The “Big Brother” effect, in a way, is the televised, formatted counterpart of circuited webcams installed in a family’s home, continuously beaming pictures of “real family life” on the Internet. The family, at the turn of the century, seems more like a unit of voluntary members, a constellation that is never natural but which may serve as a social experiment to see who survives and who does not under the scrutiny of the public eye. The “home mode” is still a space for struggle, where competing demands of individuality and collectivity are played out in cyberspace.

In sum, digital tools appear to give the individual amateur more autonomy and power over a more complex, (multi)mediated portrayal. A new media apparatus, as mentioned above, affects the practices of production in conjunction with ideologies of the home that reconstitute the family as a discursive domestic space. So how does the “home mode” in the era of digital technologies change along with notions of family and past and present representations thereof? For one thing, the digital mode suits the contemporary, fractured notions of family and individuality.

For her the experience of living in an asylum-seekers center was still very important and crucial in how she perceived the world. In an interview, she especially highlighted the rituals and religious holidays that were most intensely celebrated and remembered by her. These celebrations gave her something to hold on to. Even though the nuclear family was very close, she felt strongly connected to other Syrian families. Here the notion of the constructed extended family, the domestic group, comes to the fore, primarily by offering a site of remembering the home country and of reconstructing an ethnic identity.