 We welcome everyone to tonight's panel discussion on the dislocation in an age of connection. Tonight's event is one of many events taking place over the university this week as we look at postgraduate study across the university and the sorts of opportunities that are available to you all as students at the University of Auckland. I can hear that this is going in and out, are we good? Tisi iconpina programme ia kuon aww member ngus aww seho'u Freedom is being live streamed so as well as welcoming everyone who's in the room tonight I really love to call on the people from all around the world including the people in Southland who might be watching tisi live stream Mai dinner Guy than Push Drine Daly hosted majorining on kaurice Manau ki i te kainara tī naiʻ wicked chi nai kουμε about dislocation in the age of connection. Postgraduate studies are particularly close to my heart, given my day job. It's all about supporting postgraduate students across the university. And one of the things I really like about postgraduate studies is whether you're doing an honours degree, a master's or a PhD, it's the opportunity you have to do research, including research on real life events and actions and activities that make a difference in people's lives. And our researchers and students here tonight are people who are doing that sort of research. But before I introduce them, I have a duty of care to you all to remind you in my best air hostess routine that there are emergency exits and should the alarm sound, we will all exit calmly. You will not take your personal possessions with you. You will not, you know, take off your high heel shoes so that you can walk calmly to Wynyard Street or Grafton Street. All right, to the matter of the evening. The term digital disruption has become something of a cliché. Everything seems to have the power or potential to change our lives, to change how we interact with people and to things. The flip side of that disruption is digital opportunity. And it seems to me that the idea of digital opportunity is central to the lives of tonight's panellists. Dr Jay Marlow, on my right, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Counselling, Human Services and Social Work here at the University of Auckland. Jay is a former visiting fellow with the Refugee Study Centre at the University of Oxford in the UK. He's published more than 50 papers and is currently leading a major Marsden Fund, which is a big research project funded by the government, looking at how refugees practice transnational family and relationships, friendships through social media and what that means for people's commitment to local places. And Jay's going to tell us a little bit about his research tonight. Rez Gadi, on Jay's right, is a recent graduate from the University of Auckland. Rez studied a Bachelor of Law Honours and a Bachelor of Arts, and in February this year, she was named the University of Auckland Young New Zealander of the Year in recognition of her services to human rights. Rez is New Zealand's first Kurdish female lawyer. She is passionate about supporting young refugees and addressing the under-representation of refugee students in tertiary education. She's worked with the University to establish three new scholarships for students from refugee backgrounds and has a personal story to tell that I think illustrates nicely how connections and dislocations shape lives. On Rez's side is Dr Luke Good. Luke is also an Associate Professor here at the University of Auckland. His academic home is in media and communications in the School of Social Sciences in the Faculty of Arts. Luke specialises in new media technologies and digital politics. He's published on various topics, including online citizen journalism, democratic participation on YouTube, social media on the university campus, and the hacktivist collective known as Anonymous. His current work focuses on the future of communication technologies. So, they're our panellists. It's time to see what connections we can make. And we're going to start tonight with Jay and we're going to work through all of our panellists and give them an opportunity to tell us a little bit about their research and their research journey, which I think is at the heart of a lot of postgraduate students' journeys as well. So, I'm wondering, Jay, if we can start with you and if you can tell us a little bit about how you got to be where you are. So, from Jay the student to Jay the professor and also about the research you're doing around refugee practices with transnational family, friendships and social media. Okay, thank you. You all can hear me okay? Yeah. So, Kia ora koutou and many thanks for this opportunity and welcome to those who are streaming online, including, hopefully, some of the participants in my study right now. So, hello. Please keep me honest and send me some questions. So, what brought me to postgraduate study, I think, really, is my experiences in the southwest corner of Utah in the desert. I used to work with young people from gang-related backgrounds. I took them up into the wilderness for about 60 days at a time. And it was really in those experiences that I kind of became really aware of the injustices that people experience and also that, having a very different background, I was able to work with that difference in quite meaningful ways. And so, from there, I started wanting to learn to speak some Spanish. I went to Guatemala and did some work with an organization that took tourists and multi-day hikes in the Guatemalan Highlands and that supported the school for kids living on the streets. And then down to Ecuador, I worked with the indigenous community around sourcing alternative funds that ensigned their lands to multinational oil corporations. And so, all that work was great. And so, I wanted to pursue a profession that would allow me to follow these passions. And so, that took me to social work and so I went to Australia. I did my master's social work. And then I worked as a social worker with refugees. And I did also a practice-based PhD question and I did my PhD in ethnography of the South Sudanese community in Adelaide. And so, I've now been in Auckland for seven years and I've stayed involved in refugee-related research. And tonight, I guess I'm speaking about one of those studies that I'm involved in around how refugees practice transnational family and friendship for social media. And I guess to really provide a backdrop to that, you sort of have to understand the global context and that we're now living in an era of unprecedented numbers of forced migrants since World War II. The UNHCR and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that there's more than 65 million people forcibly displaced. That's 34 people a minute every day. 34 people a minute for 34,000 people every day of every day of the year. And in that context, about 20 million refugees. And so, and only about 100,000 refugees are able to settle in places like the United States, Canada, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. And so that means that only 1%, less than 1% of the world's refugees can actually be resettled. And what does that mean for the 99% that remain either in the countries of where they may be persecuted, countries of exile or asylum? And how do they stay connected to these people? And so this study is now occurring in a context where we have polymedia around Skype, Viber, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit. The list just goes on and on and on. And quite intimate ways that people can stay connected. And so I wanted to see how refugees practice transnational family and friendship through these technologies and what that means for their commitments to local places. So I mean, I guess just to kind of give you like a backdrop of just a few scenarios that I've worked with, an Afghan woman leaves her Skype on at night to connect to friends and family in Kabul. Not to even talk to them, but just so that they can see what she's doing as she's preparing dinner and interacting with her kids doing homo. And she can do the same, almost creating another living in their homes. The South Sudanese community engages on WhatsApp and encrypted communications, talking to people simultaneously in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, informing communities in South Sudan about militias that might be coming to their community and where safe places of exit might possibly be. Think about a Syrian man who's on Viber telling friends and family where safe passage and which border crossings might be open where they can get resources and who they can go to for help. And thinking about the Kaikoura earthquakes and the role of social media for many people from refugee backgrounds to letting people know that they are safe, to try to locate people who they may not know if they're safe, and to let their transnational communities know that they're okay. There are even sometimes where there's an earthquake in the Kermadex and the Afghan community, people in Afghanistan in the middle of the night, warned the Afghan community here and often to go up into the Wai-Takura to escape the tsunami that never came. So they've almost got eyes and ears at 24-7. So the reason why I'm quite interested in this is that people can now maintain incredibly intimate levels of connection across significant distances. And within that, what does that mean for people's commitments to local places? So across the world there are raging debates about integration, social cohesion, are we safe, are our identity, limited resources, all these sorts of things. And if we take migrants and refugees, what does that mean for our society? And so there's some basic questions that then come out of that. If only 1% of the world's refugees can be in places like New Zealand and they're communicating to this 99%, do these opportunities provide a baseline of wellbeing that they're able to engage in civic everyday life, education, employment, voting, going out to local parks, those sorts of things? Or conversely, does it actually provide such a significant level of connection that they don't even have to leave the house? Basically they can be in Afghanistan or Colombia or South Sudan or Eritrea into their homes in incredibly powerful ways. And my study, which I'm currently working with 15 participants over 10 months, we're writing with the social media diaries and I'm interviewing them. I'm trying to explore some of these questions. That's fantastic, Jay. Thank you. Jay's doing a lot of work with refugees. Rez has been a refugee. And with her family arrived in New Zealand after being forced to flee her homeland when she was six years old. So I'm wondering Rez, when you hear about Jay's work, whether that resonates with you, is that the experience of you, of your family, or a few years ago when you were six and growing up, you didn't have the same connection on what difference it's made as social media has become more pervasive in people's lives. Yeah, so as Jay was telling us all these different scenarios, it did get a lot of my thoughts, just thoughts running through my head. So my family's Kurdish, my parents were political activists. They met in Iran because both of their families had fled at different times. My dad from the Kurdish region of Turkey fleeing a genocide there and went into Iran as refugees and my mum had her village attacked by the Ba'ath regime in Iraq and my grandmother and her and my mum's two younger siblings were killed by chemical weapon attacks. So they also fled into Iran where my parents met as part of a Kurdish human rights movement. They fought for Kurdish rights, fought against the persecution of Kurds, the injustice that the Kurds had suffered and were just advocating for basic rights to be recognised as a separate identity, as a separate ethnic minority. So it's with that context that they were forced to flee because of their advocacy and they started becoming really noticed by the Iranian military and it became unsafe for them to remain. So they fled into Iran in the middle of the night from Iran into Pakistan in the middle of the night in the back of cargo trucks without telling anyone and went to Pakistan. They were told it would be six months before they were resettled and by the time our family resettled to New Zealand it was nine years later. So I was born in Pakistan in a refugee camp and it was very different to the experiences today that social media and technology has allowed because they had escaped and couldn't have that instant contact with their family to let them know how we've arrived in Pakistan. We haven't been attacked or imprisoned in the process. So even that just notifying straight after the event was not possible. They would have to go to particular centres where they could make international calls and let their family know. And I remember when we moved out of the refugee camps and into an apartment style place the landlords there were making a trip to Iran for business purposes and they took letters for my family to Iran where my parents' families were to let them know what's happening, send them some photos and update them. So it wasn't that easy back then to just keep in touch with your family to let them know and one horrible aspect to this is that my mum lost her sister-in-law while we were in Pakistan but we didn't find out for months and months after it actually happened. So in this way the communication was really hard with family and with friends that were not in Pakistan and it creates a sense of confusion and stress, anxiety what's going on with your family who remain in a war-torn place and really precarious circumstances. So fast-forwarding a bit closer to today I never thought I'd say this but I'm the 1% I didn't think I'd ever say that sentence but the 1% that got to resettle one of the lucky ones that managed to be resettled to a place and have a go at another go at life. And even then when we first arrived communication was difficult calling home was not something you did on a daily basis because of how difficult it was and also because of how expensive it was to call the Middle East So it wasn't until the internet became more commonplace in family households that we had contact with our family on a more regular basis So having gone from this not hearing from your family for months and then now being able to chat with my grandparents and my cousins and my family across the world whenever I feel like it is extraordinary and I think it is two-fold whether the connected side of it remaining connected with your family is that you can use updates all the time because of the situation and attacks that happen every so often. We keep updated and that's our way of knowing our family's safe and we can have instant contact and it's the sense of relief if they're able to contact us they're able to Skype us then they're still safe but then on the other hand I can see how it can affect disattached from the community around them because they can be they can contact their family members whenever they want back home and there's not that much pressure to necessarily interact with people that are physically around them because they can maintain those ties and they can be comfortable and they have that sense of connection and contact when they need to talk to someone it can result in that that perhaps negative aspect and that affects the integration and the actual physical connection with people in New Zealand so it's interesting from my perspective having seen both sides of it and seeing how having no connection can be really bad but also having too much connection can cause you to be a bit disconnected I think I mean those two fold connections are really interesting I think perhaps we can explore later on in question times it also I think ties in nicely with Luke's work where he looks at both the risks and opportunities of being part of a connected world and I wondered if you could just share with us some of the work you've been doing and the thoughts you have around that connection disconnection I think you mentioned some of the topics I've researched I should probably say that my perspective my interest in the internet and social media in particular has really been about the quality of the quality of civic engagement the quality of public discussion and conversation and its impact on the public sphere and democracy more widely I don't for example have any insights into your areas you know I should probably start with a sort of a kind of dispassionate research a sort of approach but I might just if I may start with a kind of more immediate and sort of more visceral example which is unfolded yesterday on social media for me late morning yesterday I learned about the bombing in Manchester a city I'm very fond of having lived there myself and social media became in very short very compressed time it became this kind of window into the peaks and troughs of humanity right on the one hand we have people reaching out to offer support, help, ride, spoon etc we had people finding lost children using social media on the other hand we had people immediately trying to score political points we had the appalling excuse for a journalist Katie Hopkins tweeting about final solutions and you know the sort of language that would never have been allowed even in her the newspapers like the Daily Mail that have employed her people creating fake profiles of fake missing people in order to presumably just sort of get attention and people making kind of sick jokes so you know when we look at social media sometimes it is kind of I think now want to do almost sort of social barometer the attention is kind of drawn to the extremes both the good and the bad and that's been I think that's really been sort of a recurring issue with popular perceptions of social media during what is a sort of relatively short history there's been this tendency either to make quite exaggerated claims about its power to transform and democratise society things like the rather kind of overblown media coverage of Twitter's role in the Arab Spring for example or on the other hand it's increasingly talked about as a force that may be kind of corrosive or even sort of pathological and that sort of more negative perspective I think is the one that's been in the ascendancy more in recent years I think we've almost started to witness a kind of low level moral panic if you like about what social media might be doing to society and particularly to young people so lots of kind of concerns about addiction, attention span, the quality of friendships and connection online for example you know there are studies that suggest a correlation between social media use and actually feelings of loneliness and isolation which of course is a paradox given it's a technology of connection but that's a correlation it's not a causation but people are quick to rush to sort of wonder and get anxious about whether or not social media might be part of the problem rather than the solution lots of interest on the way that social media kind of works or the screen works as a kind of disinhibitor and sort of facilitates some of the worst kinds of trolling and hate speech and so on and those sorts of concerns about the potential ills of social media I think for me I'm sort of reasonably skeptical about them but they also kind of risk I think sort of distracting us from some of the more fundamental kind of risks I don't know if that's the right word posed by social media and for me those risks are more kind of social and institutional rather than about individuals and I thought I might just mention sort of very briefly some of those risks as I see them and I think firstly we need to be thinking very carefully about how social media platforms influence the people we connect with and the information that we see about the world you know we typically imagine that social media platforms are simply there to facilitate connection and access to information but we also know that it's not a neutral process right there are two complementary forces that work here one is the sort of human tendency if you like the human factor that means that we are perhaps more drawn to people who are like minded people like us, people whose views show up our own and on the other hand this technological factor that reinforces it now which is the sort of algorithms that are built into platforms like Twitter and Facebook that actually sort of encourage and amplify that what's come to be known as this kind of echo chamber effect or filter bubble kind of effect to it sometimes so I mean I think social networks are certainly great for fostering solidarity and communities of interest and identity but they're also pretty good unfortunately encouraging kind of in-group versus out-group kind of mentalities and behaviours and that sort of prevalence of outrage for example that we've seen propagated on social media networks is you know it's a double edge sword outrage of course can be a productive force it can be positive it can lead to sort of struggles against social injustice for example but outrage is also kind of potentially quite kind of toxic and algorithmic power if you like it's this sort of huge issue in a sort of hidden issue really or a largely hidden issue you know algorithms drive our search engine results they drive and shape our social media timelines algorithms increasingly play a vital part in our lives that Uber is working on for example algorithms to try to figure out what you personally as an individual would be willing to pay for a taxi at any particular moment so that it can squeeze as many cents out of you as possible it's also ways in which the technology now that's the we know ourselves and sort of and take advantage of that and algorithms of course have biases that are built into them right their twitter's trending topic algorithm for example favours events that erupt suddenly like the Manchester bombing or some sudden news event rather than for example slow burn issues which is why protest movements sometimes struggle to get sort of the attention that they might otherwise merit because they're slow burning kind of issues Facebook on the other hand prioritizes prioritizes sort of positive news over negative news for example and what's alarming I think is not the biases themselves because some kinds of biases are always going to be inevitable but actually the kind of the commercial secrecy behind these technologies you know such we now have these huge monopolistic platforms that are shaping the media diet the information diets the connections we make of billions of people around the globe literally billions in Facebook's case and that's before we even get to the way that networks like Facebook sort of manually intervene in what we see we saw the Guardian this week releasing a whole lot of material about the kind of manuals the secret manuals that Facebook moderators require to use showing that they have these kind of quite arcane kind of complex rules about what we can and can't see on these networks and you know the claim that those companies make that they are just a platform that bring people together that connect people they're not people that produce content I don't think that you know that holds anymore and I don't think it should hold I think you know I think for me the time has come for us to take seriously the idea that social networks need to be subject to some kind of democratic and public interest kind of scrutiny don't get me wrong I think social media networks are a positive force overall I think the world is better for them but I think the sort of massive concentration of power and often in quite opaque kind of ways is something that's motivating me in my research and work at the moment as we try and figure out a little bit more about the nature of this kind of immense power that social media has Jay how do you how do the people you're dealing with the refugees who have often been politically persecuted deal with some of the issues that Luke's just talked about because I mean I don't know about you but if I had or felt I was at risk politically because of my beliefs I had been in a refugee camp I had been accepted by another government to come and live in a country that had fundamentally different values to maybe the values of my home society and then I'm having those close connections with people back in my home society you know your subjects in your study not worried about big brother my subjects are absolutely worried about big brother well there's actually there's two different groups there's some that to be a refugee up to the will or persecution they're coming out of experience of persecution so for some of them they say they want nothing to do with politics and so for them social media is about cooking with a grandmother over Skype and the transmission of culture celebrations of events even people coming together to mourn the death of someone or something like that there's other participants that are actually overtly political in what they do and there are some countries where even have communication or even if government or those that were possibly surveilling those countries knew that those people were talking to them that could put them in danger and so for some of them like encrypted technologies are really important so like WhatsApp uses encrypted technology and so that's in theory I mean we're told that's very hard to for others to actually know what's being discussed those sorts of things but I've got other participants that have these sort of avatars and different identities they even know that for like on their facebook account that there are people that they know are working for the government but they are feeding them incorrect information so it's a crazy kind of world out there where they're they think they know that some people are spies sometimes their accounts get hacked and other people have to figure out if that's the real person so it's but you know there's actually really very real consequences in that in conducting the study I have to be very careful around things that I talk about in terms of how that might even put people at risk because whilst the studies with people based in New Zealand is transnational in the sense that people are reflecting on these ongoing interactions and for some those are situations of ongoing precariousness yeah in my day job as the Dean of Graduate Studies I sort of travel around bits of the world doing relationship building for the university and so on I'm used to having spies travel with me like physical people in the next car you just sort of wave to them as they drive along with you but you're also really conscious in some of the countries I visit a lot about how much everything I type is going to be read now I leave a very boring life so I feel very sorry for the people who are reading that but I can only imagine for your for the participants in your studies you know do people just pull out the pluck yeah I mean I have asked the question so the nice thing about a 10 month study is that I'm able to sort of see what things have changed even now I'll be able to pick up lots of participants have family and friends that live in the UK and so then they'll be supporting them as there's going to be I think in an ever built background and sort of how do they support them in relation to some of those things and so but there are some participants who have even said to me I'll be a participant but you can't even say what country I'm from because they're so nervous around what that might mean for their family and that the only interaction that they can have on a daily basis they just say hi and hi back to each other because anything more than that could actually be done whereas in the good old days when your parents were writing letters and getting them hand delivered I mean no other trace I guess yes so with those letters they would still keep it quite monitored in what they say because my parents had escaped Iran as political refugees and so anything they said could trace back to their families and put them in danger when they were in Iran my mum tells me many stories of the times she swallowed whole letters when they thought someone from the Iranian military was following them just swallowing whole letters because they couldn't risk someone from the government seeing what they were planning or saying about advocating for Kurdish rights equally going to the doctor and getting an injection for something she didn't have just as an alibi so I think even though there's no trace it still was too risky and they wouldn't have wanted to do anything like that they escaped in the middle of the night without telling anyone because they didn't want to put their family in a situation where if they were approached they'd have to either lie or tell the information about where they were or risk them getting hurt so I think it's not either or it's not really but interesting with the social media stuff I met a young Sudanese refugee in Uganda recently in Geneva and we talk often about some of the international organisations we're both involved in and the advocacy work we're doing and I talk to him almost daily then I didn't hear from him for a while and then when he messaged me again he said he'd been kidnapped by people from the Sudanese government because what he was doing on social media was considered a national threat and he was in Uganda so there is a lot of risk and I guess in a place like New Zealand sometimes we may underestimate that because we're safe or it's just beyond imagination here that something you say in social media might get you either arrested or held hostage, kidnapped so it's interesting I'm one of those refugees that's very political in social media and everything that I put in social media is either to advocate for a particular viewpoint or advocate for a particular right or something we want to achieve or it is taking a stance against some policy or law In an election year where around the world we see anti-immigration sort of dire tribes and we've got our own order but we've still got our own local versions of that Do you think I'm just reflecting on your earlier comments about the difference between the time when you settled in the country where you couldn't cook dinner with your grandmother through social media that wasn't a possibility to now Do you think now the fact of social media and social media studies showing how connected people are in this incredibly disconnected sort of world that helps fuel some of those conversations because the Winston Peters of this world look around and go well, you've come from Sudan but you're still in Sudan you've just brought it to Hillsborough It may to an extent because there's still arguments that people make in the community about these kind of things that if you want to resettle in a place like New Zealand then you should dress like whatever New Zealand addresses like there are still those kind of sentiments around integration versus assimilation and to what extent should you take on the culture and values of the place you're resettled in terms of not just values but even the way you talk and dress and English and dress as a westerner would so I think it depends which part of the world you're in and there are certain parts where this may be more prevalent those kind of sentiments fortunately in New Zealand from my experience not saying that it doesn't exist at all but it has been better than things I've witnessed overseas or heard about through my networks around the world of what they're experiencing the kind of backlash and the kind of just us against their mentality that's been created so it's interesting to hear about different people's perspectives in that regard and it may be part of it but again when you resettle is the assumption that you give up all your culture and values and given completely to this place that's taken you in I don't think that's the expectation nor should it be it's a fine balance of embracing as much as you feel comfortable with and whatever aspects that resonate with you of the new culture so it's something you're discussing through your study Jay? Yeah so I mean there is that question around if they're doing so some of them as I said on average I might spend six hours on social media day I'm a teenager which I think is important that we actually have to turn the mirror on ourselves and think about how we use social media as well and I ask them like has social media helped you to settle in New Zealand I also ask the question if a refugee was just to come to New Zealand what advice would you give have for them around their use of social media everyone I haven't had an exception to that some of them have said things like social media is my medicine it's my first aid if I didn't have social media I wouldn't have mental health they are very clear that maintaining these links again with that 99% is very much tied intimately to their sense of well-being and for some of the participants that are less engaged there are other questions around opportunities of wider society and you start to hear the stories of discrimination and limited opportunities to actually engage and so there is that question do refugees choose to engage in society but the other side of the question is what opportunities does a receiving society provide to refugees Luke did you want to pick up on that I was just going to ask a question actually as to whether there is something about for one of the better term cyber safety that is specific for refugees or other marginalised groups in terms of because there is an incredible amount of sort of quite toxic sort of hatred and xenophobia that circulates around social media does that for any of your participants does that become part of their social media experience most of them haven't spoken about having to deal with trolls in terms of on their social media sites usually for them they use social media as a way sometimes to actually escape some of that so they return to their networks to feel that sense of belonging and that sense of connection I'm not really aware of there have been a few participants that have spoken about that were politically active they've had to deal with trolls and how they sometimes have to change their settings on these platforms or they just choose not to read them or they find particular ways to respond to that Well Luke has turned us into question mode which is very apposite I think we're going to open the floor now to questions from you and from our participants around the world and I've got a question from Lucia who, so I'm giving you time to come up with your great questions which I know you're going to do but Lucia has beaten you to it on my iPad see this is really a question isn't it I haven't just made that up have IJ there's a question from Lucia here alright this is not from Caroline pretending to be Lucia okay so Lucia says these ideas concerning people keeping in touch with family and friends in far away places are really interesting I'm sure we'll all agree we're wondering if any panellists had thoughts on geolocation apps designed to track your friends physically nearby such as Swarm or to meet new people like Tinder, Grinder, etc how are these apps affecting spaces and feelings of dislocation Luke, gone there's a question for an academic if ever there was one that you know, sort of again that's a sort of great example isn't it of the sort of double-edged the double-edged sword here which is the powerful connection versus I don't know how much we're going to talk about swords when we're talking about Tinder and Grinder personally but anyway I'm supervising an excellent PhD on Grinder at the moment and on the other hand you know, in surveillance and data and the kind of data that you are giving up in that context and you know, we are not we are not privy really, none of us read terms and conditions none of us would understand them even if we did without going for days don't they didn't someone read out the terms and conditions of some website that was 42 days or something and you know, it's not just about here and now it's about what happens to that data in the future and whose hands could it fall into in the future for example so these apps are so double-edged in that sense wonderful new technologies and immense risks Should there be a little pause button before you do things like a little question pops up and I really want to you know and just one of the social media diaries that I had at a participant talk about the use of Tinder and the last question the social media diary was how did it make you feel and the participants reply was no comment I've never been on Tinder or Grinder so I don't know do you have any comment in terms of your experience she's a lawyer she's going to take the fist alright but we are going to open it up to you because you've heard from our panellists you've heard about their personal experiences the research they're doing the experiences of the people that they've been working with in terms of their research so I'd love to hear what you're interested in in terms of asking our panellists a question now I think we've got a mic here thank you very much ask me I just wonder like you guys have been talking about technology changing the social media landscape and now probably in the short future the AI artificial intelligence will play a big part in the our everyday life aspect so what kind of positive or negative effect would you guys think AI can change the media or the media landscape AI, Jay what do you reckon I was hoping you asked Luke no I'm very democratic in my moderations I mean I'm not entirely sure I mean I think a really big impact would just be in terms of even all of you thinking of a postgraduate study thinking about what sort of jobs are going to be out there in the future and how is AI going to shape that and how is AI going to shape the ways that people can stay connected and the way that we go about our everyday lives and the way that maybe distances that are huge or just suddenly can be bridged in incredibly powerful ways Do you think that might change people's personal interactions though if you look at some of the work that has been done in our own faculty of engineering around robots in healthcare for older people and there's I don't know if anyone here is doing any work in this space but there are little animals that have been made so they're robots but they're like seals because people like seals I mean some people club baby seals to death but most people don't and so they're very comforting and a lot of old people in rest homes now prefer dealing with the robot to the person so the robot reminds them to take their pills and the robot's really calming and they prefer that AI technology and I wonder if it's sort of like the social media stuff where you get into a little bubble and you filter out all the options you don't like that caregiver who's always a bit rough but your little robot's always chirpy it's consistent you don't have to deal with the mood swings I was asked an interesting question for the show that's coming on TV and said soon called what's next with Nigel Latter and John Campbell and one of the questions was what I would think about if I was a patient going to see a doctor and it was a robot doctor and in that regard it would be a bit odd because sometimes for me personally if I'm going to see a doctor it's much about letting me know what's wrong and what I need to do to get better as much as it is just kind of having a chat like this is happening, tough day been stressed, it could be related to this it could be related to this so you want that empathetic air and that ability to interact which I don't think the algorithm could be written, couldn't it Luke? I'm very excited about AI what not wanting to sound like a start record what worries me is actually the control who has control, who has access who has oversight for me it's not the technology itself which I think is really exciting Thank you Hello My name's James, I've got a question to do with dislocation on a domestic scale rather than an international one in this very room about a month ago we had the economist Shimabelle Iqwab talking about the rise of populism and the economic factors behind that and one of the factors that he mentioned which he also said can't exactly be measured numerically was that of empathy and that there has been in a lot of western countries growing divide between liberal people and urban centres and sort of more conservative people in rural places that's very evident in America the recent French election and the result from Brexit so my question is to do with the sort of sacrifice we've made in domestic empathy in one that we've created in international empathy and do we need to do something to remedy that or do we accept this as being the new reality? Where's the domestic empathy being lost sorry just to clarify is it people just isolating themselves with their individual devices exactly I mean technologies can also bring people together domestically as well there are individualised technologies there are technologies that can be designed to bring families for example I'm not sure about the question of empathy particularly I'm not sure if I quite understood why you think specifically empathy is a risk but I think you're right that there is a risk of isolation at sort of every level from the micro right out to the macro and you say domestic out to the international level but there's also opportunities for technologies to bring people together around them right technology doesn't have to be designed to be completely individualised but you know how you go out to a restaurant or something and you see everyone's on their phone and they're sitting at the same table and you just think look up have a chat you know what are they doing on their phone that's so important that the person sitting next to them gets ignored I tend to agree with Luke here on the point that social media and technology can be a powerful force for bringing people together and in my experience in a domestic kind of sphere it's been through social media and our ability to reach a huge number of people and spread our message that we've been able to organise for example we had three protests in the last few years condemning ISIS attacks and we had thousands of people show up who only knew about it through social media and spreading that message to as wide range of people so I think if used appropriately and of course there are always risks but if used appropriately and for conveying a message it can be a really powerful tool to connect people I mean I think it can be a powerful tool for connection one of the questions I've asked participants is where do you get your news and a lot of them actually say that the primary place to get their news is their Facebook and who's on their Facebook? their friends because they share things in common and so I think what you're seeing in the United States is not even people talking with each other not even talking past each other the conversation is not even happening because I wouldn't even predicted that Trump would have won because on my Facebook feed I said that that was even possible and yet that's exactly what happened and so if I was you know and that's being found now that that bandwidth is being reduced that you think that the social media and the proliferation of information that this would increase that sort of understanding and the sources for empathy possibly and yet in some ways it's actually reduced it quite significantly there is another economic aspect to this which is about the media the media escape more generally and the fact that advertising revenue has been siphoned out of media and into and dominated now by Facebook and Google and so on and that's corroded the quality of journalism more broadly and that's mainstream media although it always had particular markets nevertheless sort of functioned on the model of bringing different perspectives together and when that sort of becomes siphoned off into these very individualised tailored media diets then the quality of conversation and the ability to exchange ideas the ability to encounter perspectives that don't meet your own is definitely threatened and I think that's very important part of the media disruption of the digital disruption is that changing economic platform underpinning some of those sort of public service journalism issues that I don't know encourage me to donate to other newspapers that still have proper journalists alright have we got any other questions that people have sorry we've got one behind you and then so we've got the microphone to the man in the orange T-shirt Hi my name is William I really liked what Luke mentioned about something about we need social networks that social networks need to be democratically controlled by the people or something of that sense and so and also at the moment I guess the big players the monopolies they don't run like that and they don't have really networks so why don't we have networks like that yet I think well there have been experiments for example some years ago there was a very interesting attempt to set up an open source rival to Facebook called diaspora and it founded on critical mass because Facebook is very sticky you know people are on Facebook because the people they know are on Facebook and it's a self-fulfilling dynamic and Facebook is full of people that are fed up of Facebook and don't like Facebook as an entity but are kind of wedded to it because it's their platform they become sort of dependent on it for their sort of social capital there's all sorts of other reasons I think other obstacles one is the lobbying power these Silicon Valley companies that are presented as very sort of progressive and sort of modern are now huge political contributors lobbyists etc they're huge blocks of power now and I think those are obstacles but I would still like to see us move towards and the EU is making some headway in this trying to at least subject them to some kind of some kind of oversight, some kind of public interest oversight but we've got a long way to go but really interesting that the alternative was called diaspora the people connections that we're talking about tonight absolutely that's diaspora but couldn't break through Facebook those Zuckerbergs all right now I've got a question from Jamie here but before that we've got a live person not an AI person Thank you I just readjusted Facebook last week so I found that is quite interesting and then for our Chinese our social media is WeChat We both now I know that Facebook and then because I do online business online training on WeChat so social media now has become a means for me to make money and so I just wondered so because my major is education I didn't learn business I think that the social media is a way to connect different connect resources in different parts of words together so when people need help to pass the test to learn English the social media can be an important way to help but sometimes the social media can also call some problem that it's hard to manage to manage it so my question is that so in your opinion if we do a business on social media how to make it manage it more effectively Business advice now I remember being in China and someone asking me what my WeChat address was when I said I didn't use WeChat he looked at me like I was a creature from another planet just incomprehensible that I didn't use WeChat so any business advice how can we harness the energy of social media for private gain is it something your communities are looking to do as people who perhaps are not getting a fair go in employment situations there are people that are active on LinkedIn and the sorts of things that sort of help them to connect with professional networks particularly in New Zealand the power of connection with other people and word of mouth is something that's really important I guess for me the flip side of it that I think that's important is that some people are now saying that digital literacy is a new form of poverty and that if people aren't learning to engage on these digital platforms to use them that in some ways these things are only picking up speed and if you don't engage in some ways you can't get left behind see I don't engage in any of them I'm thinking do you get left behind or do you just jump a hurdle now I've got a question here from Jamie and then we've got another question in the audience so Jamie's going to bring us back into the refugee space thank you Jamie wherever you are in the world Jamie asks are there any articles about the costs and disruption of resettling refugees in society is there any good research on the contributions of refugees to local communities there should be and there are opportunities for postgraduate study on that very topic I'm sure Jay absolutely I think it's a really important question number one I think when we think about the costs what sort of contributions do New Zealand what contributions refugees make I think we have to first think about do we just think about contribution as dollars and cents thinking beyond just a financial contribution but if we even just stay in that vein of things a well-renowned economist Philip LeGrain wrote a report just last year which he said that investing one euro in refugees yields two euros within five years provided that the society is willing to accept them employ them in those sorts of things some of Australia's billionaires are from refugee backgrounds they are incredibly entrepreneurial Mitchell Fahm who developed the OJIN software employing lots of people within New Zealand the women who wrote Goodbye Sarajevo Hannah Reid in Aukka Scofield she's also a lawyer here in Auckland they've made amazing contributions Rez can tell you all sorts of contributions that other refugees have made and I think the other thing is also for us to sort of I think the other flip side of this is New Zealand has enough problems of its own why should we invest more money in taking refugees and I think actually the response to that is why does it need to be a choice it's actually about what commitments we have as a country and how we should be global citizens and to what is really in many ways a global crisis Yeah I definitely agree with that I think when you start trying, while it's really important to look at the contributions refugees make to kind of show that aspect of things as well and combat some of the assumptions that refugees just come here lazy don't do any work and just want to live off the government which of course is not true in so many instances we're treading some dangerous ground when the first question is what contribution and it's in a financial sense usually people pose the question what financial benefit will bringing refugees have to New Zealand and I think if that's the first question on our minds then we are forgetting the entire purpose and the difference between refugees and migrants in that we don't bring them here for economic benefit to New Zealand first and foremost it's based on humanitarian grounds and we have a responsibility to protect as global citizens like Jay mentioned and we have a responsibility to protect under refugee conventions and under so many other international conventions that we've signed up to and do they not mean anything so I think it's important to firstly recognise the humanitarian need to respond to the global refugee crisis and the reason that we need to play our part in protecting the most vulnerable people one of the most vulnerable people and then move on to the question how can we support them to thrive and to contribute in a positive way to New Zealand economically socially, environmentally so I think it's important to frame them not in the other way around and maybe we come back to that question of empathy so we've got a question here My name is Judith and I just want to commend what you've just said and pick up on the question of Jay's research and the fact that it's being funded by government monies through the Marston Fund have you got an audience in government of your research and do you feel that there might be an opportunity to use social media to connect with the refugees in New Zealand in a proactive way and to help them integrate the word you wish to use at the appropriate way with local society Thank you for the question I think I have an audience James who's in government Well even now the government I mean I was invited to the annual tripartite consultations on resettlement to the UNHCR which was very limited I was able to present my work and that was actually to resettlement countries and representatives from that and they're very interested in that work I think one of the things you have to always be cautious about with research is how it's interpreted and one of the things I wouldn't want governments to walk away with is saying ah well if they can have these meaningful interactions and they can beam cobble into their homes in Palmerston North or Nelson or Auckland or whatever it might be we don't even have to have a refugee family because they can just stay connected through wifi so you have to be really careful around sort of how you talk about results and what sort of conclusions they might have because that's certainly not what my conclusion is I think that the government should be thinking about that social media space but I mean really it seems to be the thing you either invest in and you really do well or you don't do it all because people are digitally discerning I know that I'm kind of on some sites and stuff like that but people don't spend the time with it and so I think it's about building that trust but you know that like with the Red Cross they've got a strong relationship with a lot of people from refugee backgrounds if they could sort of have notifications around if there was an earthquake over a certain magnitude or if there's a tsunami that was coming and that maybe even when they came to Mangari during that six week program if they could sort of like some of these different institutions there could be some opportunities to convey some key messages I don't think that it's the only mess-filling medium that should be used but I think there are some real potential there either of you want to especially in the lead-up so like for example when my family came to New Zealand before we arrived we had no idea when New Zealand was we were told it was part of Australia and had no idea what to expect so I've always floated around this idea like what if there was an app that you could be on before coming to a place like New Zealand or wherever it is that refugees are resettled around the world what if there was an app in the lead-up when you found out where you were going that would let you know what to expect, the laws what the cities are like what the foods like, what the language is like just all that stuff just more app if so many people are on social media then when they arrive in this country it's not this shock and arriving to something they had never imagined or just have not can't even visualise you'd at least have some sort of easing into it so maybe it could be a good thing and good way to engage with refugees they're about to be resettled to different parts of the world Reza, you're participating in a lot of high level policy work, do you have the air of government through? I like to think I do as well but actions speak louder than words so I engage with a lot of across the spectrum with different NGOs and organisations with different government representatives but whether they're listening is one thing and whether they're going to act on that is another so we'll wait and see all right I think we might have time for one more question down the front, here we go in the stripes you've got a lot of man in stripes thank you very much everyone for the discussion this evening it's been very enlightening and full provoking I'm very interested in senses of sharing in an age of connection particularly in reference to displaced peoples and I wanted to get your thoughts on do you think this age of connection diminishes the need for a claim of belonging to a particular kind of geographic place or does it kind of galvanise a claim to that place especially in light of things like Trump America and Brexit does social media encourage those things or does it make it less necessary I think you've identified already in a sense that on the surface it seems like a paradox that this kind of this kind of technology which offers people in principle mobility and the ability to be almost free-floating of place and yet we're living in an era where ethno-nationalism for example is a real kind of sort of fever pitch around the world it's hard not to see it's hard to isolate social media as a factor in that I think you've got to look at the long history of globalisation some of the sort of reactions against the way that globalisation has taken root around the world but I think social media does lend itself precisely on the one hand James was talking about these different demographics the sort of liberal cosmopolitan ideal that we can be global citizens it also lends itself to very potentially quite parochial inward looking expressions of attachment to place and nation so it's a bit of I'm sitting on the fence here What are you seeing through your search Jay? I mean I just think you see a bit of both it depends on the context what's happening in the States maybe that belonging isn't being galvanised maybe it's being questioned so I think it ebbs and flows and I think social media is another site where that belonging can be inculcated or not Yeah I agree I think in my experience a bit of both there is the ability to transcend boundaries and to connect with people around the world who share their values and views and it's lightning in that sense really to see people from opposite sides of the world come together for a particular cause and stand up against something that they feel is not right an example of that is all the movements around the world in relation to women's rights recently we had that occur so and so in that sense it does allow you to transcend boundaries and advocate for something that you feel passionate about with people all around the world who share your views but equally a lot of terrorism and that extremism happens through social media and technology as well so I mean arguably that's also them finding people around the world with similar views and values so whether good or for bad both exist but I think the women's march is a nice example because you might be connected around the world on that issue but you are physically marching in your city and you are making a political stance in the place that you are as well as being connected in a global community which is a you know which to me as a historian is a fantastic sort of you know that couldn't happen in the past you know the technology allows those things whereas someone whose first book was about women's suffrage you shouldn't have got me started so late in the evening as well you know that couldn't happen you had women who had to go on boats from New Zealand to the UK and take weeks to get there and then take the message in March in Hyde Park so a really nice example I think of a really positive aspect of location and connection rather than dislocation and connection and I think that's probably a nice place to also draw our discussion tonight to a close apologies again that we had a few slight delays at the beginning but I think you'll all agree with me that it was worth staying that we've had some really insightful comments both as presenters talked about their own personal journeys and their background whether that's at a personal level or in terms of their research and academic career but then as they responded to our online and in-person questions getting that sense of how researchers think about their work how they position themselves personally because research isn't that abstract thing that people sometimes think goes on in universities Rez although she hasn't committed to the postgraduate space yet tells me she is coming back to do a masters and you know that we are looking at tonight's event not just in terms of our content but also thinking about all of those questions that you are asking to me they all sound like research questions for a masters thesis or for a PhD there's an awful lot of opportunity here there's a couple of great supervisors so social media can also be useful to get in touch with a potential supervisor and ask to set up a meeting and have a little discussion about what the next step of your life might be alright I'll stop plugging for my day job but I would like to thank you all for coming along tonight and I would especially like to thank our panellists and invite you to join me in showing our appreciation so drive home safely do not be on your phone as you drive home no texting as you drive and I'll put my hand up now I do not have a Facebook account I've never had a Facebook account I've never had a Google I don't tweet I don't do any of those things I am a Luddite I am poor I am sort of technology poor Jay and yet somehow I exist there we go a lesson for us all alright good night