Transient Non-Use: How People in Migration Experience Digital Disconnection

TL;DR

This paper explores how migrants intentionally and unintentionally avoid or withhold technology during their transitions, highlighting non-use as a protective and systemic response with implications for design.

Contribution

It extends the concept of ICT non-use within migration, analyzing its role across transition phases and proposing design principles that account for non-use behaviors.

Findings

Non-use varies across understanding, negotiating, and resolving phases.

ICT non-use functions as protection and systemic exclusion response.

Non-use shifts with time, risk, and institutional demands.

Abstract

People experiencing migration endure many transitions across borders, technologies, and social systems. While HCI research often emphasizes this community's adoption of technology, less attention has been paid to practices of technological non-use. This paper investigates how information and communication technologies (ICTs) are intentionally and unintentionally avoided, withheld, or not used during migration. Drawing on interviews with 32 people experiencing migration in the border city of El Paso, Texas, USA between February and May 2025, we identify a range of non-use experiences, including device, informational, and protective non-use. We extend the concept of non-use by situating it within the three phases of transitions: understanding, negotiating, and resolving. We show how ICT non-use shifts with time, risk, and institutional demands. Our analysis demonstrates that non-use functions both as a protective strategy and as a response to systemic exclusion, and concludes with design principles that anticipate non-use as both intentional and unintentional design conditions rather than as punitive failure.