Acclimatising in a new country? There’s an app for that

Social networking applications have taken their place in almost all parts of our lives. Writing in the International Journal of Mobile Communications, researchers reveal how immigrant children, adolescents, and young adults are using these apps, which include WhatsApp and Facebook, to maintain contact with the family and friends they have left behind in relocating to a new country.

Gila Cohen Zilka of Bar-Ilan University, in Ramat Gan, Israel, has looked specifically at how youngsters are using these apps to help them acclimatize in Israel as their new home. The research surveyed 551 participants of whom 110 were also interviewed directly. Interviewees shared both positive and negative feelings and experiences.

Fundamentally, writes Cohen Zilka, “participants feel that communication alleviates the sense of longing, enables intimate discourse, sentiment sharing, release of anger, and relief of frustration.” She points out that the use of web applications encourages significant interaction with those who remained in the country of origin, but conversely, to a certain extent, causes social isolation in the new country.

The study found that many young immigrants to Israel did not feel as if they had been uprooted from one country and placed rootless in a new land, but rather that they still had roots in the country of origin and were already putting down new roots in their new home. “The use of internet applications for communication made them happy and gave them a sense of relief in the process of acclimatisation in the new country,” the team reports.

Zilka, G.C. (2020) ‘Use of social networking applications by immigrant children, adolescents, and young adults to maintain contact with those who remained in the country of origin: usage characteristics and habits’, Int. J. Mobile Communications, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp.257–272.