42 years ago, reinforced by family and financial reasons. When I questioned his perspective about home, his answers described neither his home country nor the house where he currently lived in. Effortlessly, he stated, “I agree that home is a place where I feel comfort, yet never have I really been feeling it these whole years. Perhaps this life is just a passage. Perhaps home is where I will live after the life”. I defended his thoughts with my definition of home, yet he continued on his discourse, “Multiculturalism has brought many people with different background to the country, carrying their heavy luggage (problem). This has put politic, economy, and the whole society of the nation becomes more complex than it used to be. There is no more privacy today, and there’s nowhere in this world I could find solace.” In Robert’s time, Melbourne used to have less migrants and the population was not as big and diverse as today. This argument however has drawn me to a more spiritual concept – maybe ‘home’ only exists in the life after death? Or maybe it’s just Robert’s generation that has faced too much unfamiliarity that they become mentally unable to feel chez soi?
McQuire’s theory had helped me understood that the phenomena of ‘annihilation of time and space’ that has brought dramatic changes in the society is the concept that baby boomer generation did not grow up with. Robert’s generation had much stable and far less complex than today’s digital landscape, where the ‘annihilation’ correlates with the rollout of technology, absorbed to the majority of social beings that finally, influence the ‘abstract knowledge’ and ‘social practice’ (McQuire, 2008). Where digital technology lies within the context, mobility and globalization comes as a result, and the concept of ‘home’ and ‘privatization’ is far more complex. Drawing from Sussman theory, this new established set of force from inside and outside has drawn too much unfamiliarity to the earlier generations. There is an alteration from a stable social structure to an increasingly open system. There are more opportunities for far-flung associations that set different standards on how we socially interact compared to the older social bonds that conducted only within spatial proximity. There is a growing uncertainty, freedom, and indefinability, and they are all part of today’s society – particularly, generation Y’s society and after.
Yet, there is another group of people other than Robert that, not only mentally, but physically has no possibility to be at ‘home’ – the homeless, nomad, exile – all the global souls that have mirrored the postmodern inability to find or to feel home within this global relentless movement. I remember of having a Syrian friend that has to move around from Malaysia, to Turkey, and illegally, to Sweden in order to find a life he deserves. Drawing from this phenomenon, I see digital technology has helped them find a better way to communicate and share experiences with others that have similar circumstances.
Openness To The World: People On The Move
Most people in the world today are on the move – Diken called the mobile people as ‘strangers’ (Marotta & Pietsch, 2009). Some are forced by crisis and some others forced by desire to explore the world. The latter category fits into Bauman’s ‘individualized society’ that examined the affluent society who craves for ‘conformity’ and recreate identity that was once, perhaps, provided. Bauman called people who are on the move as adventurer and therefore ‘a passport to adventure’ is their ‘identity’, while people who are not on the move tend to defense against adventurers and have their firm ‘identity’ that has been built upon values from their origin. Bhabha (1999) argued, the latter group of people found adventure is a forceful threat and therefore chose to lock themselves up around their home and being what we called as ‘domestic people’ .
However, in practice, I think ‘mobility’ only cross the nodes of ‘identity’ temporarily, because somehow ‘identity’ should be something permanent, not temporary. Many of the people on the move are losing their own identity but then eventually collecting back the pieces at the end of their journey, while some others displacing the old identity with the new one they found along the journey. If Bauman statement defined the identity of people on the move as ‘adventurer’, where are all their original values and where will the former group of people belong? If Bhabha (1999) said ‘domestic people’ have a fear of adventure, how would they accept the ‘strangers’ coming to their country and whether they will be immobile all their lives? Molz (2008) argued that round-the-world traveler is only symbolic rather than identity – one can encounter differences, and open to experiencing other cultures, but that’s only a passage, not a permanent. I will draw this argument based on my personal experience. I have been on the move to several different countries upon the need for experience, education, and growth. Partly I could relate myself to Bauman’s ‘hybrid culture’, moving across borders and boundaries, bringing my identity into foreign places to study (and travel). I enjoy my ‘freedom of movement’ with ‘sufficient network capital’ that enables me to go around places (Whitlock, 2014). In return, the experience of being liquid is what has changed the way I see the world, yet I don’t see ‘adventure’ as my identity. My perception of ‘home’ and the sense of ‘openness to the world could have shifted, but my ‘identity’ is still somewhere in between my wisdom thoughts, that holds the repository of memory and values. On the other hand, my parents have always been conservative with their firm beliefs and identity. Yet, they never have a fear to face the uncertainties – travelling from one place to another in between their free time has been a routine since they were younger.
The need to be on the move according to Bauman relate to the needs for knowledge, exploring different ‘mix of cocktails’ that eventually lead to self-exploration. Throughout my ‘adventure’, I found different characteristics of culture that lies within different territories that perhaps, the usual things that ‘people on the move’ always has to adapt to. The first country that I moved to was Malaysia. Both Malaysia and Indonesia have strong norms of collectivism, and therefore Malaysia has not much of a different characteristic with society where I grew up, except in the big city of Kuala Lumpur, in multinational company offices, where all the “strangers” work and live. The experience of working with different culture made me learned to open up my mind to different perspectives, allowed me to understand what Bauman mean as ‘strangers make social, cultural, and physical boundaries porous and unstable’.
Another different point of view has been explored during my first experience going to the first-world country, United States, before migrating to Melbourne. America (as well as Australia) is well known for its individualism, nations with huge number of immigrant populations (Milburn, Rotheram-Borus, Rice, Mallet, & Rosenthal, 2006). Living within the individualized and multicultural society for about a month, I saw more sense of freedom within the society as to their outstanding ability to express themselves on the streets, yet I discovered another side of the spectrum that I wasn’t thought of discovering in a developed country – people who are forced to move, people who are exiled, and people who are poor, mentally and physically. Not only many I could find in Los Angeles, but also in every corner of Las Vegas. Sad but true, moving to Melbourne and living here has shown me the similar occurrences. Refugees, asylum seekers, and exiles – seen as the ‘sans-papiers’, group of people that have to go through all the impediments to keep moving, dispersed along the corners of CBD. This somehow is reflected upon the discourse of cosmopolitanism, where the affluent society reproduced new forms of ‘value-laden global hierarchies’, ‘reinforcing existing distinctions of inequality’ (Kothari, 2008). Drawing from Bauman’s ‘individualized society’, I discovered those depression among the homeless could probably one of the results of self-exploration, or pressure that is given from outside such as familial violence and abuse (Kamienicki, 2001).
With all these fascinating movements crossing borders and boundaries, ‘strangers’ have reinforced the social and cultural boundaries yet at the same time creating blurred lines of identity within the country. Bauman called them as people who are ‘physically close but morally distant’, whereas adjustment in the way the domestic people react to the migrants is needed to recreate harmony. In the previous chapter, Robert has stated that migrants, refugees, immigrants and all the ‘strangers’ have somewhat brought significant changes to the social life, politic, economy, but on top of all, the terrain. In micro level, the different backgrounds have reinforced and at the same time blur boundaries in the way the locals socially interact with the strangers. In macro level, the establishment of Chinatown, the Turkish area within Brunswick, the Italian area in Lygon street, and rallies of refugees and asylum seekers, the rise of social enterprises – all things that are built in today’s society to support (and fight against, for some people) the presence of strangers.
Bhabha (1999) argument about people on the move is somehow alluring – he stated that ‘in the presence of online media, people have to activate the root of the “exilic” and redefine our perspective that sees “exile” as a forced dislocation’. We have to constantly move, beyond our comfort zone, our home, to revise our knowledge of some of the uncontrolled debates of power, possession, knowledge and belonging that rise from the uncanny far-flung disintegrations and wreckage of metropolitan conversations.
Openness To The World: Relational Space
While migrant community is growing across the globe – the digital diasporas within the Internet is also on the rise as the result of cyberspace development. People are more mobile than ever – as McQuire stated this new mode of social occurrence as ‘relational space’, a condition where the scope of social connections has become more open than before. This has brought more freedom and openness as another forms of ‘annihilation of time and space’ – reconfiguration of ‘home’ that caused depletion of fixed coordinates, yet building up new processes of integration across interconnected territories. Molz (2008) argued that in this era of mobility, ‘home’ is apparently one of the casualties; drawing upon Bauman theory that said mobility ignores the ability to feel at home.
I would relate this to my personal and professional experience. Being mobile while far away from home has opened up doors for me to connect with my family, my old friends, people I choose to keep in touch with, not only in Indonesia, but also in any parts of the world. Both text and phone call has been unlimited like it never before through the online platforms and this created a sense of borderless, a feeling of closeness, retaining the intimacy between families and friends. At the same time, I could also monitor the recent protest that just happened in Indonesia from a distance through the help of media and recent updates on Facebook as well as group discussion through Whatsapp and other messaging app, as if we were watching the same TV program, sitting in the same living room. The conflict that is happening in another part of the world such as the US Presidential Election and Turkey’s political crisis could also be felt as if I were currently at the same country. Professionally, digital technology has helped me connect through the world with more job options. One of the opportunities offer freely within the digital world that I undertake is freelancing. From programmers, designers, to writers, many of our society today has realized the benefit of connecting with clients from far-flung places, exchanging work and command through emails or Whatsapp messages. This contemporary mode of making a living has given us freedom, yet uncertainty for the risk associated with the digital supremacy.
Although there are many invigorating opportunities offered by digital technology, what ‘relational space’ is lacking of is perhaps, privacy. Sometimes it is hard to differentiate the ‘real’ world and ‘cyberspace’ when we are too close to technology. Sometimes it is hard to have privacy while we are connected. Robert has found that this situation bothers him in most of the time – he insisted to be frequently on Facebook or on the phone like our generations do. “Back in the old days, we have our privacy and we could distinguish between work and personal life. We can sit back and relax after office hours. Today, my boss could call me at any unexpected time. It seems like the fact that sometimes ‘I was not on the phone’ is ignored and only seen as an undesirable excuse. Today, we all have to suffer for being on the phone, 24 hours”. I linked Robert’s experience to Giddens theory that explained the concept of “a world where no one is ‘outside’,” that drawn upon meaning that no one can be treated as immobile – so does Robert.
Other thing that is uncomforting is the attribute of ‘relational space’ is loaded with poor experiences as a result of displacement. Every situation drawn in digital media is not a complete picture of an event but it could interrupt other spaces and generalized in fallacious perceptions. One of the examples I could relate is the Indonesian rally that just recently happened last 4th of November. Although it seemed like media is portraying that we had a very dangerous conflict with several gunshots and massacres, the real situation was actually not as bad as what is written on Facebook statuses and articles.
The Intersection: Openness To The World and Security At Home
Morley (2000) theory of separation of private and public in the nineteenth century is something I can relate to my belief that home is a zone of ‘private’, ‘secure’, and ‘comfort’. This need of privacy that most of the time urged me, under intolerable circumstances, to go home and isolate myself from the world. Yet sometimes the privacy of home strained upon physical privacy other than mentally, due to the presence of mobile as the pre-eminent factors that keep me connected to the world even when I am at home. It is, however, an obvious intersection in every day lives that we all have to struggle with. At the same time, the era of mobility has reinforced us to get away from the comfort zone. Being on the move offers freedom and fulfilling emotions to move from one another, finding our own self and exploring the world, but there are less favorable values kept within the freedom society. It is uncertain, it has higher level of risk, and it is indefinable, but yet – it is crucial for growth, the vital concept within our society, that to improve ourselves to survive the unyielding global competition.
Molz (2008) concept of ‘global abode’ has somewhat emphasized the intersection between residing and travelling that has got me fascinated: ‘understand home as a fluid, mobile, and plural as well as a site of attachment and grounding’….inspired to provide a more nuanced account of the way home is inflected by mobility,’ If the theory of ‘home’ constructed upon different spatial agenda, then the round-the-world travelers could also extend the spatial meaning of home as the ‘globe’ itself. In addition to Molz argument, Robbins stated that people on the move are actually a ‘reality of (re)attachment, multiple attachment, or attachments at a distance’, he continued, ‘a style of residence on the earth’ that involves ‘complex and multiple belonging’. However, this argument represents another complex concept of security and attachment that also associated with home.
While according to Bauman, ‘openness to the world’ and ‘security at home’ are two different pursuit that every individual craves for to form a happy life, yet unable to work hand in hand – when one is pursued, the other one has to be slowed down. But what I could imagine with digital technology that seems to lie between the two nodes – physical and virtual could take role as variables that differentiate the level of ‘openness’ and ‘security’ that one can have. With the Internet, even though we don’t get physical freedom, stuck in the routines of working 8 hours a day, we could still get the access to the window of the world through the Internet – online media, Facebook, YouTube, and other online sources. Being mobile today is not necessarily has to be on the move, but it is about connected with the world through virtual space. On the other hand, the travelers or people on the move can easily be in touch with their family through the mobile technology. One that is longing for home can displace their feeling of belonging and making themselves familiar to a space one currently resides, and simultaneously, keep the feeling of closeness to those far-flung relatives and maintain multiple relationships across the globes.
Will Our Generation Keep Being On The Move?
Since globalizations in general has somewhat sabotaged the boundaries and emotional ground that people associate with home, with the ease of technology, the term of home is not completely on absent presence but rather replaced by the virtual imagination associated with emotions. Digital technology has brought the feeling of closeness upon those under far-flung relationships, be it family or friends or lover, without the need to be together under one roof. People still need to be on the move, and simultaneously, the ones who choose stability over adventure could also keep being a global soul through the presence of Internet, in a capacity one wish to obtain. In conclusion, even though both the desire of being at ‘home’ and getting a ‘freedom’ does not seem to go hand in hand, one could leverage the desire of another nodes that they are lacking of through the ease of technology.
Drawing upon such a complex discussion on home and freedom in the mobility, I think this research has raised another question: if there is an extreme transition in today’s global world that has brought so many different perspectives and unfamiliarity within two generations, what is going to happen in the next 10 years, will I keep being on the move or will I prefer to be secure at home? Will I still find comfort, or ended up thinking the same way as Robert? Will the physical world be really borderless, like what we currently experience within virtual society? Will the politic, economy, and policy within the country become more liquid or otherwise, become more solid?
Freedom could be seen as something uncertain, unstable, and indefinable. Yet it is human nature that makes our heart yearning for safety and certainty. I think, eventually, a person who keep on the move will eventually crave for stability once they find comfort somewhere in the world. It could have lied within their ‘origin stories’, or it could be discovered amidst their adventure.
SundaySerenades 