Homelessness and the web

[Steve Hoffman]

Homeless Left Out of the Digital Revolution

NY Times 1/9/98


Like homesteaders who flooded the American West during the nation's
expansion, Americans are building communities in cyberspace. The
foundations for some of these communities are being laid by
well-capitalized corporations like GeoCities that provide virtual
homesteaders tools and virtual real estate for building online
homes. And some of the virtual homesteading is part of a phenomenal
explosion of grassroots networking, publishing and connectivity that
the Internet allows. 

But among the many things that set apart cyberspace from real space
is the ease with which cyberspace communities can merely make invisible
those members of the virtual society who don't conform to netiquette
or don't fit the profile the community seeks to engender. 

And ironically, in a universe built metaphorically around the notion
of "home"-pages and virtual architecture, the homelessness that plagues
real space environments magically disappears. 

Walk around downtown San Francisco - the real world urban center of
Silicon Valley - and you'll see tremendous physical evidence of lives
wracked by the problems of homelessness. Visit most of the Net's
vaunted virtual communities and you'll see precious little evidence
of a world in which a home is hard to come by. 

Enter Michael Rennick, a graduate student in emerging cultural
studies at Columbia University in New York. While researching a
project on graffiti, Rennick hit upon an idea: He would give
disposable cameras to homeless people living on the streets of New
York and ask them to chronicle some moments, spaces or people in
their lives. Coupled with a transcription of an extended interview
with each homeless person, the results would be posted on the Web. 

The result of Rennick's effort is a site called Vagrant Gaze
(http://www.perfekt.net/~vagrant/homeless.htm). It's got the
do-it-yourself look and feel of early Web projects. The design is low
tech, the interview transcriptions could use a good proof reading.
But thanks to the technological breakthroughs that lead to the
disposable camera, portable tape recorders and the Web, the site
brings to the public the sensibility of people historically
disconnected from access to media. 

"I kind of feel like the site's not mine," Rennick said. The site
really belongs to the homeless folks whose photos and stories form the
core of the site. So far Rennick has posted the work of four men. 

Perhaps the most evocative of the photos were taken by Michael
Hartman, a veteran of special post-war operations in Cambodia,
according to the accompanying interview. The pictures, taken in
August, provide a homeless man's eye view of Manhattan - a man
sleeping on old cardboard in behind a wrought-iron gate like bars on a
jail cell; a shot of a gum-stained street corner where Michael sat,
his cat curled up near his back pack, the photographer's shadow just
visible at the bottom of the picture. 

Also interesting are the photos of Kevin King - instead of being dark
and brooding they're bright, cheery and full of local shopkeepers. 

"In a way you have a population of people who are not involved in
this discourse of information technology at any level," Rennick said.
"At the same time that it incorporates them into this conversation,
it transforms them from a object into a subject." 

In fact, Rennick's work is not the first in cyberspace to address
homelessness in physical space. The photographer Margaret Morton who
began chronicling in photography the handmade shanties built by the
homeless, posted her work on the Internet in 1996 as an extension of
work for CD-ROM. The Austin Chronicle, an alternative newsweekly in
Texas, published an interactive exhibit of stylized photos of life
among homeless street kids called Gutter Tribe by Jana Birchum. In
1996 another photographer, Mary Lou Uttermohlen, published Structure
out of Chaos on the Web, a collection of documentary photos and text
about life in shantytowns. 

Dozens of street newspapers maintain an online presence, some of
which publish first-person accounts and essays by homeless men and
women. More than 100 homeless advocacy organizations maintain sites
on the Web, at least one of which, the National Coalition for the
Homeless's site, contains tales of homeless people in Seattle. There
are discussion on homelessness, the most prominent of which is hosted
by Communications for a Sustainable Future, begun as a bulletin board
by Don Roper, an economics professor in Colorado. 

There's even the online journal of Kalem Kazarian, a student at
California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, who has
spent the past year posting journal entries and religious poetry drawn
from a planned year of travels among the nation's homeless on his
Homeless Ministries site. 

But Rennick's site is different, bringing something new to the
Internet by allowing homeless people to have their own unfiltered
voices. "It's a good example of the way in which the Internet can be
a democratic institution," he said. 

For now Rennick's site remains a hobby or something more. "It's
almost like I have to do it," he said. "It's chosen me somehow to do
it." 

But Rennick said he'd love to be able to make the work something
more formal. And for a medium often hailed as being a great leveler
and democratizer, it may well be off the beaten track of works like
Vagrant Gaze that hint at the medium's promise and bring a sense of
America's real community life to this budding digital facsimile.
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