Concept: Technology

Definition: (noun) The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry

Related Terms: techne, technical, surveillance, data, media, modernity

Description: Contemporary processes of migration seem inextricable from technologies of surveillance, quantification, and individuation: From automated visa assessments to the collection and deployment of biometric data, migration is delimited and made possible through technical processes. In Langdon Winner’s seminal article Do Artifacts Have Politics? (1980), Winner contends with the provocative question of whether technical things possess political qualities. Taking technology to mean “all of modern practical artifice,” Winner outlines a theory of technological politics, proposing that some technologies carry inherent politics, while in some cases it is the design and deployment of technologies that then delineate how communities address certain issues.¹ The politics of technology thus provide a framework for examining issues of migration today.

The notion of technology itself is nebulous, necessarily having morphed across time. Technologies as tools have existed since early human history, and the industrial revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, for instance, saw industrial developments alongside tremendous flows of labor migration through societal transformations of production.

Beyond simply being acted upon by technology, migrants have instrumentalized technology as means of carving out space for community and connection. Research by Minu Thomas and Lim Sun Sun emphasize the indispensability of technologies such as mobile phones to women migrant domestic workers in Singapore—who often hail from countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, and India—for remaining in contact with family in the roles of mother, wife, daughter, and sister, and finding community.²

Lastly, the role of media technologies, from television to video games, cannot be understated in mediating the figure of the immigrant, whether in the representational form of news reports or narratives. The video game Venba (2023), for instance, features a Tamil immigrant couple moving to Canada, tracing their journey through recipes showcasing South Indian cuisine and the mechanics of cooking video games.

J.Y. 2024

Notes

¹ Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?,” Daedalus 109, no. 1 (Winter, 1980): 121–136.

² Minu Thomas and Lim Sun Sun, “ICT Use and Female Migrant Workers in Singapore,” in Mobile Communication: Dimensions of Social Policy, ed. James E. Katz (Routledge, 2017), 175–190.