Digital Storytelling About Migration: A Civic Media Framework

The recent influx of migrants and refugees into mainland Europe has resulted in a rising tide of nationalism and a populist backlash throughout the West. This increase in migrating populations has highlighted tensions in how citizens of the West view their borders, their politicians, and their civic identities when faced with the arrival of those with little support and few resources for transitioning into a new culture.

It has also made clear the increasingly influential role digital media plays in shaping both the perceptions and outcomes of population movements into Western democracies. This role of digital media in engagement between and among migrants and host communities is the subject of the 2016 report, Digital Crossroads: Civic Media & Migration, authored by Liat Racin, Eric Gordon, and me, in partnership with the Salzburg Global Seminar and supported by the German Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (IFA: Institute for Cultural Relations). More specifically, our report focuses on how organizations use digital and connective media to help communities think critically and holistically about migration.

This report comes at a time when many organizations — whether invested in social issues like migration or political issues, like voting rights — face increasing challenges for how they use digital media to share information, engage with citizens, and provide clarity and depth to complex issues.

In Digital Crossroads we explore contemporary narratives of migration in media and find, not surprisingly, a reliance on broad portraits of the issue, the use of aggregated statistics and distanced information to portray the refugee situation in the West. Such de-personalizing of complex issues may help make stories accessible to wider audiences, but it also leads to reductionist views and representations of refugees and migrants as abstract, other, and less than equal.

Our report focuses on the capacity of organizations (primarily NGOs) to use digital media to connect, engage with and create empathy between host communities and refugees. We apply the frame of civic media, defined in our book as “the technologies, designs, and practices that produce and reproduce the sense of being in the world with others toward common good.” The skills and knowledge needed by organizations to effectively communicate and engage with digital media around the topic of migration is not merely a technological issue; rather, it is an issue of civic media. Our report shows that beyond the constraints of funding and infrastructure, there is a general lack of digital literacies in NGOs to support good civic media practices, including effective storytelling. Over 20 organizations (see appendix C of report) spoke of their struggle to find effective ways to tell stories in an online media ecosystem that is essentially an echo chamber, one that so easily amplifies misinformation and hearsay about vulnerable populations. In short, NGOs were hard pressed to find meaningful ways to engage with communities across the myriad platforms online, especially around the polarizing issue of migration.

Based on our research with practitioners, we offer a digital storytelling toolbox to help NGOs do the difficult work of effectively employing civic media with and for refugees and migrants.

Digital Storytelling Toolbox

We conclude the report with the following five guiding statements:

1. Digital media are about potential, not about product. The value of digital media is the ability for platforms, tools, and spaces to offer connections, to bridge divides, and to bring humans together. They offer a potential for exploration and empathy, caring and discovery. The potential drives use, not the resulting product.
2. Tell stories from within, not from beyond. Stories that document information are useful inasmuch as they provide content and context. Stories that relate experience can create understanding. Digital media open up the potential for this to occur.
3. Stories are more meaningful than tools. Tools might make things easier, but they alone do not make meaning. Tools must support the intentions of the story, not the other way around.
4. Reframing narratives means moving beyond dominant structures. As much as large media outlets and platforms provide wider audiences to reach, they also reinforce the perspectives of the outlets themselves. Humanistic stories must emerge outside of these frames, or they risk being subsumed by the intention of the dominant structures with which they exist.
5. Stories must be designed from the margins. Refugee and migrant populations are almost exclusively on the margins of the societies they enter. Stories designed from the perspective of the dominant societies have the potential to further divide and dehumanize the plight of migration. Stories must come from the margins, not end at them.

This report is a response to the struggles organizations face when creating story-driven media in digital spaces for an increasingly distrustful citizenry. The challenges facing organizations are further amplified when considering the recent phenomenon of citizens who either bypass such media altogether or use it to fuel polarizing, value-driven advocacy and expression online. The need for civic media and digital literacies to address these issues could not be greater.

Digital literacies comprise more than critical inquiry and reflection: they suggest the embracing of the dynamics of digital culture to get work done. NGOs have to understand how the media works in order to use it effectively. They need to internally develop the skills and dispositions that support social and cultural inclusion and that counter the spread of xenophobic rhetoric and harmful misinformation online.

What we propose is ambitious, but there are grounds for such approaches. This past summer at the Salzburg Academy on Media & Global Change, an annual gathering bringing young media makers together with scholars and practitioners to use media to respond to the pressing problems of our time, we experimented with the type of digital literacy driven storytelling explored in our report. Out of this, we created, Move: Media, Migration and the Civic Imagination an online publication that collects 21 multimedia essays built by an international cohort of young people, aimed at providing human faces to migration.

We believe a focus on the digital literacies of the storyteller can enhance the ability of organizations and citizens to find ways to connect and challenge the wave of polarizing rhetoric that plagues our mainstream and digital media channels across borders, cultures, and divides.

Learn more about IFA: Institute for Cultural Relations, the Salzburg Global Seminar, and read our full report Digital Crossroads: Civic Media & Migration.