Introduction

In recent years, social media has become an integral part of everyday life in Asia. In India, one can find the world's third- largest number of Facebook users, with over 57 million users. Dubbed ‘Twitter Nation’, Indonesia is home to nearly 43 million Twitter users (Nugroho 2012). In China, where Facebook is banned, a healthy diet of QQ, Weibo and WeChat dominate, highlighting the significance of media- rich mobile media. With a strong shanzhai (pirate or copy) phone culture that keeps smartphone prices down through the creation of imitation phones, we see over 420 million of China's total 564 million online users accessing the Internet from their mobiles. It was estimated that Internet users in Asia stood at more than 1 billion in mid- June 2012, 44.8 per cent of the world's Internet users and representing an 841 per cent growth over 2000. In Southeast Asia, the survey showed locations like Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand as boasting the highest penetration rates of social media use.

This accelerated growth in social media – predominantly through the mobile phone – highlights the changing mobilities, cultural and ethnic entanglements playing out in the region's media practices. This is no more apparent than with the highly visible mobility of Asian students within the region. This leads us to ask: How are media practices – often deployed to negotiate being simultaneously home and abroad (Hjorth 2007) – used to pursue culturally specific notions of well- being while also engaging with global mobility? This chapter explores the intersection between culturally specific notions of well- being by Asian international students as they negotiate media usage while studying in Australia.

By exploring some detailed case studies, this chapter highlights the complex and often conflicting ways in which mobility and well- being intersect, overlay and entangle. The fieldwork was conducted by Joshua Wong as part of his PhD with the Young and Well CRC. As an international student from Southeast Asia, Wong was interested in how experiences of mobility were shaped by cultural contexts. To explore this idea, Wong interviewed approximately 40 students from various locations and asked them to compile pictorial diaries of media use in their daily lives in 2013– 2015 in Melbourne.