By Pramod K Nayar During the Syrian refugee crisis, for several of those fleeing, as studies showed, WhatsApp, Viber and Google Maps enabled them to traverse safer routes, and other apps helped them undertake currency conversion. Thus, it was an app-enabled journey in many cases. But for others on such a journey, they could not […]
By Pramod K Nayar
During the Syrian refugee crisis, for several of those fleeing, as studies showed, WhatsApp, Viber and Google Maps enabled them to traverse safer routes, and other apps helped them undertake currency conversion. Thus, it was an app-enabled journey in many cases. But for others on such a journey, they could not access real-time news and were, therefore, at the mercy of misinformation, especially by smugglers who were ‘helping’ them cross European borders to safety.
Information studies specialists examining the case of these refugees coined the term ‘information precarity’ to describe their condition. It referred to, in the words of Melissa Wall, Madeline Otis Campbell and Dana Janbek,
“the condition of instability that asylum seekers experience in accessing news and personal information, potentially leaving them vulnerable to misinformation, stereotyping, and rumors that can affect their economic and social capital.”
Informational vulnerability — or precarity — has two prominent aspects.
Giving out Information
When the refugees did actually update their status on social media, they ran the risk of the regimes back home monitoring them and then targeting those whom they had left behind. But that is not all. The US Department of Homeland Security realising the potential of social media as a source of information, announced in 2016 (according to a New York Times report) that it would be monitoring the social media accounts of visa applicants to check for possible links to terror organisations.
In the same year, The Guardian reported that Frontex, the EU border agency, asked tech companies ‘to pitch ways to track and control people trying to reach the continent before they get here’. One such company claimed that ‘technology could help prevent some migrants from coming to Europe at all, discourage others from making hazardous sea crossings and reduce the role of smugglers’.
But commentators noted, this was a clear route into information vulnerability because, as The Guardian put it, ‘IT companies could persuade people to put tracking apps on their phones in exchange for information about weather and the safety of different routes’. Information becomes the cornerstone on which the entire edifice of refugee movement and refugee safety depended. They had to give up information through their apps, rendering them open to stoppage and control. In order to secure ‘good’ info, they laid themselves open to excessive control, and perhaps the end of their journey to safety itself.
Subjects of Misinformation
Misled by smugglers and traffickers, many refugees fall prey to misinformation. What is even more troubling about the structures of information vulnerability is that post-arrival in the receiving societies and seeking asylum, the refugees remain vulnerable in terms of their access to accurate information.
First, as Wall et al found, they were fed dangerous information. This meant the refugees remained manipulable through information feeds. Secondly, their access to welfare and state support was determined by the content of information received and access to such information — both of which were often controlled by the state and its agencies. Finally, there was also a disconnect between the refugees and the social networks and support systems. They were unable to construct tenable and reliable support systems in the receiving society because they could not plug in digitally, and had already lost their moorings in similar systems back home when they left Syria.
What we are staring at then is an extraordinary ecosystem that hampers community building and renders the refugee vulnerable through information gathering, dissemination and control.
Double Precarity
In their introduction to the volume, Precarity within the Digital Age: Media Change and Social Insecurity, David Kergel and Birte Heidkamp write:
“the media change effects a stable instability or precarity. Due to the media change, social practices throughout the diverse societal fields are questioned: new social spaces emerge which require new social practices. Along these lines, we can formulate the thesis of a double precarity: a precarity within digital media and a precarity through digital media.”
Thus, ironically in an age more or less defined by the digital, the digital becomes a tool of isolation and enforced alienation when the refugees are unable to access reliable information, or build healthy social networks through the digital medium.
Further, as media scholars have established, the digital space itself serves as a social space, which often offers the kind of freedom traditional public and/or private spaces do not. More worryingly, a loss of this access to digital spaces simply replicates the loss of power, possibility and hope which the traditional spaces had already imposed on the refugees when they were in Syria. That is, since the digital is a version of the material world, and the material world has ensured that large swathes of the population in several nations have been disenfranchised. Now, the digital world which once offered minimal freedoms has also disenfranchised them, replicating the material world they were fleeing from.
When this digital space of emancipation and freedom is lost or curtailed, then we arrive at the condition of double precarity via information of the refugee. As we now know, the media and its digital form influences how we see ourselves and how the world sees us. When the refugee fleeing oppression is disappeared from the digital, her/his precarity is doubled because there are no longer any means of self-representation, of presenting oneself to the world in the form of one’s stories, pictures, anecdotes — narratives — and this endangers the individual because then the state or border agency steps in to define it for her/him.
In the age of information vulnerability, the digital serves as a weapon to exacerbate inequalities and powerlessness.
(The author is Professor and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies, Department of English, University of Hyderabad)