YouTubing Remittances, Revealing (Dis)connectedness: Copresence as Fiction, Ideal and Heuristic on the YouTube Channel of Western Union

Abstract

Sending and receiving remittances is central to the negotiation of transnational family life, and to nourishing a sense of copresence among physically distant parties. Although the lived experience of this transaction has a very intimate and personal basis, it is also subject to increasing visual and public representation, as a part of the working of dedicated migration industries. Based on an in-depth exploration of the advertising materials on the YouTube channel of Western Union (WU), we analyse how money circulation is made visible, emplaced in migrant life circumstances and co-produced through visual narratives that illuminate the micro-foundations of copresence and its structural limitations. While following the rationale of a commercial product, and despite their idealized contents, WU's stories are revealing about the relational affordances for virtual copresence, its shortcomings and the social embeddedness of remittances in family life.