This insightful book discusses how states deploy frontier and digital technologies to manage and control migratory movements. Assessing the development of blockchain technologies for digital identities and cash transfer; artificial intelligence for smart borders, resettlement of refugees and assessing asylum applications; social media and mobile phone applications to track and surveil migrants, it critically examines the consequences of new technological developments and evaluates their impact on the rights of migrants and refugees.
In recent years, UN agencies, global tech corporations, states and humanitarian NGOs have invested in surveillance technologies to support migrant communities and streamline their management. This book shows how the new surveillance systems lead to further militarization and securitization of border management.
Conceptualizing how digital artifacts can function as a frontier mediated by technology in the geographical, physical, sensory, visual, discursive, and imaginary, this volume offers an interdisciplinary analysis of digital material circulating online in a way that creates a digital dimension of the Mexico-U.S. border. In the context of a world where digital media has helped to shape geopolitical borders and impacted human mobility in positive and negative ways, the book explores new modes of expression in which identification, memory, representation, persuasion, and meaning-making are created, experienced, and/or circulated through digital technologies. An interdisciplinary team of scholars looks at how quick communications bring closer transnational families and how online resources can be helpful for migrants, but also at how digital media can serve to control and reinforce borders via digital technology used to create a system of political control that reinforces stereotypes. The book deconstructs digital artifacts such as the digital press, social media, digital archives, web platforms, technological and artistic creations, visual arts, video games, and artificial intelligence to help us understand the anti-immigrant and dehumanizing discourse of control, as well as the ways migrants create vernacular narratives as digital activism to break the stereotypes that afflict them. This timely and insightful volume will interest scholars and students of digital media, communication studies, journalism, migration, and politics.
This book explores how social media and its networked communities dismantles, builds, and shapes identity. Social media has been instrumental, sometimes dangerously so, in binding together different communities; with thirteen original chapters by leading academics in the field, the volume investigates how belonging, togetherness, and loyalty is created in the digital sphere, in a way that transcends, and even dismantles, ethnic and national borders around the world. In tandem, the volume analyses the further threats to identity presented by the ease with which fabricated news and information spreads on social media, resulting in many users becoming unable to distinguish credible data from junk data. Social media is both creative and destructive in its influence on identity, and therefore the growing fake news crisis threatens the very stability of the world’s communities. This book provides relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings in the area, including diverse case studies and analyses of social media experiences in indigenous and urban communities around the world, including China, Africa, and Central and South America.
Data at the Boundaries of European Law represents an original and engaged piece of scholarship in an important and fast developing field of policy and research. Beyond, and including, the most recent major new pieces of EU legislation-the Data Governance Act, together with the Data Act and the AI Act still going through the legislative process-this book draws attention to the substance of a number of core themes of the relationship between law and the digital world that are still somewhat hidden. These themes include the mimetic regulatory trajectories in and around the GDPR, transparency, ownership, and accountability, as well as the translation of all of these into core areas of public law such as criminal law, migration law, and intellectual property law. As a result, this book occupies a distinctive place in the debate on digital law that goes beyond the various silos of knowledge of particular legal disciplines. The issues addressed in this book are of interest to a global readership. They grapple with a number of the difficult themes of our times as applied to private and public actors and their (future) regulation in a manner that is relevant not just in Europe but worldwide.
Online Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self presents a critical investigation of the ways in which representations of identities have shifted since the advent of digital communications technologies. Critical studies over the past century have pointed to the multifaceted nature of identity, with a number of different theories and approaches used to explain how everyday people have a sense of themselves, their behaviors, desires, and representations. In the era of interactive, digital, and networked media and communication, identity can be understood as even more complex, with digital users arguably playing a more extensive role in fashioning their own self-representations online, as well as making use of the capacity to co-create common and group narratives of identity through interactivity and the proliferation of audio-visual user-generated content online. - Makes accessible complex theories of identity from the perspective of today's contemporary, digital media environment - Examines how digital media has added to the complexity of identity - Takes readers through examples of online identity such as in interactive sites and social networking - Explores implications of inter-cultural access that emerges from globalization and world-wide networking
"This book examines the impact of digital identities on our day-to-day activities from a range of contemporary technical and socio-cultural perspectives while allowing the reader to deepen understanding about the diverse range of tools and practices that compose the spectrum of online identity services and uses"--Provided by publisher.
In situations ranging from border control to policing and welfare, governments are using automated facial recognition technology (FRT) to collect taxes, prevent crime, police cities and control immigration. FRT involves the processing of a person's facial image, usually for identification, categorisation or counting. This ambitious handbook brings together a diverse group of legal, computer, communications, and social and political science scholars to shed light on how FRT has been developed, used by public authorities, and regulated in different jurisdictions across five continents. Informed by their experiences working on FRT across the globe, chapter authors analyse the increasing deployment of FRT in public and private life. The collection argues for the passage of new laws, rules, frameworks, and approaches to prevent harms of FRT in the modern state and advances the debate on scrutiny of power and accountability of public authorities which use FRT. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
From smart gates and drone patrols to e-visas and mobile GPS apps, digital technologies are becoming a ubiquitous feature of state borders and travel. The embedding of digital technologies into bordering and travel processes is reshaping the ways people move around the world, as well as the means sovereign states use to control and facilitate that movement. Digital Mobilities studies these changes and examines how ‘digitisation’ is remaking the very fabric of state sovereignty, territory, and borders. Some of the core bordering and travel transitions prompted by digitisation that are examined in Digital Mobilities include the spatial and temporal reorganisation of borders; the algorithmic assessment of travellers as ‘data doubles’; the reformulation of border agency, or who or what performs the border; the digital augmentation of international travel; and the new tensions and conflicts arising between smart borders and digital mobilities. Understanding these transitions is essential for policy makers, advocates, and members of the public to comprehend both the exceptional opportunities and monumental risks posed by the embedding of digital technologies into borders and travel.
