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Marginal Publics / Privacy in Motion: Homelessness in Times of Mobile Media

Applicant Professorin Dr. Maren Hartmann, since 6/2020
Subject Area Communication Sciences
Empirical Social Research
Term from 2019 to 2023
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 403628254
 
Final Report Year 2024

Final Report Abstract

The project focuses on the rarely researched topic of the connection between homelessness and digital media use. It focussed on the seemingly simple question of how homeless people in Berlin use digital and mobile media. Homelessness and rooflessness are difficult to separate as people often move from one to the other (and back again). For the project, this meant that we worked with both homeless and roofless people: people who had been living on the street (some for a long time, some only recently), people in temporary accommodation, but also people who were housed at the time of the study, but still counted themselves as homeless. For the sake of simplicity, we refer here to homeless people, i.e. people suffering from homelessness. The empirical focus of the project consists of two sub-projects: a survey on the media use of homeless people and a so-called 'qualitative experiment' in which smartphones were issued to homeless people and they were accompanied (and in some cases supported) in their appropriation. Both sub-projects were based on long-term ethnographies in the field (especially in shelters for homeless people and at meeting places for people affected by homelessness). The whole project was supplemented by a larger smartphone distribution (in cooperation with a homeless organization), which was not originally planned, and other complementary smaller project parts. This combination of methods can be considered innovative and allows for a triangulation of results. In addition, the project was characterized throughout by the pandemic - as both a challenge and an opportunity. Thematically (and thus theoretically), the focus was also on the media use and appropriation of homeless people, on which there are only a few studies in German-speaking countries (most of which came out during the project period). This focus also touches on issues of social participation, the digital divide, but also media appropriation in precarious circumstances and to a large extent in public spaces. The question of privacy in the context of homelessness, which was originally planned in the project, was therefore addressed. However, the question of becoming public / being public of homeless people (in the context of digital media use), which was also originally considered, proved to be unanswerable in this project: on the one hand because public processes in a proactive form rarely exist in this context, and on the other hand because a different approach would have been required to approach them. Instead, our core findings have to do with the question of smartphone loss, with the question of entertainment vs. other uses and with the question of social expectations of use.

Link to the final report

https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-104702-2

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