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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 rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 16 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.27.3.06har
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