Our project is about family connections thus the name, FamConex.

We plan to test mobile phone technology to preserve cultural and family ties, support adolescent identity formation, and document changes in culture among children whose families live on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Among the families we are working with, one branch of the family came to the US long ago, invited as part of a program to hire agricultural workers. Members of these branches are legally in this country; many are US citizens.

Still the families have close ties in both countries. Regardless of how established they may be in a US metropolitan area, the soul of family life may be rooted in a small village in Mexico. Families are likely to return to Mexico for significant life events - to be married, to celebrate a daughter's 15th birthday, to be buried.

Our hope is to provide families with a network of mobile phones capable of running social media applications such as Twitter. Ideally we would then be able to test the efficacy of various social media applications, gathering quantitative data on the ways in which family and cultural ties, along with identity markers, are supported by the media. We would gather qualitative data as well.

As a pilot, we would begin with five sets of iPhones, with five phones on each side of the border. We would then place all users into a Twitter group and ask them to provide us with information on group use. Over the course of the year we would test at least one other social media technology with the iPhone. This pilot project would help us identify any issues that the project might run into, and would tell us whether our idea is feasible.

We are looking for free, off the shelf applications where possible, and find that these are available among the third party applications developed for the iPhone. Twitter is a good example of what we are looking for: members of our participating families can "follow" one another, and can allow us to follow them during the data collection period. Mobile Facebook is another answer.

There may be other applications down the line that may not even have been developed yet. We think that by collecting data on which aspects of mobile communication might support our goals, we and others will be in better shape to identify the most useful technologies for our purposes in the future.