Countering isolation with the use of technology: how asylum-seeking detainees on islands in the Indian Ocean use social media to transcend their confinement

Abstract

Governments detain asylum seekers on islands across the Indian Ocean region, including Australia's Christmas Island, Papua New Guinea's Manus Island, Nauru, and across the Indonesian archipelago. Scholars and advocates alike have shown that the ambiguous jurisdiction and complex legal migration statuses that emerge in these areas, as well as their remote location and isolation, contribute to their popularity as sites of migrant detention. The negative effects of isolation and remoteness on migrants' physical and mental health, as well as their legal outcomes, have been well documented. We argue, however, that detainees and others are countering the effects of isolation with the use of technology. Ethnographic research conducted on the islands within Australian and Indonesian migrant detention networks suggests that asylum seekers detained in remote sites across the region are combating the isolation of detention with the use of mobile phones, internet access, and social media networks. They communicate with friends, relatives, legal representatives, advocates, activists, and members of the public beyond prison walls to transmit information, facilitate advocacy inside and outside of detention facilities, and construct transnational support networks. In turn, punitive policies to discipline asylum seekers by limiting methods of communication threaten these efforts.