Abstract
This article explores the relationship between online and offline practices in the special case of forced migration. By applying a central category in social relations, trust/distrust as developed by Niklas Luhmann, this article contributes to the understanding of forced migration in the digital age. It presupposes that, without a strategy of trust, it would be almost impossible to cope with situations of unfamiliarity and uncertainty. By interviewing refugees, the question is in what contexts the refugee recognizes that they can trust (or not). The article concludes that through the combination of on- and offline communication practices, more varied mechanisms for the creation and stabilization of trust are provided. In contexts of unfamiliarity, interpersonal relations with the native inhabitants play an important role in bridging online and offline worlds.
Highlights
When Aisha, a woman in her 40s, wakes up, she brews a cup of Arabic coffee and opens Facebook on her smartphone
In coping with situations that are characterized by a lack of knowledge, dangers, intercultural encounters, misunderstandings, stereotypes and so on, strategies of trust and mistrust are of crucial importance
In order to explore conditions for trust-building, I conducted a pilot study that consists of seven interviews with refugees in Sweden and Germany, conducted in the fall of 2017, and on studies published on refugees’ media use
Summary
When Aisha, a woman in her 40s, wakes up, she brews a cup of Arabic coffee and opens Facebook on her smartphone She scrolls through the latest pictures posted by her daughter studying in Italy and checks her notifications to see whether she has missed a message from her husband, who has traveled to Lebanon to visit his sick father. She can control how much bad news she is willing to digest, and if the limits are reached, she leaves her Facebook feed and listens to Arabic music on YouTube and says: “I feel better” For a moment, she seems to forget troublesome news and her everyday-life in a new country that is so different from her former life, before the war, in a big house with a happy and fulfilling social life. As Turkle (2011) has shown, frequent media use creates challenges in coping with both online and offline interactions
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