Paper short abstract:

Digitalisation threatens to multiply the exclusions experienced by homeless people. Access to digital media is a constant process for homeless people, in which practicing connectivity is always accompanied by practicing disconnectivity, complicating narratives of digital inclusion.

Paper long abstract:

The Covid-19 pandemic radically transformed social and material life, shifting much of it into the domestic sphere and into digital spaces. This transformation particularly affects homeless people, who do not have a permanent dwelling and who disproportionately struggle to gain and maintain quality access to digital communication technologies. As smartphone ownership has become tacitly accepted as a precondition for participating in many aspects of societal life, digitalisation therefore threatens to multiply the exclusions experienced by homeless people.

In this context, I conducted two years of ethnographic research with a charity in Berlin (Germany) which organised a large-scale distribution of smartphones to homeless people. Planning and carrying out smartphone distributions proved a very unique ethnographic starting point to understand the digital desires, fears, challenges, and practices of homeless people, which I will elaborate and reflect on.

It quickly became apparent that connectivity for homeless people is not a binary question of having or not having a smartphone. Rather, it is a set of constant practices which require significant time and resource investments. Simultaneously, homeless people often experience – and practice – disconnectivity. Disconnectivity may result from phone loss, breakage, lack of phone credit, or access to power; however, it is also constituted through practices like turning off one’s phone for a prolonged period of time, not picking up calls or answering messages, and many other ways of refusing to do (digital) connectivity. In this presentation, I will use the concept of “dis:connectivity” to show how these different practices are entangled.