Trends and Friends: Access, use and benefits of digital technology for homeless and ex-homeless people

1. INTRODUCTION
Every generation in the modern era seems to believe that it has created a technological
breakthrough removing the barriers of space and time from social interaction. Bicycles made
it possible to court girls further afield than neighbouring villages. Cars meant that those who
live long distances apart can nevertheless maintain regular face-to-face personal contact
without living in proximity. Families could still meaningfully be families of love, conflicts and
secrets and live in each other’s pockets without living cheek by jowl. Jet aeroplanes extended
the range of relatively rapid contact across international spaces as well as disseminating
a social virus of curiosity for exotic places and the people that lived in them hitherto only
accessible to the bold, hardy and wealthy. And in the contemporary era the impetus of despatialising,
time-shifting, disintermediating change has been taken up by digital technology.
The world of work has, of course, been transformed in particular by the (soon to be
superseded?) desktop personal computer. Notwithstanding the rise of digital technology, the
search for the paperless office, once imagined and predicted by the futurologist Alvin Toffler, 3
has proved fruitless. Similarly, John Maynard Keynes’s forecast that technology and the social
commitment to full employment would result in much shorter working hours and more leisure
time has proved a vain hope (though looking back a hundred years or more, we certainly work
less hard than our ancestors). 4 Ubiquitous technology has undoubtedly made it easier to work
for oneself or from home and more people now do, but it is far from the norm. Technologies
have brought new stresses to the working life, in particular the increased expectation of
immediacy in response and action, which often means that rather than home working being
more relaxed there is an expectation of knowledgeable, comprehensive responses at all times,
within and outside the working day.
3
In 1980, Alvin Toffler, the author of Future Shock declared that, ‘making paper copies of anything is a primitive use of machines
and violates their very spirit.’ (Toffler, A, 1980 The Third Wave P.189 Bantam, New York). In 1975 researchers at the Xerox labs let
it be known that they could see the paperless office looming on the horizon, but it proved a mirage. (Business Week (2387), The
Office of the Future p. 48–70 30 June 1975
4
John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren 1930 available in: Keynes, J.M, Essays in Persuasion pp. 358-
373 New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1963
9