Cover not available
Article published In:
Skype and domestic settings: Interpersonal video communication as a site of human sociality
Edited by Richard Harper, Rod Watson and Christian Licoppe
[Pragmatics 27:3] 2017
► pp. 447–474

The Skype paradox

Homelessness and selective intimacy in the use of communications technology

| Social Shaping Research, Cambridge
| Telecom ParisTech, Paris
| University of Washington, United States
Digital technologies are likely to be appropriated by the homeless just as they are by other segments of society. However, these appropriations will reflect the particularities of their circumstances. What are these appropriations? Are they beneficial or effective? Can Skype, as a case in point, assuage the social disconnection that must be, for many, the experience of being homeless? This paper analyses some evidence about these questions and, in particular, the ways communications media are selected, oriented to and accounted for by the homeless young. Using data from a small corpus of interviews, it examines the specific ways in which choice of communication (face-to-face, social media, or video, etc.), are described by these individuals as elected for tactical and strategic reasons having to do with managing their family relations. These relations are massively important both in terms of how communications media are deployed, and in terms of being one of the sources of the homeless state the young find themselves in. The paper examines some of the methodical ways these issues are articulated and the type of ‘causal facticity’ thereby constituted in interview talk. The paper also remarks on the paradoxical problem that technologies like Skype provide: at once allowing people in the general to communicate but in ways that the homeless young want to resist in the particular. The consequences of this for the shaping of communications technology in the future are remarked upon.
Keywords: sociology, ethnomethodology, philosophy of action, homelessness, family, communication media, Skype, membership categorization, participation frameworks, reasons
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Methods and approach
    • 1.2The relation between this approach and other ways of addressing homelessness
    • 1.3Some remarks on data
  • 2.Analysis
    • 2.1Preliminary observations
    • 2.2The homeless and family communication
    • 2.3Identity, communication, participation frameworks
    • 2.4The ‘politics of living’ in the detailed organisation of communications
  • 3.Conclusion: Reasons, causes, evidentiality
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 16 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.27.3.06har
References (41)
References
Anderson, N. 1923. The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man. Chicago: Chicago Council of Social Agencies.Google Scholar
Aronsson, K., and A. Cekaite. 2011. “Activity Contracts and Directives in Everyday Family Politics.” Discourse and Society 22 (2): 137–54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bourgois, P. 1998a. “Just Another Night in a Shooting Gallery.” Theory, Culture and Society 15 (2): 37–66. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1998b. “The Moral Economies of Homeless Heroin Addicts: Confronting Ethnography, H.I.V. Risk and Everyday Violence in San Francisco Shooting Encampments.” Substance Use and Misuse 33 (11): 2323–51. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Castells, M. 1996. The Rise of the Networked Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. I. Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell.Google Scholar
1997. The Power of Identity, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. II. Cambridge, MA/Oxford, UK: Blackwell.Google Scholar
1998. End of Millennium, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. III. Cambridge, MA/Oxford, UK: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Duranti, A., and C. Goodwin. 1992. “Editors’ Introduction”, Rethinking Context, ed. by A. Duranti, and C. Goodwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Fitzgerald, R., and W. Housley. 2015. Advances in Membership Categorisation Analysis. London: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garfinkel, H. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Garfinkel, H., G. Girton, E. Livingston, and H. Sacks. No date. Studies of Kids’ Culture and Kids’ Talk. Manuscript.
Garfinkel, H., and H. Sacks. 1970. “On Formal Structures of Practical Actions.” In Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments, ed. by J. C. McKinney, and E. A. Tiryakian, 337–366. New York: Appleton-Century Crofts.Google Scholar
Goffman, E. 1979. “Footing.” Semiotica 25 (1–2): 1–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goodwin, C. 1981. Conversational Organization: Interaction Between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Harper, R. 2011. Texture: Human Expression in the Age of Communication Overload. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Horst, H. A., and D. Miller. 2006. The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication. Oxford/New York: Berg.Google Scholar
Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jackson, E. 2012. “Fixed in Mobility-Young Homeless People and the City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36 (4): 725–41. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Katz, J., and M. Aakhus. 2002. Perpetual Contact: Mobile communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Latour, B. 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. (Trans C. Porter). Harvard: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Liberman, K. 2013. More Studies in Ethnomethodology. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Maynard, D. W. 1988. “Language, Interaction, and Social Problems.” Social Problems 351: 311–334. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Miller, D., and J. Sinina. 2014. Webcam. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Rose, E. 1960. “The English Record of a Natural Sociology.” American Sociological Review 251: 193–208. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sacks, H. 1972a. “On the Usability of Conversational Data for Doing Sociology.” In Studies in Social Interaction, ed. by D. Sudnow. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
1972b. “On the Analyzability of Stories by Children.” In Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication, ed. by John J. Gumperz, and Dell Hymes. New York: Holt, Rinehart.Google Scholar
1987. “On the Preferences for Agreement and Contiguity in Sequences in Conversation.” In Talk and Social Organisation, ed. by G. R. Button, and J. R. E. Lee, 54–69. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
1992. Lectures on Conversation. Volumes I & II1. Malden: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sacks, H., E. Schegloff, and G. Jefferson. 1974. “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” Language 50 (4): 696–735. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sacks, H., and E. Schegloff. 1979. “Two Preferences in the Organization of Reference to Persons in Conversation and Their Interaction.” In Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology, ed. by G. Psathas, 15–21. New York: Irvington Press.Google Scholar
Schegloff, E. 1969. “Sequencing in Conversational Openings.” American Anthropologist 701: 1075–95. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1972. “Notes on a Conversational Practice: Formulating Place.” In Studies in social interaction, ed. by D. Sudnow, 75–119. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
1995. “Discourse as an Interactional Achievement III: The Omni-relevance of Action.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 28 (3): 185–213. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2005. “On Complainability.” Social Problems 521: 449–476. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, E. A., and H. Sacks. 1973. “Opening up Closings.” Semiotica 81: 280–327. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Speier, M. 1971. “The Everyday World of the Child.” In Understanding everyday life, ed. by J. Douglas, 188–217. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Spradley, J. P. 1970. You Owe Yourself a Drunk: An Ethnography of Urban Nomads. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Watson, R. 2015. “De-Reifying Categories.” In Advances in membership categorization analysis, ed. by R. Fitzgerald, and W. Housely, 23–49. Los Angeles: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Woelfer, J., and D. Hendry. 2010. “Homeless Young People’s Experiences with Information Systems: Life and Work in a Community Technology Center.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 20101, pp. 1291–1300.Google Scholar
. 2011. “Homeless Young People and Living with Personal Digital Artifacts.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 20111, ACM Press, pp. 1697–1706.Google Scholar
Yoo, D., A. Huldtgren, J. Woelfer, F. Hendry, and B. Friedman. 2013. “A value Sensitive Action-Reflection Model: Evolving a Co-Design Space with Stakeholder and Designer Prompts” Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, CHI 2013, ACM Press, pp. 419–428. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Abel, Susan, Tanya Machin & Charlotte Brownlow
2021. Social media, rituals, and long-distance family relationship maintenance: A mixed-methods systematic review. New Media & Society 23:3 ► pp. 632 ff. DOI logo
Martins Ferreira, Dina Maria & Jony Kellson de Castro Silva
2021. Chapter 8. The adaptability of becoming. In The Pragmatics of Adaptability [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 319], ► pp. 171 ff. DOI logo
Davis-Owusu, Kadian, Evans Owusu, Lucio Marcenaro, Carlo Regazzoni, Loe Feijs & Jun Hu
2019. Towards a Deeper Understanding of the Behavioural Implications of Bidirectional Activity-Based Ambient Displays in Ambient Assisted Living Environments. In Enhanced Living Environments [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 11369], ► pp. 108 ff. DOI logo
Harper, Richard, Sean Rintel, Rod Watson & Kenton O’Hara
2019. The ‘interrogative gaze’. In Skyping the Family [Benjamins Current Topics, 103], ► pp. 19 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.