MECM90003 Chap.5 Digital Passages: Connection and Control
Digital Passages: Connection and Control
Week 5 shifts from media coverage of migrants to migrants' own use of phones and platforms to understand their journeys, and to the surveillance power the same tools give states. Diaz Andrade and Doolin's fieldwork with resettled refugees in New Zealand shows information and communication technology converted into capabilities for belonging.
Latonero and Kift's digital passages show refugees, smugglers, companies and governments sharing one networked infrastructure, from charging stations to European fingerprint databases. The week's central lesson is that one infrastructure can serve connection and control at once.
What this chapter covers
- 01
From framing to agency: refugees as users and makers of technology
- 02
Five capabilities of ICT use for resettled refugees
- 03
Agency and well-being advancing together
- 04
Digital passages and the four actors who share them
- 05
Eurodac and Eurosur: identifying individuals versus classifying groups
- 06
Social media and device surveillance of asylum seekers
- 07
Legal status, digital literacy and infrastructure as sources of variation
Worked example · free
Mapping one refugee route as a digital passage
- 1Connection: the messaging app and Wi-Fi let the family gather real-time information and keep family ties alive.
- 1Other actors: the same apps can carry smugglers' offers, and the companies running them collect the data the family produces.
- 1Control: fingerprint registration inscribes the border into each person's body and follows them after arrival.
- 1Conclusion: the route is one sociotechnical space in which connection and control arrive through the same infrastructure.
Key terms
- Eurodac
- Eurodac is the European Union's biometric fingerprint database established to enforce the Dublin system for asylum claims.
- Eurosur
- Eurosur is the European Union's coordinated drone and satellite surveillance system for detecting boats at sea.
- Dual use
- Dual use describes a technology that serves both the people who rely on it and those who exploit or track them.
- Social inclusion
- Social inclusion is the capacity to participate fully in a society, which Diaz Andrade and Doolin trace through refugees' use of information technology.
Digital Passages: Connection and Control FAQ
What is a digital passage?
Latonero and Kift use the term for the sociotechnical spaces of flows that refugees travelling to Europe relied on from 2014: social media, phones and networked technologies in which refugees, smugglers, governments and corporations all interact. The concept captures how the same infrastructure supports both movement and control.
How do refugees use technology after resettlement?
Diaz Andrade and Doolin interviewed more than 50 resettled refugees in New Zealand and found ICT helping them participate in an information society, communicate effectively, understand a new society, stay socially connected and express a cultural identity. They read this as refugees regaining control over disrupted lives.
Why does the lecture say registration is never neutral?
Because the infrastructure that offers protection can also become a tool of suspicion. Fingerprint databases, drone surveillance and proposals to read asylum seekers' phones without consent show border control moving into bodies and devices. The lecture links this to Week 2's humanitarian technophilia, where tools framed as care double as control.
What factors make refugees' experience of technology vary?
The lecture names legal status, which decides which services and platforms are accessible; digital literacy, including language and skills; and infrastructure, such as connectivity, device access and host-country systems. It links them to Sen's conversion factors and adds gender, age and household role as further sources of difference.
Assessment move
Draw your own version of the four-actor map for a case you know and label each actor's use of the shared technology. Then write a paragraph that moves from a capability gain, using Diaz Andrade and Doolin, to a control effect, using Latonero and Kift. That two-step shape suits the essay question on personal media and surveillance, and it keeps you from treating technology as purely liberating or purely oppressive.
A public library, a community centre or a transport hub with free Wi-Fi all make strong Week 5 sites, because both connection and control are visible there.
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