Absara Hassan
Response 4: Sarah C. Bishop, “(Un)documented immigrant media makers and the search for connection online” and Subhash Kateel, Aarti Shahani, “Families for Freedom: Against Deportation and Delegalization”
Sarah Bishop highlights the many drawbacks of digital media by giving examples of ways that it has had negative impacts on undocumented immigrants. Bishop interviews twenty-five undocumented media makers, who share their personal experiences on the matter. One could only imagine the difficulty with which an undocumented person finds the courage to “come out”, and Bishop introduces several accounts of this situation. Pang, who is from Thailand, describes her encounter with another undocumented immigrant, where she was uncomfortable about sharing her own story with the other person, demonstrating that “even when immigrants do cross paths with others without documentation, they may refrain from outing themselves due to a lack of knowledge about their own status, fear, a desire to fit in, a lack of emotional preparedness, or because of direct or indirect instructions from others” (Bishop, 4). Bishop goes on to mention that the media makers also reported feelings of shame and isolation with regards to “coming out”.
Several of the interviewees supported the use of media, saying that the openness of the Internet proved to be helpful in giving them the courage to discuss their status. Bishop summarizes their statements, saying that “the ways coming out online helped them to discover or uncover parts of their identities they had previously been unaware of or kept hidden” (Bishop, 8). However, although the media provides a way for those who are undocumented to “engage in communal coping” and “counter isolation” (Bishop, 9), digital platforms have detrimental effects, shown by the personal experiences of the media makers.
Bishop states that digital media is not all beneficial by saying that it “perpetuates conformation bias” (Bishop, 9), in which people seek information from or follow those who already share the same beliefs and opinions. The narrators were able to relate to this based off of their own personal experiences, where much of their work doesn’t reach their intended audiences, (those who don’t agree), but instead those who do agree, therefore resulting in little to no change: “If a mediated message intended for the purpose of audience persuasion never reaches its intended audience, it cannot have its desired effect.” (Bishop, 13). Furthermore, digital platforms provide a means for communication, both good and bad. Bishop includes a personal account from Angy, who is from Colombia, where Angi says that she has been called a “leech” and a “cockroach”, and has also been told to commit suicide. These harsh threats demonstrate the darker side of media, and specifically its effects on undocumented youth.
Subhash Kateel and Aarti Shahani speak similarly of the issues undocumented immigrants face, but use the term “apartheid” when speaking of immigrant experiences, as well as the term “delegalization”, referring to the movement of policing populations through immigrant status (Kateel, 2). What’s interesting is Shahani’s personal story on deportation, more specifically that if his uncle and father. For them, coming out caused nothing but hardship, sending them to prison and then back home to India. Shahani’s uncle and father were treated like prisoners, and the process of deportation back to India had been delayed due to irresponsibility, prolonging the stay behind bars. These incidences described in Families for Freedom connect to Sarah Bishops study by showing the negative implications of revealing one’s status as an undocumented immigrant, where Bishops looks specifically at its ties to media.
Questions
- How can the problem of conformation bias be overcome?
- Do you think the media makers feel the same way they do now as they did before about coming out?
