Here at Migration Matters we find ourselves spending increasing amounts of time on online social networks, and not just poking people. Facebook still seems to be largely about having fun (during working hours), but there are other, smaller social networks dedicated to more serious matters.

One such is Africa Media Network, which describes itself as a 'networking community for people who are professionally involved in the African Media Industry'. You can sign up more or less immediately, and then contribute blog posts and start discussions. One discussion from earlier this year was on human trafficking, anticipating the impact of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

This network is hosted by Ning, a platform for creating your own special-interest social network. A quick search for social networks on Ning dealing with migration issues throws up Team Grassfire, a US network providing 'a place for conservatives to get informed, connected and engaged', and (for balance) freeDimensional, an international activists & arts community. Perhaps Migration Matters should be amongst them?

Another network of potential interest, though not using the social network form and somewhat clunky in its web design, is the AfricaNews network of African reporters. A search for contributions on migration issues produced this list.

Let us know about any interesting examples of social networks out there. Email migrationmatters[at]fomacs.org.

On tonight (Friday) and Saturday, at the Teachers' Club on Parnell Square, Dublin: Polish theatre director Darek Skibiński, of A3 Teatr stages an experimental production, 'The Boot's on the Other Foot', based on a workshop held with young Polish and Irish actors. The workshop and performance are based on the 'Minimal Art' method: according to the pre-publicity, 'Post-Kantor theatrical Minimal-Art aims to unearth the emotional and physical cohesion of the performers and the truth of the characters they present. These truths, and the truths of each intention and situation, get further tested through absurdity, deformation and a peeling away of the blurring pathos.' I have no idea what that means, but it's certainly intriguing.

This has been facilitated by ArtPolonia, a Polish-Irish cultural exchange centre in Dublin. ArtPolonia has just moved into a new venue, the new Centre for Creative Practices. For Culture Night, tonight, the centre will celebrate with an open day from 12pm to 11pm, with a programme of workshops and talks. There's more on culture night here.

Incidentally, the recent Polish production in the Dublin Fringe festival, 'Emigrants', was reviewed here. Meanwhile, I wrote a piece on Gerardo Naumann's play in the Fringe, 'A Useful Play', which used 'post-dramatic' techniques to explore the story of a Bolivian immigrant to Argentina, here.

The UK Refugee Week this year ran a 'Simple Acts' campaign with an online video component. Various people recorded videos of themselves defining the word 'refuge', and posted them on wordia, a website devoted to video definitions of words (ie. a searchable video dictionary). The Archbishop of Cantebury's definition is here. There was also a parallel YouTube channel. 

It's an intriguing idea, which would seem to have some potential for a 'viral' impact, with members of the public uploading their own videos, but the campaign does not appear to have got much traction, with just a dozen videos on YouTube. 

The campaign also included these written contributions on refuge from established authors.

Placing Voices - Voicing Places is a collaborative project exploring 'the meaning of heritage for 21st century Ireland', and there's much in it of interest.

One component is the Home Project, a project led by curator Ian Russell and playwright Ursula Rani Sarma, to explore the concept of 'home' against the changing landscape of the past, present and future of the inner-city Clanbrassil Street area in Dublin.

The words for the project are taken from a series of creative writing workshops run by Sarma with 10-12 year olds. A postcard was designed and was distributed throughout Dublin, and in July, a selection of statements about 'home' were chosen and stenciled onto both footpaths of Clanbrassil Street. (See the photos on flickr here.) The children's statements were collated in a simple booklet, which can be downloaded here.

Amongst those contributing are Abdi Salem Taher Haji, who writes that 'home is the place where you live with your family', and quotes his father: 'I used to live in a small village in Somalia. I like living near my son's school. Home is one place because I only have one.'

Placing Voices - Voicing Places explores what heritage means to people today and how heritage has a central role to play in the integration of a multicultural Ireland. It is a collaboration between University College Dublin, CREATE and Dublin City Council, bringing together archaeologists, artists, policy analysts, local government officials and sociologists to work with the diverse communities of inner-city Dublin in articulating and exploring the many heritages that are part of their everyday lives. 

Another of its publications is a zine on the history of Clanbrassil Street, which can be downloaded here. The latest issue of Create's newsletter can be downloaded here. It features an interview with Tadhg O'Keefe on histories and Heritages beyond the surface.

The American online journal McSweeneys is always fruitful territory for Migration Matters, and a quick look there points in some typically interesting directions...

The Voice of Witness project is a series of books of oral history from crisis zones, which was inspired by Dave Eggers's collaboration with Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng in 'What is the What'.

The Voice of Witness site leads me to this interview with the editor of the volume 'Out of Exile' in an attractive online cultural magazine, 'The Rumpus', and to this trailer for a HBO documentary on child migration, 'Which Way Home'.

Also on the site are links for Dave Eggers's latest book, a documentary account of the struggle of a Muslim family from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. There's an interview with Eggers on altmuslim.com here. There are reviews of the book, which sounds fascinating, here. From Salon:

'Zeitoun is a story about the Bush administration's two most egregious policy disasters — the War on Terror and the response to Hurricane Katrina — as they collide with each other and come crashing down on one family. Eggers tells the story entirely from the perspective of Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun.. At first, as a reader, I felt some resistance to this tactic — could the Zeitouns possibly be as wholesome and all-American as Eggers depicts them? — but the sheer momentum, emotional force and imagistic power of the narrative finally sweep such objections away.'

Not really related to migration issues, though certainly an interesting use of mainstream media to highlight social issues, 'Assignment Detroit' is a year-long project by Time Inc to investigate the predicament of the blighted US city of Detroit, as Roy Greenslade explains in the Guardian. Time Inc has bought a house in the city and tasked reporters from its stable of publications to spend time there and find stories. There's a smart, short vox pop video introducing the project, 'How to Survive in Detroit', here.

Looking ahead to the Dublin Theatre Festival, which opens on September 24, there are a couple of shows of particular interest. Foremost amongst them is 'The Blue Dragon' (October 7-10), the latest theatre work by the Canadian theatre and film maker, Robert Lepage. Lepage is of interest for two reasons: his work is steeped in multicultural references, and he is a pioneer of technology-driven innovation in the theatre, where he has attempted to create something of a fusion of cinema and live performance. Lepage is Quebecois who is entirely comfortable in English, and his early work explored bilingualism and Canada's bifurcated identity. He made his name internationally with 'The Dragon's Trilogy' in 1985, an epic which told stories of three Chinatowns in Canada. 'The Blue Dragon' returns to the hero of that earlier play, 25 years on, and finds him now living in China. Tickets & info here. There is an extensive interview with Lepage here.

I spoke to Lepage during the week for my theatre column for the Irish Independent, which I will post here once published. In the meantime, he referenced a recent French production called 'Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées)' which played in New York in 2005. This was a six-hour theatre work by Ariane Mnouchkine's Paris-based Théâtre du Soleil that explored the phenomenon of asylum and refuge, and Lepage said it was extraordinary.

According to the New York Times, the show was 'based on letters, interviews and testimonials collected by Ms. Mnouchkine and assistants from several years of visits to refugee camps and detention centers in Sangatte, France; Sydney, Australia; Auckland, New Zealand; and Indonesia. It was developed, as are most of Ms. Mnouchkine's productions, slowly and painstakingly, with the cast of 36 drawing on their own experiences in improvisational workshops. (Ms. Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil collective is a thoroughly international organization, with 25 nationalities represented.)

'The arduous process involved in the show's creation imbues it with the kind of specificity and vividness you normally find only in documentary film...

'Ms. Mnouchkine and her remarkable assembly of artists evoke the struggles and suffering of their subjects with a simplicity and compassion that allows the production to transcend its few aesthetic miscalculations. Despite its broad scope, "Caravansérail" is a profoundly intimate theatrical work that brings us into uncomfortable communion with the everyday anguish of men and women fleeing oppression and violence at home, only to discover that the indifference of the wider world can be equally brutalizing.'

According to the Guardian, 'Le Dernier Caravansérail opens with a vast storm, an army of stage-hands agitating an immense billowing stage-cloth. We are, a slide informs us, on the Kyrgyzstan/ Kazakhstan border. A tiny boat, packed with people who have paid their dues to smugglers, is attempting to navigate the crossing. The wind threatens to whip them out of the boat. Some founder. One makes it to the other side, only to be shot by a smuggler. He hasn't paid.

'What follows draws on hundreds of taped conversations, the migrants' stories of family, fanatic oppression back home, dangers in the camps, on railway sidings and on the road. These tales are brief, laconic and often surreal. An amputee in Sangatte receives his metal crutch and plays "All the lonely people" on it like a flute. A beggar slumped beneath a telephone on a Moscow street picks through his old medals: "Chechnya ... Afghanistan ..." A young woman returns from a demonstration to a living room in Teheran. She screams when her father hugs her: her back has been whipped raw by the faithful. Talibans cluster salaciously around a house in Kabul where a couple are making love.

'These scenes are played by a company of actors who, like the stories, originate from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Kurdistan and Russia. They play what dialogue there is in their own or each other's language, subtitled. The French philosopher Hélène Cixous accompanied Mnouchkine on her visits to the camps, and tried to write a play based on the stories. But that text felt too constructed and "aesthetic". In the end it was set aside, and the speeches and scenes were improvised.

'Le Dernier Caravansérail doesn't go in for economic or political overviews; instead, it confines itself to the real experiences of the actors and the inhabitants of refugee camps. The recorded voices of the original tellers punctuate the action, and what they say is striking. One woman, who was denied education in a fundamentalist theocracy, insists: "Both women and men must study. It's not right that only men study. In our religion, knowledge is a matter for all Muslims. In our religion, it's said that one must study and study as much as one can. We have to go on studying right to the edge of the grave." Such voices give the play the immediacy and intimacy of a radio documentary.'

There is another account of it here.

This year's festival has a strand of 'documentary theatre', plays created based on the experiences of 'real' people rather than fictionalised dramas. 'Radio Muezzin' (October 6-11) is particularly interesting. By the German company Rimini Protokoll, it tells the story of four of Cairo’s Muezzins as they challenge the Egyptian government’s decision to centralise the call to prayer, showing the devastating effect it will have for tens of thousands of lives. Tickets & info here.

Rimini Protokoll have previously brought some intriguing shows to Dublin. 'Cargo Sofia' took place in the back of a truck as it rolled through Dublin's Docklands, and its Bulgarian drivers told of their lives on the road. 'Call Cutta in a Box' took place, essentially, on the phone, as the audience had individual conversations with employees of an Indian call centre. I wrote about that here.

The company will participate in a post-show discussion on October 7, and the Festival is hosting a panel discussion on documentary theatre in the Samuel Beckett Theatre on October 10 at 4.30pm.

Immigrants are overwhelmingly choosing to stay put in their adopted countries, rather than return home, despite the impact of the economic downturn on employment, according to a new report by the Migration Policy Institute for BBC World Service. 'Migration and the Global Recession' reports that some migration flows, particularly illegal migration, are also down as would-be migrants are being deterred by reduced job prospects in countries that would previously have offered them better opportunities.

The report focuses on migration flows to and from the major migrant-destination regions of the world, including: the United States, European Union, Canada and Australia; as well as movement in major migration corridors: the United States-Mexico; United Kingdom-Eastern Europe; Spain-Romania and Spain-Morocco; and Gulf State flows from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and the Philippines.

The 130-page report provides data on migration, remittances, employment and poverty rates for immigrants and the native-born alike; and examines the policy changes some countries have enacted to suppress migrant inflows, encourage departures (including through recent “pay-to-go” plans) and protect labor markets for native-born workers.

The report also examines internal migration in China, and how the recession affected the 70 million rural migrant workers who returned to their hometowns for the 2009 Chinese New Year, in what amounts to the world’s largest annual movement of people.

The report can be download here. There's a related story on the BBC here.

A Kenyan TV company has boldly gone where very few have dared - or managed - to go before (reports Reuters AlertNet, a good source on 'humanitarian' issues): they have gathered rare footage of the Oromo Liberation Front and the insurgency they are fighting in Ethiopia's south. The Ethiopian government bars all access to this region and has tried to force the four-part documentary series off the air, but you can watch it on YouTube. The report is by NTV. It has has 22,500 hits on YouTube.

The Oromo Liberation Front has been fighting for self-determination for the Oromo people against what they call "Abyssinian colonial rule" since the early 1970s. It has been designated a terrorist organization by the Ethiopian government. See Wikipedia and this and other reports on Refworld, which is UNHCR's online information database.

Architecture is one medium we have never yet featured on Migration Matters. However, a notification from the Forced Migration Studies Programme in Johannesburg of an upcoming guest lecture (on September 23) has alerted me to the work of the San Francisco architectural firm, Public Architecture. They have developed a design for a 'Day Labor Station' to provide facilities for the growing numbers of (mostly Hispanic) day labourers that gather at key point in US cities seeking construction and other work.

Public Architecture practices and proselytises for 'pro bono architecture'. The firm 'puts the resources of architecture in the service of the public interest. We identify and solve practical problems of human interaction in the built environment and act as a catalyst for public discourse through education, advocacy and the design of public spaces and amenities,' they say.

'Can't sophisticated design serve social justice? It can, and it should. The distinction between progressive design and popular design is a class prejudice—and a red herring. Public Architecture brings the values of design—formal innovation, intellectual currency, critical appraisal of the status quo—to bear on real problems in our communities.'

Their Day Labor Station 'is a simple, flexible structure [to be erected at] informal day labor locations. It is a sustainably-designed project that utilizes green materials and strategies and exists primarily, if not completely, off-the-grid. It provides a sheltered space for the day laborers to wait for work as well as greater community amenities and resources. Our design is a responsive one, addressing the needs and desires of the day laborers themselves, as our clients. As such, the structure will be flexible enough to serve in various capacities, including as a meeting space or classroom.

'Despite day laborers' contributions to key economic sectors of our society, they receive little in return. Their role in the informal economy has forced them to occupy spaces meant for other uses, such as street corners, gas stations, and home improvement store parking lots. A relatively small number of officially sanctioned day labor centers have appeared in recent years, but the previously mentioned informal gathering sites remain the norm. These sites are far from being ideal; their presence in spaces designated for other uses means that they often lack even the most basic of amenities (shelter, water, toilet facilities, etc).

'Conscious of the controversy surrounding day laborers, our goal is not to cast an opinion about public policy. Instead, we seek to fulfill our professional responsibility: to give day laborers a more dignified environment and to advance the debate about day laborers and the spaces they inhabit.

'The Day Labor Station project was introduced as part of the Design for the Other 90% exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York... However, this project is intended to be more than just a museum piece; we are actively working to locate a day labor site, which can serve as a permanent home for the first full prototype. Ultimately, Day Labor Stations will be deployed across the country.'

There is a gallery of images here, a radio debate on day labourers from NPR here, and a list of affiliated firms and organisations here.

Liz Ogbu is the member of Public Architecture due to speak in Johannesburg. She has an essay on the Day Labor Station project here. She writes: 'In proposing the Day Labor Station, Public Architecture is identifying the day laborer, not a municipal entity or a nonprofit, as its client. As such, we acknowledge their individual and collective voices: their realities, their needs, and their desires. The social structure that forms the underpinnings of their lives is not viewed as an appendage that will adapt to whatever structure is built, but instead an armature on which the design is based. With this perspective and with further research, and creative exploration, Public Architecture seeks to produce an actual product that provides an institutional spatial visibility to the day laborers and engages the debate around their presence in a new light.'

I wrote last month (see the Special Report on 21/08/09) about my recent trip to Angola, a country whose history has in many ways been critically shaped by migration. 'Angola After the War' is a one-minute documentary I've just completed, the first installment in an ongoing documentary project looking at the history of the town of Kuito. It is being entered into a competition in the Darklight digital film festival, which runs in Dublin from October 8 to 11. The programme is here.

This article from the LA Times investigates the facts behind an email chain letter about the impact of 'illegal' immigrants.

Reporter Hector Tobar wrote a sympathetic story about Mexican immigrants, and attracted an email calling him a 'crybaby' and citing statistics claiming that social services were being overwhelmed. He decided to check on the claims in the mail (which was being circulated as a chain mail). Here's an excerpt:

'What did I find? A stew made up for the most part of meaty exaggerations and spicy conjecture, mixed in with some giblets of truth. Two of the "stats" are the musings of a conservative op-ed writer. Another takes its information from a government "report" that is, in fact, a work of fiction...

'Here they are, from 1 to 10:

1. "40% of all workers in L.A. County are working for cash and not paying taxes. . . . This is because they are predominantly illegal immigrants working without a green card."

The source of this information seems to be a 2005 study by the Economic Roundtable on the informal economy in Los Angeles County. Its findings were reported in The Times and other papers.

But the chain-mail's author more than doubled the figures in that study, which estimated that 15% of the county workforce was outside the regulated economy in 2004. Illegal immigrants getting paid in cash, it said, probably made up about 9% of the workforce.

A later Economic Roundtable report, by the way, credited immigrants with keeping the local economy from shrinking in the 1990s.

2. "95% of warrants for murder in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens . . . "

We traced this "fact" to a 2004 op-ed in The Times by Heather Mac Donald of the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Mac Donald said "officers" told her about the warrants. She conceded that there were no such data in official reports but suggested the LAPD "top brass" was hiding the truth.

I called the LAPD's press office, which contacted the department's Fugitive Warrant Section. Officers confirmed that the statistics in item No. 2 and No. 3, which follows, don't exist.

3. "75% of people on the most wanted list in Los Angeles are illegal aliens."

We traced this figure to something circulating on the Internet under the name "the 2006 (First Quarter) INS/FBI Statistical Report on Undocumented Immigrants." The "report" contains similar figures for Phoenix, Albuquerque and other cities. But it isn't an actual government document. The INS ceased to exist in 2003, after the Department of Homeland Security was created...

4. "Over 2/3 of all births in Los Angeles County are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal, whose births were paid for by taxpayers."

Once again the "statistic" more than doubles the actual figures. According to a 2006 story in The Times, there were 41,240 Medi-Cal births to "undocumented women" in the county in 2004. They accounted for 27% of all births.'

It's a useful examination of how statistics can be distorted, misused and made up. Read the rest here.

Some general surfing this week threw up some interesting sites and insights, not related specifically to migration issues, but with the potential for exploitation by readers and interest groups.

Arts Audiences is a new Arts Council project being run by filmmaker and director of the Stranger Than Fiction documentary festival James Kelly. The project is looking at how the internet can be used by arts organisations to develop their audience ('Audience 2.0'...) and therefore is of potential interest to anybody producing creative media. More details here.

A post by James led me to this video, 'Social Media Revolution', on YouTube, which should be mandatory watching for anybody who isn't sure quite what Facebook is and why anybody bothers blogging. The video is a spin off of Erik Qualman's 'Socialnomics'.

More details on the figures cited, including sources, is here. The comments suggest that (as you might have guessed from the video) there is a level of slippage between the original data and the claims being made in the video. Take it as a piece of polemic rather than hard science. I think it's usefully provocative.

Arts Audience has some related, Irish-based information here. One impressive figure cited is that the Barbican arts centre in London generated £110,000 in ticket sales through a single mail shot to its email list (of 100,000 names) - a pound per email.

Searching for migrant-issues organisations utilising social media brought me to this article from the Toronto City News about LoonLounge, a Canadian initiative that describes itself as an immigration and settlement online community'.

('LoonLounge was created to improve the Canadian immigration process for the millions of people involved... By facilitating communication and centralizing member information, the purpose of LoonLounge is to empower Canadian residents, immigrants, and potential immigrants with the knowledge we need to build a stronger Canada together.')

There's clearly much more out there, though. Readers with their own experiences of using social media for either producing and distributing media, or for organising, are welcome to send on any links or information. Email me at migrationmatters[at]fomacs.org. As always, new readers can subscribe to Migration Matters here to receive the weekly email update.

Last week's 'Humanitarian Heads Up' from Reuters AlertNet looked at Pakistan, where hundreds of thousands of people have returned home to the battle-scarred Swat Valley:

'Pakistan has been encouraging more than 2.3 million people to return to homes in the Swat Valley and wider northwest region which they fled in April when the government launched an offensive to retake the area from Taliban control.

'Those who have returned - and officials estimate over 80 percent have now gone home - face unexploded ordnance, sporadic militant attacks and a lack of basic services . Hospitals and clinics were looted, vandalised or destroyed in the fighting, and many health staff have not yet returned.

'Government officials have dismissed concerns from aid workers that returnees are at risk while the army conducts its mopping up operations, and say people help the army hunt down remaining militants.Aid agencies have, by and large, applauded the government's response to this crisis.

'But some say the return process may have started too early, with huge numbers returning in a short space of time - more than 1.3 million people have returned since the beginning of July.

'Meanwhile a lot of the displaced have experienced post-traumatic stress syndrome and many women have stopped breastfeeding because of mental stress , says Maria-Luiza Galer, country director for Merlin. 

'Some families will remain displaced over the winter because of ongoing fighting near their homes, says Manuel Bessler, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The newsletter contains a list of contacts in the region for media seeking more information or a report.

Pakistanis rally to support the war-affected – AlertNet

Fresh clashes in Pakistan's Swat valley; dozens killed – Reuters

Amputees bear lifelong cost of Pakistan's conflict – Reuters

INTERVIEW-Having baby full of risks in Pakistani conflict zone - AlertNet

INTERVIEW-Over 80 pct of Pakistan's war-displaced return home– AlertNet

INTERVIEW-Some Pakistan war displaced must winter in camps-UN - AlertNet

A Clash of Principles? Humanitarian Action and the Search for Stability in Pakistan – Humanitarian Policy Group

The Swat Conflict: An Arc of Instability Spreading from Afghanistan to Central Asia and Xinjiang - The Jamestown Foundation // Global Terrorism Analysis

In the Irish Times on August 29, Declan Kiberd wrote a provocative essay on contemporary Irish culture. He had some interesting points to make on the role of immigrants in Irish society and culture in recent years, and in the years to come:

'Sometimes, when a people are about to surrender a culture, outsiders come to its rescue. It was TS Eliot, a young man from St Louis, Missouri, who saved English poetry in the 1920s, abetted ably by other outsiders like Pound and Yeats. In the previous generation, the English novel had been reconfigured by an American named James and a Pole named Conrad – as it would be by Joyce in the next decades. All cultures which survive strongly do so because they are open to injections of new life from without.

'It would not, therefore, be altogether surprising if immigrant writers from Africa or Eastern Europe reopened a dialogue with Cúchulainn and Deirdre. They may well find inspiration and new meaning in these marginal figures, who exist still as buried memories of that landscape in which these newcomers are choosing to live...

'The Irish State was solidly established, but the cultural domain, in whose name the whole separatist agitation had been mounted, remained largely marginal, even tokenistic. The family, named as the basis of society in the 1937 Constitution, often functioned as an alternative to the social itself. By the last century’s end, despite the growth of the State, there had been a further shrinkage of the cultural “public sphere”. By then, most people owned cars in which they hurried through streets from one private experience to another. Gated communities emerged on the edge of towns, in which domestic dwellings got much bigger. It was often left to immigrants to become the most enthusiastic users of streets, parks, beaches, galleries – as if Old Ireland were retreating into privatised space. 

'To understand what a huge reversal this represented, one has only to think of Ulysses , in which “street people” , far from constituting a problem, are seen as vital to a full civic life. In the free circulation of persons through all of Dublin’s streets, a young poet can confront his own inner strangeness by taking a late-night bread-roll and coffee with a Jewish ad-canvasser. By the 1990s such meetings seemed less and less likely. Even though the streets of Ireland contained many migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, the literature produced in Tiger Ireland (with some honourable exceptions) seemed largely incurious about the Other. Instead of attempting a total portrait of a city or society, writers tended to focus on this or that sub-group...' Read the essay here.

Declan Kiberd is professor of Anglo-Irish literature at UCD and author of Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (reviewed here).

This week's Migration Information Source e-newletter features a new country profile of Ireland, originally written by Martin Ruhs of COMPAS as Oxford, and updated by the ESRI's Emma Quinn. 

Some of the key points:

'If international economic conditions improve, large-scale Irish emigration could resume. There are some indications this may happen: emigration rates overall rose 25 percent between 2006 and 2008. However, net migration remains strongly positive.' 

I should clarify that headline: this is a post about Twitter, not an announcement that Migration Matters is climbing aboard the Twitter train (yet, anyway). It occurs to me that many readers may be slightly bemused by the rise of Twitter as a force, if not yet in their lives, in virtual word at least. And some may be skeptical. However, references to it have become obligatory for any self-respecting commentator on popular culture, and as a result is appears to be ubiquitous. I thought it time Migration Matters took a look.

The reason it's of interest at all is largely due to two events this summer. The elections in Iran and the death of Michael Jackson were the first global stories to shape, and be shaped by, Twitter as a new medium. In both cases, Twitter broke stories. In the case of Iran, Twitter itself became a force in the development of that story, as it became a tool for mobilising dissent, as well as reporting it. In the case of Jackson's death, though Twitter obviously didn't affect it, it did set the tone for the initial coverage, which echoed that of the death of Lady Diana in its effusiveness and emotionalism. (For more on Twitter in Iran, see here, and for Twitter and Jackson's death, see here.)

So what is it? Twitter is basically a refinement of blogging - ie, the habit of writing short notes about your life and publishing them on the web. Essentially, it's designed for people who want to process greater quantities of trivial information, more quickly - though, as Iran proved, that information needn't be trivial. 

You can sign up for Twitter in about two minutes here. Wikipedia explains it here and there's an article about how it works, and where it comes from, here. Of interest to anyone also wrestling with the challenge of producing online video will be this short guide to Twitter produced by CommonCraft, specialists in making three-minute educational videos. (I was very impressed by the style and concision of this.)

So, to Migration Matters: what's happening on Twitter of interest to us? A quick search of Twitter for 'immigration' yields these results, showing that there's plenty of people tweeting about the subject. Immigrations is a particularly prolific tweeter.

A search for 'migration' in the 'Find People' section yields these results. MigrantHistory is the Twitter page for the NSW Migration Heritage Centre, in Australia. MigrationMuseum is the page for the Migration Museum in Adelaide.

Very curiously, this search seems to be pulling up entirely Australian tweeters. A search for 'migrant' leads me to Migrant Rights, the twitter page of this organisation in the Middle East.

In short, there's plenty of action on Twitter. That said, Migration Matters won't be tweeting just yet. We're busy enough getting to grips with the blogosphere. 

Adam Curtis is a television documentary maker with the BBC whose next project is to be a documentary looking at the history of the West's relationship with the Congo. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, as readers will know, is the scene of one of the worst contemporary displacement crises: some online media here and here (though this latter piece, from the Irish Times, is marred by its reliance on some of the tropes of reporting on Congo, and Africa generally). However, this report isn't about Congo, or really about migration issues. Instead, it's a look at Adam Curtis.

Curtis has made numerous influential documentary series for the BBC, specialising in the use of archive footage (Wikipedia has a list with links). More recently, he has been experimenting with online video and other innovations, specifically a collaboration with the pioneering British theatre company, Punchdrunk.

In the Sunday Times recently, Bryan Appleyard explained:

'Indulged by the BBC, Curtis nevertheless feels that many of his employer’s ideas — notably its obsession with “multi-platform”, involving the internet, mobiles, podcasts and so on — fail to correspond with reality. He’s a web sceptic, and the ideology of the internet is the subject of a future series. It occurred to him, though, that the BBC’s neophilia did suggest an entirely new way of making documentaries. Thanks to the iPlayer and other technologies, people can now watch programmes many times. Yet all Curtis’s training was based on one prime directive — keep it simple, they’ll only see it once. Now, why not let it be as complex as it needs to be?

'“I was marching round the BBC saying, ‘If we can watch films over again on iPlayer, then the form is going to change. We can start making more complicated, more involving films, of different lengths.’” So he suggested a series of experimental films, dispensing with most of the conventions of documentary-making. This being Curtis, they said yes, but then, when he delivered, they got jumpy and gave him his own website instead.'

The website doesn't appear to be fully functional at the moment. However, there are selections of Curtis's work on Google Videos (this link brings you to his recent five minute film, 'The Rise and Fall of the Television Journalist as Hero') and YouTube. There's a trailer for Curtis's latest film, 'It Felt Like a Kiss', with an article, on the Guardian site, here.

'It Felt Like a Kiss' involved a collaboration with Punchdrunk, and premiered as a theatre installation in Manchester earlier this summer. The Guardian's theatre critic, Michael Billington, reviews it here. (There are reports it may be transferring to London later this year.) I've written about Punchdrunk and the trend towards making theatre in unconventional spaces for my column in this coming Saturday's Irish Independent and will link to that here next week.  

The Sunday Times's Bryan Appleyard keeps a blog, 'Thought Experiments', here.

Many readers will know the feeling: a pile of old Irish Times papers teeters in the corner, threatening to overwhelm the living room. Family members demand that they be thrown out; you insist that you're just about to read them. Well, I finally tackled my pile at the weekend and amongst the articles buried therein was this piece by Fintan O'Toole on the Jewish-Irish editor and writer, David Marcus, whose death becomes the cue for a meditation on the nature of diasporic communities and cultural integration.

O'Toole writes:

'David Marcus’s passing reminds us of the extraordinary and disproportionately significant contribution to 20th-century Irish culture of the small Jewish community from which he sprang. That community, largely concentrated in Dublin, Cork and Belfast, was never much more than 4,000 strong. Much of it, moreover, had its origins in a single shtetl in Lithuania...

'The passing of David Marcus does remind us that the Jewish community in Ireland is in decline and that the riches it has created can no longer be taken for granted. And this in turn makes it appropriate to ask what the experience of this remarkable enrichment of Irish culture by a Diaspora community has to tell us for the future.

'Much of what it suggests is obvious but needs to be repeated. The first point is that paranoia about an indigenous culture being somehow adulterated or weakened by immigration has no relationship to reality. Like the Irish communities around the world, the Jewish community in Ireland significantly strengthened the indigenous culture, both directly through the work of its own members and indirectly through its influence on indigenous artists (both Joyce and Beckett, for example.) The second lesson is that crude notions of “assimilation” are wrong-headed for many reasons, one of them cultural. Why do immigrant communities make a disproportionately large cultural contribution? Because they are complicated. Simple assimilation seeks to flatten out complexities, to absorb all differences into an assumed norm (which is usually itself a fiction). This is the opposite of art, which lives in ambiguities and uncertainties and enriches the world by hovering between different realities. Immigrant communities need to be integrated (and the integration of Jews into Irish artistic, political, professional and intellectual life is a fine example to follow) but they should not be expected to cease to have another life of memories and meanings.'

Further resources:

O'Toole cites Dermot Keogh's Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Refugees, Antisemitism and the Holocaust.

There is a website for the Irish-Jewish community here and a gallery of images of the Irish Jewish Museum here. The long-standing curator of the Jewish Museum, Raphael Siev, died last January. There are obituaries here and here.

On a related subject, O'Toole earlier this year wrote about a play by Conall Quinn that explored something of Ireland's Jewish history (albeit through a historical counter-factual), 'The Death of Harry Leon'. That article is here. I wrote about the play and its author here.

One of the most interesting aspects of my recent trip to Angola was the opportunity to witness the emergence of China as a prominent actor in Angolan, and African, development and politics. Current TV's roving correspondent Mariana van Zeller has a report here and there's a short overview on Current.com here. There's a substantial overview on Migration Information Source here. French journalists Serge Michel and Michel Beuret have recently published 'China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing’s Expansion in Africa', which was reviewed in the New York Times here, and featured on NPR here and on Democracy Now! here. Time has a photo essay here. BBC Online ran a series of reports on the issue in 2007, here.