Diasporas in the New Media Age

Identity, Politics, and Community

Andoni Alonso, Pedro Oiarzabal, Andoni Alonso, Pedro Oiarzabal

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780874178166
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

The explosion of digital information and communication technologies has influenced almost every aspect of contemporary life. Diasporas in the New Media Age is the first book-length examination of the social use of these technologies by emigrants and diasporas around the world. The eighteen original essays in the book explore the personal, familial, and social impact of modern communication technology on populations of European, Asian, African, Caribbean, Middle Eastern, and Latin American emigrants. It also looks at the role and transformation of such concepts as identity, nation, culture, and community in the era of information technology and economic globalization. The contributors, who represent a number of disciplines and national origins, also take a range of approaches—empirical, theoretical, and rhetorical—and combine case studies with thoughtful analysis. Diasporas in the New Media Age is both a discussion of the use of communication technologies by various emigrant groups and an engaging account of the immigrant experience in the contemporary world. It offers important insights into the ways that dispersed populations are using digital media to maintain ties with their families and homeland, and to create new communities that preserve their culture and reinforce their sense of identity. In addition, the book is a significant contribution to our understanding of the impact of technology on society in general.

PART I

INSIDE-OUT THE SCREEN

DIASPORAS AT THE MARGINS OF CYBERSPACE

1 Interconnected Immigrants in the Information Society

ADELA ROS

Owing to the communications and transportation revolution, today's international migrants are, more than ever before, a dynamic human link between cultures, economies and societies. Penny-a-minute phone cards keep migrants in close touch with family and friends at home, and just a few seconds are needed for the global financial system to transmit their earnings to remote corners of the developing world, where they buy food, clothing, shelter, pay for education or healthcare, and can relieve debt. The Internet and satellite technology allow a constant exchange of news and information between migrants and their home countries. Affordable airfares permit more frequent trips home, easing the way for a more fluid, back-and-forth pattern of mobility.

—Kofi Annan, Report of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, 2006

Fatima is a twenty-five-year-old woman who works as a journalist at a local television station in Barcelona. The first thing she does every day when she arrives home at eight o'clock is go to the computer and connect her Webcam and Skype. A few minutes later, her parents and grandmother get connected from Casablanca. Then, her sister appears on the screen from Romania. A few minutes later, her cousin in Belgium shows up. “Not only do we speak every day, we stay together,” she says. Fatima is one of the almost one million immigrants who have arrived in the past decade in the autonomous region of Catalonia, in northeastern Spain. Many of them are using the world of information and communication technologies to meet their communication and information needs. The effects and implications of such technological adoption still remain unknown.

The example of Fatima may illustrate a new situation. Castles and Miller (2003) have shown that one of the outcomes of global interdependence and interconnection is the expansion of the effect of international migration. Now immigrants may be taking advantage of that same interconnection that generated their move and use it to overcome the main difficulties that they face.

One of the new elements differentiating the present migration domain from that of other periods in history comes from the possibilities that communication and information technologies offer everybody, including immigrants and their families, to keep in constant contact through communication and information. Migrating in the age of mobile technologies—multimodal communication from anywhere to anywhere, SMS interchange, fast e-mail, virtual communities, chats and forums, video conferences by telephone and Internet—introduces new dimensions. Today, immigrants have many more opportunities to live interconnected with situations and people in their country of origin. According to the consultancy firm Telegeography, “There is a high increase in the growth of telephone traffic between countries with strong migration connections; looking at the number of minutes of teletraffic between specific countries with strong migration connections in the years 1995 and 2001 data, they suggest a remarkable growth in traffic” (Vertovec 2004b, 10).

Migration is probably one of the oldest ways of interconnection between different, distant parts of the world (Held et al. 1999, 283). Migration has always constituted a “natural” flow of products, ideas, cultures, and languages. Millions of social, economic, and political interconnections have been produced after migration has linked two or more regions in the world. Once established in host societies, migrants’ links with families and friends in the country of origin have always remained. In Held's terminology, the pattern of global interconnection in the domain of migration has always been high.

But the recognition of a long history of interconnections, even the affirmation that connection constitutes an intrinsic element of migration, does not alter the fact that the increase and changes in interconnection in the Information Society may be transforming the nature, meanings, and logic of immigration. Immigrant interconnection has now taken on a new dimension, with new physical spaces reserved for it and, what is even more decisive for the future, associated economic benefits. In the context of Catalonia, the presence of Internet cafés and telephone centers in immigrant neighborhoods in major cities and in medium towns and the hundreds of advertisements everywhere from private companies trying to make immigrants call and send money home are constant reminders that something new is happening. Now it is time to pass from an intuitive observation and use all these pieces of reality to start making something of them more important: interconnection can be used as the basis for a new look at immigration.

This chapter has two main purposes. First, the chapter attempts to go a step further in the analysis of interconnections in immigration. Although immigrants follow a general trend of increased interconnection within globalization, there is not much data on how patterns of communication and information develop different levels and forms of interconnection and the identification of the main factors that intervene. As patterns of communication have always existed in migrant contexts, the question is whether there is something new in the nature of interconnection in the Information Society and what the main consequences are. Second, this work examines a closer interrelationship between immigration and a whole set of elements that are transforming our way of life that have been characterized as the Information Society. High interconnection is only one of the traits of the Information Society paradigm. In the Information Society, immigrants are experiencing historical transformations, too.

The organization of this chapter reflects these goals. Each section corresponds to a different part. First, I will frame immigration within the Information Society context. Second, I will take a look at the interaction between immigrants and technologies of information and communication. Third, there is an analytical proposal to analyze interconnection patterns of communication and information. This work poses more questions rather than giving quick responses. Future answers will be the result of a long-term initiative taken by the Immigration and Information Society Research Programme.¹ Data shown in these pages are the result of ongoing research that employs various techniques such as in-depth interviews, statistical analysis, participant observation, and other more specific, innovative techniques to register the use of technological tools.²

The study of interconnection is nothing new in the immigration literature. But today it is becoming even more necessary than ever to track all that transnational studies have helped to recognize. That is, immigration implies a new relationship with both the host societies and those of origin simultaneously. But immigration also produces continuous contact with the local reality and needs. A deep interest in the relationship of the local to the global, or in the continuous processes of compression and decompression in which immigrants are immersed, lies behind the following pages. We need to ask how this constant movement is produced in day-to-day practice and how it is changing the social organization of immigrants. More particularly, nowadays, could people who are separated due to migratory movement be organizing their social lives and filling them with meaning, overcoming the factor of distance? And are we moving from a pattern of immigration to another of mobility as a new model that implies a lesser will to transform one's life since life could easily be developed within one's own newly built, technologically maintained networks? The consequences of a real recognition of interrelation from a local perspective are still unknown.

Nothing of what has been said up to this point seems to have been understood by policy makers yet. In Europe, for instance, the dominant model these days reminds us more of a scheme of integration as disconnection than of any possible advantage of having interconnected immigrants. The influence of international geopolitics does not help at all.

THE INFORMATION SOCIETY IN CONTEMPORARY IMMIGRATION

The emergence of information and communication technologies in immigrant communities in Western societies represents a new element in migration contexts that may be transforming different elements of the nature of migration. The introduction of information and communication technologies (ICTS) in the world of immigration could be incorporating new elements into the reality of immigration that, far from being complementary, could imply a transcendental move toward the emergence of new issues in the social organization of immigration.

Contemporary migration occurs in the Information Society, and it is intimately interwoven with it. However, Information Society and migration are two realities that have not yet been combined. Although the presence of technologies of communication in migration settings has already been pointed out as a new trend, a full integration of the Information Society paradigm in migration remains to be studied. First, the way in which politics and business have reacted responds quite well to the scheme of “projecting dreams and fears of the kind of society that will result” (Castells et al. 2007, 2). Mobile telephone companies shape a new ideal world for immigrants, where communication becomes “the closest thing to being together” and helps one avoid homesickness.³ From politics, the incorporation of ICT into the immigrant's world is interpreted more as a difficulty than as an opportunity.

What does this look consist of? This approach involves considering contemporary migration as part of the reality of the Information Society, which implies a new model of social organization of migration made possible by the revolution of technologies. An approximation of immigration to the Information Society would allow new elements and new questions to arise. The Information Society is thus the necessary framework within which we will be able to find emerging patterns of immigrant incorporation into host societies.

The Information Society is the result of a technological paradigm that engenders an augmentation of human capacity of information processing and communication made possible by the revolutions in microelectronic-based information and communication technology such as computers and digital communications. Such a paradigm, which was shaped in the United States in the 1970s in interaction with the global economy and with world geopolitics, was organized around information technology; globalization—as a process of increasing interpenetration and interdependence of activities—has accelerated systems of interaction.

Technological tools play a central role in the organization of society and in the shaping of the opportunities and constraints, meanings and ways, of life. People and groups adapt technology to their needs and interests, producing transformations in the organization of social life and profoundly changing the structures of current society in such a way that “the rhythms of everyday life are being transformed in ways which, by any historical comparison, are remarkable” (Webster 2001, 1). Thus, information and communication technologies imply three new features: more capacity for processing information, more capacity for interaction of people, and more capacity for flexibility in continuous fields of presence. In recent years, analytical work has been carried out on the meaning that these three features have in different spheres of social organization. We propose immigration as a very appropriate site to empirically analyze how a technologically based paradigm is expressed in a specific reality and group. To look into migration using an informational perspective, that is, using the main traits, transformations, and challenges identified for the Information Society, makes for an interesting analytical exercise.

Information Processing

That migration networks distribute information among potential migrants and offer assistance to recently arrived immigrants is in itself nothing new. Networks (i.e., interconnected nodes) are the pattern of social life and of dominant functions and processes in the rise of the network society (Castells 1996). Although the relationship between migration and information is closely tied, the conditions under which networks of information and communication function in migrant contexts are new. Contemporary migration expresses a new model of mobility with high levels of information and communication networks, powered by informationalism as a new capacity for processing information. This implies a closer look at new informants and at new sources of information, multiple nodes and new actors, and the possible capacity that migrants have to make more informed decisions. The central actors are the creators, designers, and disseminators of information flows. These new actors result in more autonomy from power centers, since this autonomy requires multidirectionality and continuous flows of interactive information processing.

Revolutions in transportation and new technologies of information and communication are the main factors explaining current patterns of interconnectedness and the possibility to have wider access to information anywhere in the world. The impact of high interconnectedness on contemporary international migration could be offering new information and communication potentialities to migrants. Migrant networks can distribute information and coordinate efforts in a better way than ever before. They can connect with different nodes around the world and process information with an impact and velocity never seen before (Massey 1998; Fawcett 1989; Tilly 1990). Horst observes that increased communication in Jamaica “enabled through the presence of house phones and especially the ownership of mobile phones has led Jamaicans to more realistic expectations of the migration experience and opportunities associated with living abroad” (2006, 155).

The penetration of ICTS in migration contexts, in both the country of origin and the country of destination, directly benefits migrants, as they have wider access to information. As a Senegalese immigrant reported, “Information, we have it all.” However, these new potentialities are associated with a lack of structured information, opening the door to asymmetric information, unreliable sources, false expectations, and more. Although there are new potentials for information transmission in migration contexts, there is still a lack of information among most migrants. The information they have is often insufficient and leads migrants into situations of misinformation or confusion, opening the way for frauds or intermediaries to intervene. A resident in Catalonia from Benin was very explicit in reference to this lack of useful information: “People see images, but they do not know what lies behind them.” A woman from Algeria added that “there are many things in communication, telephone, the Internet. But this information never arrives; it doesn't cross the Mediterranean Sea.”

Finally, at the level of migration policies, the new tools of the Information Society have not yet been used to solve the basic problem of a lack of information, both before and after the arrival into a new country, which is still prevalent in many migration situations. It does not seem, therefore, that contemporary migration in the information age has contributed to overcoming a situation of unequal distribution of knowledge.

More Interaction

High connectivity in migrant contexts shapes a new space for interaction and simultaneity, both at a distance and in the local context. First, new patterns of distant interaction and sociability based on new communication tools would be emerging in immigrant contexts and allow them to maintain ties to a distant community while supporting face-to-face ties closer to home. As new technologies give more opportunities of communication, existing family relationships may get stronger and much more coordinated (Castells et al. 2007). Second, more interaction may also imply more and new contacts in the host society.

Immigrants are using the possibilities created by mobile technology, working in diffused networks, in order to coordinate work across long or short distances. Immigrant workers are also mobile workers who keep in constant contact with their managers to get last-minute information while working anywhere or even when they ...