Digital Borders Research Articles

Digital Borders, Diasporic Flows and the Nigerian Transgender Beauty Queen Who Would Not Be Denied

In 2011, Miss Sahhara, a transgender woman from Nigeria with UK refugee status, was crowned First Princess at the world’s largest and most prestigious beauty pageant for transgender women—Miss International Queen. The then Cultural Minister of Nigeria when contacted for comment responded that if she was transgender, she could not be Nigerian, and if she was Nigerian, she could not be transgender—a tacit denial of her very existence. In recent years, LGBT people “fleeing Africa” to the “Global North” has become a common media trope. Responses to this, emanating from a variety of African voices, have provided a more nuanced reading of sexuality. What has been absent from these readings has been the role of gender expression, particularly a consideration of transgender experiences. I understand transgender refugees to have taken up “lines of flight” such that, in a Deleuzian sense, they do not only flee persecution in countries of origin but also recreate or speak back to systems of control and oppressive social conditions. Some transgender people who have left, like Miss Sahhara, have not gone silently, using digital means to project a new political visibility of individuals, those who are both transgender and African, back at the African continent. In Miss Sahhara’s case, this political visibility has not gone unnoticed in the Nigerian tabloid press. Drawing on the story of Miss Sahhara, this paper maps these flows and contraflows, asking what they might reveal about configurations of nationhood, gender and sexuality as they are formed at both the digital and physical interstices between Africa and the Global North.

Globalisation and Digitisation - The Exponential Spread of Infectious Information and its Possible Containment

There is a fundamental difference between the human migration movements of the past and those of the beginning of the 21st century. The latter impose the need for a cultural assimilation of the migrants which they cannot master within one generation. This cultural transformation includes the necessity to adapt to the compression of humans into a new living space, into technology-based megapolises, which altogether represent the equivalent of an artificial planet. This new planet does not provide new resources nor additional free spaces for an overall growth of material wealth. On the contrary, it asks for a drastic reduction of individual freedoms. The stability, even the survival of these mega centres, is at stake without consistent subdivisions of an overall shrinking of spaces needed for all kinds of movements and of a consistent restriction of the exploding communicative interference within and between these mega centres. This essay aims at a first-hand analysis of a possible introduction of digital borders without which adequate legal spaces appear infeasible as the constituting framework of “our“ artificial new planet.

National Cyber Security Strategy and the Emergence of Strong Digital Borders

National Cyber Security Strategy and the Emergence of Strong Digital Borders

Digital Borders, Location Recognition, and Experience Attribution within a Digital Geography

During an online session, a user may visit a number of websites, often following hyperlinks from one website to the next or using a search results page to find and visit pages of interest. In doing so, the user can lose track of which sites were visited and which were helpful in meeting the objective. Thus, sites that may have provided value to the user may not receive expected positive effects such as loyalty and intention to return. It is thus crucial to understand if and how an individual website is perceived by users within the context of multi-website online sessions—particularly in predicting desired outcomes, such as user loyalty, trust, brand image, and revisit intentions. To address this problem, we conceptualize the Web as a geography traversed by users who cross digital borders as they move from one website location to another. We introduce the concept of border strength, or the degree to which digital media artifacts mark a transition to a website, and propose a positive effect of border strength on users’ recognition of their locations. We then consider users’ attribution of credit for assistance in successfully completing an online task to those websites and their owners that supported the task. This attribution is a function of border strength and location recognition. We test these hypotheses using experimental data, which show that, indeed, some websites go unrecognized and that stronger borders increase users’ recognition of having visited a website and users’ credit attribution for their experience to the site. Our findings demonstrate the usefulness of the geography metaphor, suggest the need to further study dynamics regarding individual sites within the context of multi-site sessions and show the usefulness of erecting stronger borders to mark the entry into digital locations.

Digital Borders, Location Recognition, and Experience Attribution Within a Digital Geography

During an online session, a user may visit a number of websites, often following hyperlinks from one website to the next or using a search results page to find and visit pages of interest. In doing so, the user can lose track of which sites were visited and which were helpful in meeting the intended objective. Consequently, sites that may have provided value to the user may not receive expected positive effects such as loyalty and intention to return. It is thus crucial to understand if and how an individual website is perceived by users within the context of multi-website online sessions—particularly in predicting desired website interaction outcomes, such as loyalty, trust, brand image, and revisit intentions. To address this problem, we conceptualize the Web as a geography traversed by users who cross digital borders as they move from one website location to another. We introduce the concept of border strength, or the degree to which digital media artifacts mark a transition to a website, and propose a positive effect of border strength on users’ recognition of their locations. We then consider users’ attribution of credit for assistance in successfully completing an online task to those websites and their owners that actually supported the task. We explain that this attribution is a function of border strength and location recognition. We test these hypotheses using experimental data, which show that, indeed, some websites go unrecognized. Importantly, we show that stronger borders increase users’ recognition of having visited a website and users’ credit attribution for their experience to the site.

Re-thinking Borders in the Digital Space

<p><em>On the basis of the arguments advanced by Imad Saleh, Nasreddine Bouhai, and Hakim Hachour (Saleh, Bouhai, & Hachour, 2014) concerning the impact of “digital borders” generated by the Internet on the dynamics of inter-disciplinary research, we have been led to blend disciplines in order to develop the following question: are representations in the digital space located in a borderless communication imagery? Here the humanities are called upon to look into the underpinnings of the meanings assigned to digital space, in its conception and its technological praxis. This question also provokes the following underlying reflections: how could we define the notion of borders in relation to a space that is non-territorialized at the level of human perceptions and where customs officials are not quite “in flesh and blood”? How does a border present itself? Does its representation influence conception and technological praxis? As a matter of priority we define what a border is in space for the purpose of confronting this definition with imagined borders in order to analyze the digital space in its continuum between openness and limits. </em></p>

Sub-stack protocols: digital borders and coloniality

sub-stack protocols: digital borders and coloniality

E-residency and blockchain

In December 2014, Estonia became the first nation to open its digital borders to enable anyone, anywhere in the world to apply to become an e-Resident. Estonian e-Residency is essentially a commercial initiative. The e-ID issued to Estonian e-Residents enables commercial activities with the public and private sectors. It does not provide citizenship in its traditional sense, and the e-ID provided to e-Residents is not a travel document. However, in many ways it is an international ‘passport’ to the virtual world. E-Residency is a profound change and the recent announcement that the Estonian government is now partnering with Bitnation to offer a public notary service to Estonian e-Residents based on blockchain technology is of significance. The application of blockchain to e-Residency has the potential to fundamentally change the way identity information is controlled and authenticated. This paper examines the legal, policy, and technical implications of this development.

LIS Education in an Interdisciplinary Frame: Integrating Digital Media into the Ethics of Digital Personhood

This article explores the ways in which the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Rhode Island integrates digital media into its curricula and research as part of its ongoing interdisciplinary framework. Suggesting it is incumbent on LIS educators to both teach technological skills and examine digital media tools as objects of intellectual inquiry, this article contends that LIS education must consider core epistemological questions which inform the field and address significant philosophical and cultural questions regarding our digital selves. The article considers how we can attend to issues of equity for diverse populations, and work towards understanding the assumptions inherent in digital spaces and technological tools which are guiding the creation of our digital borders.

Technological Dependency and the Internet: Latin American Access from Buenos Aires, 2001–2013

Aunque el Internet, nació del deseo de mantener sitios de investigación descentralizados a través de interconexiones de alta–velocidad, su desarrollo ha producido un espacio de redes altamente jerarquizado y centralizado. A través de la aplicación de procedimientos del análisis espacial aquí se representa cartográficamente el nuevo mapa mundial del ciberespacio visto desde Buenos Aires (Argentina). Un espacio apto para la realización de nuevas exploraciones pero también un espacio que presenta posibilidades geopolíticas. Se verifica el surgimiento de nuevas fronteras digitales entre los países centrales y periféricos, ampliando la fragmentación en la conexión de los países de América Latina. Revertir esta situación es un desafío futuro.

‘Greedy’ Information Technology: The Digitalization of the European Migration Policy

AbstractEuropean borders are being transformed into digital borders. The ambition behind the European information systems ‐ like the Schengen Information System and Eurodac ‐ is to establish a single Union information system to control the flux of migrants. We show that in this process information technology is not a neutral tool to reach established goals but that it is ‘greedy’. This greediness indicates the distorting potential of information technology regarding the means-end logic. Our analysis suggests that the European migration policy is stuck in a ‘digital fix’, i.e. a technological fix focusing on ICT. We identify three political issues concerning greedy information technology within the context of the European migration policy. The first issue concerns the democratic control on information systems. The second issue discusses the weak legal position of immigrants. The third issue inquires into the effectiveness of information systems as a policy instrument.

The New Digital Borders of Europe

This article analyses the development of three EU migration databases and their significance for the internal control of irregular migrants. Because borders and immigration policy alone cannot stop irregular migration, many governments turn to internal migration control on settled irregular migrants. Surveillance of this group is aimed at their exclusion from key societal institutions, discouraging their stay and ultimately, the deportation of apprehended irregular migrants. These are policies in which identification of irregular migrants is crucial. In this age, registration and identification mean computerized and networked databases. The member states of the EU are currently developing a network of databases in the field of (irregular) immigration. The Schengen Information System (II), the Eurodac database and the Visa Information System are vast databases, often including biometric data, aimed at controlling migration flows and identifying and sorting legal and irregular migrants. These systems are able to ‘re-identify’ parts of the population of irregular migrants on the basis of digital traces of their migration history. It is argued that the digital infrastructure that is now growing past its infancy is developing into a formidable tool for the surveillance of irregular migrants in Europe.

A theory of binary digital pictures

We study 2- and 3-dimensional digital geometry in the context of almost arbitrary adjacency relations. (Previous authors have based their work on particular adjacency relations). We define a binary digital picture to be a pair whose components are a set of lattice-points and an adjacency relation on the whole lattice. We show how a wide class of digital pictures have natural “continuous analogs.” This enables us to use methods of continuous topology in studying digital pictures. We are able to prove general results on the connectivity of digital borders, which generalize results that have appeared in the literature. In the 3-dimensional case we consider the possibility of using a uniform relation on the whole lattice. (In the past authors have used different types of adjacency for “object” and “background.”)