This research examines the role of smartphones in refugees’ journeys. It traces the risks and possibilities afforded by smartphones for facilitating information, communication, and migration flows in the digital passage to Europe. For the Syrian and Iraqi refugee respondents in this France-based qualitative study, smartphones are lifelines, as important as water and food. They afford the planning, navigation, and documentation of journeys, enabling regular contact with family, friends, smugglers, and those who help them. However, refugees are simultaneously exposed to new forms of exploitation and surveillance with smartphones as migrations are financialised by smugglers and criminalized by European policies, and the digital passage is dependent on a contingent range of sociotechnical and material assemblages. Through an infrastructural lens, we capture the dialectical dynamics of opportunity and vulnerability, and the forms of resilience and solidarity, that arise as forced migration and digital connectivity coincide.
International audienceThis special issue reports on a collaborative UK research project which examined how new security challenges are constituted in the intersecting relationships between political and military actors, news producers, news representations and discourses, and news audiences. This article introduces the ethnographic reports which follow, and describes the theoretical premises and methodological strategies of the research. It outlines an innovative, multi-disciplinary methodology - `Integrated Multidisciplinary Media Analysis' - which integrates Collaborative Media Ethnography (a novel method in itself) with institutional and textual analysis. This combination of mutually informing approaches affords unique insights into social and cultural processes. The research process began with explorations of how public knowledge and understanding of security issues relate to and are shaped by everyday cultures of media practice, the subject of the following reports. Combined with the findings of researchers investigating the perceptions and working practices of security-policy and media professionals, and others working on the textual analysis of salient news broadcasts, our study reaches three main conclusions. First, that ritualized interactions between policymakers, journalists and 'citizen audiences' constitute the media-security nexus as a 'battlespace' of mutual disrespect and suspicion. Second, that this exacerbates the marginalization and racialization of many ethnic minority groups but in particular British Muslims, who face declining prospects for multicultural citizenship. Third, that security policymakers must struggle to find public legitimacy in view of the growing scepticism and hostility of national and diasporic news media and audiences
The single biggest challenge facing journalism today is the continued unregulated growth of social media platforms and associated ways in which they have been gamed by political actors for their own ends. This is contributing to the steady erosion of independent journalism and a deterioration of democratic politics. Finding a solution to these problems requires not only concerted political will but also state regulation of social media platforms to ensure greater privacy, data protection and transparency. A few important steps towards a solution include effective monitoring of the deployment of targeted advertising for political purposes; ensuring that their algorithms do not promote the circulation of racist, sexist, homophobic and other extremist content; and making social media companies editorially responsible for the content they publish and circulate.Recent revelations surrounding the use of social media to target and influence voters in elections across the world point to the single biggest challenge facing journalism today; the unregulated rise of social media platforms. This problem is not simply one of nefarious actors using social media to spread 'fake news'. The problem is much bigger and it concerns how social media platforms themselves contribute to a toxic news media ecology by their very design, business model and lack of accountability.The true story underlying the Cambridge Analytica scandal, for example, is not that of a shadowy company exploiting Facebook user data to influence people, it is that the exploitation of user data is Facebook's business model. In the age of 'platform capitalism' (Srnicek, 2016), users of social media platforms and the data trails they create have become the very product by which social media platforms make their profits through advertising. Targeted advertising represents 98 per cent of Facebook's revenues which were $40 billion last year. That this advertising has been exploited by corrupt and suspect
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