Homelessness and the web

[Lorraine Pozzi]

On Thu, 8 Jan 1998, Steve Hoffman wrote:

Interesting.  Seattle has one of the most active groups of homeless
in cyberspace.  Check out Real Change on the Web -- www.speakeasy.org/
realchange.  Read about Anitra Freeman in the Times, Dec. 26, 1997.
Anitra was briefly active in SCN but has found a better deal at
Speakeasy.  Her Web pages have won several awards.  There are quite
a few folks on a couple of international homeless lists. 

Dr. Wes and Anitra also participated in the DIAC conference -- it
was a very lively workshop.

Several transitional housing sites -- one step up from the emergency
shelters -- give their residents access to computers.  Most do NOT
have modems and phone lines.  

On a personal note -- when I was in the Seattle Public Library last
week, I ran into three homeless/formerly homeless people who 
stopped to chat about computer stuff.  

We could be doing a lot more -- and maybe the City's Technology
grant will do just that.  But I'd guess Seattle is one of the
more responsive cities in providing Internet access to the
homeless.

Lorraine


> 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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