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

1. Introduction
contact, often now brief and quick, has exploded exponentially. Multiple means of contact and
countless glancing encounters is experienced most powerfully among the young. Young adults
have, of course, for a long time had a wider social network than children, who are bound by
parental control, or older adults who are bound by professional and family obligations that
limit the time available for socialising. The advance into middle age may also be accompanied
by a diminution of curiosity and a certain fraying of the appeal of novelty both in sensations
and people. Older people, knowing who and what they like, are somewhat less likely to feel
minded to extend the sphere of their social contacts and encounters. Digital technology has
changed none of those underlying patterns of social relationships.
Leisure too has altered. Films have moved from the cinema to the video to the DVD to the
personal computer to the tablet. Recorded music similarly has gone from vinyl to tape to
CD to the MP3 player. But the most fundamental difference made in the creative sphere has
been that the boundary between artist and audience has been made porous. Everyone can
make songs, videos and distribute them online. We can all have our own online TV channel
regardless of its quality; the only problem is finding anyone else who wants to watch it!
Of course, digital technologies and the web in particular have created or amplified some
darker social effects. It is estimated that at least one in three internet searches are for
pornography, which is perhaps not the end of the world in a free society. However, the far
more disturbing presence and dissemination of pornography involving children has expanded
via the internet. The capacity to meet and find people with shared interests, regardless
of location, has also in the extreme meant that, for example, sites that portray suicide
and cannibalism, sometimes in real time, are also to be found on the web with persistent
searching, perhaps offering a lure to the vulnerable or disturbed mind, though probably not
accessible easily enough for the merely curious.
The arrival of the internet during the 1980s created the capability to link various private
networks through a shared protocol into a global network of networks. The effect was billions
of computer devices around the world could connect to and communicate with each other.
Although there were antecedent electronic mailing systems, during the 1990s email became
ubiquitous, a method of people with individual digital identities (their email addresses)
sending digitally messages principally of text but also pictures and other information.
Similarly, (weighty) mobile phones existed in the 1970s and 1980s, but in the 1990s ownership
and usage of mobile phones became ubiquitous as handsets became lighter, smaller, with
longer lasting batteries and network coverage spread. These three changes – the internet,
email and the mobile phone – taken together have re-created aspects of personal as well as
business lives. The question for this study is whether the impacts seen elsewhere in society
and social relationships adumbrated above are replicated among homeless or excluded people
or whether, in fact, these groups of people, because of their wider exclusion from community
life and in particular their general absence from the housing and labour markets, have also
become digitally excluded i.e. unable to access either these three principal technologies or
their benefits.
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