Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the differential use of digital technologies in the experience of migration and the factors that shape the emergent technoscapes of mobility through a comparison of two different migration trajectories and conditions of movement.

Paper long abstract:

Digital media technologies have expanded, becoming part and parcel of our everyday lives in many parts of the world. This transformation has been particularly significant for transnational migrants who are actively in the process of movement and world making, whether these worlds involve the creation of new livelihoods and spaces of belonging in their country of migration or the maintenance of transnational families and connections across borders. This paper examines the differential use of digital technologies in the experience of migration and the factors that shape the emergent technoscapes of mobility through a comparison of two different migration trajectories. The first journey focuses upon the processes of 'bordering' (Long 2011) for Haitian migrants living on the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and the role of mobile phones in facilitating and mitigating physical movement. The second journey focuses upon migration across New Zealand, Tonga and Niue and the use of social and locative media to create, view, distribute, modify, archive and communicate a sense of belonging and being across national borders. Whereas the first example involves everyday mobility across a porous, yet surveilled border region, the Pacific examples foreground digital over physical mobility. Engaging with Vertesi's (2014) metaphor of 'seams' and 'seamfulness' to describe the ways in which people navigate the technological and infrastructural heterogeneity in their everyday lives, I conclude by reflecting upon the contemporary technoscapes migrants stitch together through different conditions of mobility and the meaningful use of digital media technologies.