“I Just Go on Wi-Fi”: Imagining Worlds Through Professional Basketball Migrants’ Deployment of Information and Communication Technology

Abstract

The connection between athletes and technology has developed in recent years, with the focus on how lives are augmented and presented through this relationship. Building on previous reflections concerning the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to support the sometimes fractious experiences of sport migration, we suggest a need to develop our understandings of migrant athletes’ use of ICT by interrogating socially-embedded processes driving its usage. In so doing, we draw on 18 semistructured interviews with professional basketball migrants based (at the time) in the United Kingdom but whose seasonal work moves them frequently across the globe. We explore these participants’ experiences through the lens of Appadurai’s model of scapes and disjuncture. With this framework we explore themes of negotiation, need, expectation, and barriers. Consequently, we propose expanding how we understand migrant athletes’ relationships with technology.