“You Can Connect with Like, the World!”: Social Platforms, Survival Support, and Digital Inequalities for People Experiencing Homelessness
通过芝加哥无家可归者的民族志研究，提出“连接雄心”概念，揭示他们如何在社交媒体和众筹中寻求生存支持，以及技能、隐私担忧等数字不平等如何阻碍其成功。
Abstract This study examines how people experiencing homelessness invest their efforts in locating survival support over social media and crowdfunding and the barriers they experience along the way. Reporting on ethnographic fieldwork with unstably housed adults in Chicago, the study introduces the concept of connective ambition to describe how platform narratives take hold in a context of deep exclusion, informing a view of social media as a vast terrain of untapped support from strangers. Digital inequality emerges in the failure of campaigns to raise money for rent from virtual ties, but also in how limited skills and heightened concerns over privacy and safety discourage most people living on the street from ever seeking out support over social media. Ethnography can help better illustrate the interlocking features of offline and digital inequalities, showing how status-specific uses of social platforms emerge and shape unequal outcomes of digital participation for members of marginalized communities.