(In)Visibility and the smartphone: Experiencing homelessness as dictated by urban figurations of social control

Introduction

Current research on homelessness and mobile communications shows that digital technologies, especially in the form of smartphones, are as common among a wide age range of people experiencing homelessness as the general population (Humphry, 2014; Rhoades et al., 2017). Using digital media allows them to secure basic needs, ensures their survival, establishes a sense of security, promotes social inclusion, supports the construction of the self, and can strengthen their mental well-being (Eyrich-Garg, 2010; Hauprich, 2021; Humphry, 2014; Roberson & Nardi, 2010). Following up on this research strand, our contribution focuses on the German context and asks how people experiencing homelessness in Germany make sense of the idea of a dedicated app, which, has not yet been developed, by engaging individuals who are homeless in a group discussion about how such an app would be used or not. Creating a dedicated app for those experiencing homelessness is potentially valuable and worthwhile because it might help to meet some of their needs both quickly and relatively easily. However, in order to assess the app's potential, we first need to find out about the needs of people experiencing homelessness and only then can we ask the follow-up question of what needs can be digitized. Against this background, we deal with the discourse of “digital participation” and ideas of “tech solutionism.” Moreover, imagining the idea of a dedicated app for the homeless cannot be dissociated from the current social conditions in which people experiencing homelessness find themselves. In Germany, as with other welfare state regimes, homelessness is viewed as a social problem that deviates from normality and, consequently, must be dealt with. Certainly, dominant rules and social norms influence the way homelessness is perceived within a given society, and its impact on the agency of people facing this kind of existential hardship should not be underestimated. Therefore, in this article we will first discuss the social conditions of homelessness in Germany, which take the form of what we call urban figurations of social control. We will then introduce the study design, methods, and the empirical data we draw upon in the analysis. Following on from this, we will present our analysis of how people experiencing homelessness project specific fears and desires onto the use of a smartphone app designed with them in mind, and then discuss our findings on the respondents’ often articulated need to be simultaneously visible and invisible through the smartphone within the broader context of digital participation. To conclude, we reflect on the respondents’ potential use of the app as part of a strategy to regain agency and reduce vulnerability and feelings of loneliness. Analyzing imaginaries around this app can provide a lens through which to obtain a better understanding of the experiences of homelessness, because the projection of homelessness can only be interpreted against the background of homeless people’s marginalized position in society.

Urban figurations of social control or how the state deals with homelessness

The way neoliberal welfare states treat poor populations has been extensively demonstrated by studies from the United States, where the increase in social inequality and poverty rates go hand in hand with a dismantling of welfare state benefits and an increase of state repression and prosecution in order to control people effectively (Wacquant, 2009), including police state surveillance of neighborhoods where predominantly low-income and black communities live (Goffman, 2014). However, in the German context, despite an active labor market policy, the conservative welfare state still allows its citizens to receive social benefits, which has a decommodifying effect (Sowa et al., 2015). However, the conditions of welfare change with the loss of housing and a registered address. Those without an abode become people experiencing homelessness and are situated within a specific structure of control that we term “urban figurations of social control.” According to Elias (2000), a figuration is defined as a structure of mutually oriented and dependent group of people or as a historically produced and reproduced network of interdependencies. He further claims that “[i]n the relations between individuals, as well as in those between different functional strata, a specific duality or even multiplicity of interests manifests itself more strongly, the broader and denser the network of social interdependence becomes. Here, all people, all groups, estates or classes, are in some way dependent on one another; they are potential friends, allies or partners; and they are at the same time potential opponents, competitors or enemies” (Elias, 2000, p. 317, emphasis in original). Power structures create interdependencies in which various control strategies are at play as formal and informal behavioral control dynamics in a society. Consequently, a specific social order is formed. Thus, modern societies legitimate a specific social order, which directly affects the individuals living in it because they conform to explicit sets of accepted behaviors. These behavior sets guide individuals, whose repeated actions become standardized. Needless to say, social norms define what is normal and what is not, and they exert an external constraint on the individual. On the one hand, societal external constraints become individual self-constraints during the civilizing process in that people practice self-control and regulate their own emotions (informalization). On the other hand, a fixed, formalized canon of behavior based on legal norms (formalization) creates a structure of control in modern societies, with direct consequences for people experiencing homelessness – what we call the urban figurations of social control. How homelessness is experienced depends on the network of social interdependencies at hand, the power relations within that network, and on how this state of living is regarded and represented; in this case, homelessness is regarded as a social problem (Sowa, 2022). Thus, doing social problems brings forth legal norms, which are implemented by street-level bureaucrats. Within these organizations, social networks are established and standardized, behavioral patterns are repeated, and expectations of actions become known.

The German state provides two main legal frameworks for its interventions with people experiencing homelessness: the police force; and social assistance. The former fulfills a protective function in its aim of eliminating the security problem that homelessness is deemed to be. People experiencing homelessness are perceived as a threat or danger to society, including to the affected people themselves (self-harm). Concretely, it means that when people lose their (tenancy-secured) housing and become (involuntarily) homeless in Germany, the city or municipality, as the regulatory authority, is required to provide (what is supposed to be) temporary accommodation, such as emergency shelters (Ruder, 2017). However, many of these shelters are poorly equipped, run down, and barely habitable. Because the loss of housing acutely endangers fundamental and human rights, such as the right to life and health, municipalities are obliged to provide accommodation at all times of the year and day (possibly separate locations for overnight and daytime stays), which, however, does not have to meet the requirements of permanent housing. Conversely, the latter provides social support services in the form of counseling and other forms of social assistance including welfare assistance. However, people facing homelessness do not automatically receive welfare assistance according to Social Code XII because social work organizations must first confirm that special living conditions are associated with social difficulties. In other words, it needs to be proven that people (experiencing homelessness) are socially excluded in various areas of their lives and that they are also unable to overcome these special living situations by themselves – understood as deficiency situations (lack of housing, income, labor market participation, and social and cultural participation). If social difficulties in connection with special life situations are determined for a person, only then does the legal framework take effect and institutional help by way of social assistance can be provided. In this way, people experiencing homelessness neither have an automatic right to housing nor do they have a claim to it. Therefore, we argue that the German welfare system constructs urban figurations of social control, regulating homeless people in spaces of the municipality or with regard to social assistance on the basis of legal principles. However, the two (support) strategies are rarely offered together. In addition, there are countless interactions with other areas such as youth welfare and support services for mental health and alcohol and drug abuse, all provided on different legal grounds with the corresponding division of responsibilities within a municipality. Furthermore, alternative places to stay in a public space are often denied due to societal notions of what constitutes public and private spheres, entrepreneurial cities, and urban security and crime prevention.

Study design and methods

The empirical material we draw upon in this article consists of a group discussion about the potential of an app designed to help those in homeless circumstances with 12 people experiencing homelessness. As elaborated within the German and Anglo-Saxon context, group discussions differ from focus groups (Merton, 1987). The latter originated in the United States, and whereas focus groups have moderators, whose task it is to steer the discussion so that it focuses on certain aspects, the method of a group discussion is more open, because the moderators merely help to promote the group’s self-reliance. In focus groups, the participants do not know each other and are often randomly brought together by the researchers (Bohnsack & Przyborski, 2007); this is not the case with group discussants. The great advantage of the group discussion method is that it allows patterns of collective orientation to emerge (Bohnsack, 1998) as the participants confirm, complement, or correct each other. Their utterances build upon each other and, therefore, they negotiate meanings collectively and interpretatively. Thus, we approached the empirical material with the following research question: How would people experiencing homelessness make sense of an app that is customized and made available to them? Collective orientations unfold through the mutual enhancement and completion of the views of the individuals involved in the group discussion. Importantly, these orientations do not simply emerge out of straightforward interaction but, rather, are reproduced within the discussion over and over again and amount to deeper collective structures (Bohnsack & Przyborski, 2007).

After having briefly introduced the idea of creating an app designed for people experiencing homelessness, participants in the group discussion engaged in a lively exchange as to whether and how it would benefit them. Consequently, no feedback on a specific app proposal was sought. Rather, the group was asked to speculate on what the app could include for it to be both meaningful and user-friendly. More precisely, they discussed the app as being something imagined rather than as something that was actually being used by the participants. The discussion group largely consisted of men with the exception of one woman, who did not actively take part in the discussion. Therefore, there was a lack of female voices and representation. The group was selective in another way in that it was already in existence prior to the study, thus representing a self-organized group of people experiencing homelessness in Germany. For this reason, its members were likely to be more politically active than others in the same homeless situation. All of the participants had experience of living on the street rather than living in homeless shelters or with friends or acquaintances. The group discussion took place after an ordinary group meeting in 2019 and lasted about an hour and a half. The discussion was recorded and fully transcribed. We analyzed the empirical material by classic open coding (Glaser & Strauss, 1999) and sequential analysis (Oevermann, 1981, 2000) for those sequences within the discourse that dealt with the issue of visibility and invisibility. Thus, we combined aspects of grounded theory and reconstructive methods.

(In)Visibility and the smartphone: Navigating fears and desires

Recent studies indicate that despite differences in the continuous availability of electricity and internet access as well as digital hardware (such as computers and tablets), there is a high level of digital participation among homeless people in the German context (Rösch et al., 2021). For those people experiencing homelessness, sharing and taking part in a “new normalcy” of digital participation is perhaps of high value and, therefore, sought after. However, for normalcy to evolve, new media and corresponding forms of communication need to be integrated into quotidian activities. Hartmann (2010) argues that the appropriation of new technologies invokes the ontological certainty that users possess a “centrally firm sense of [their] own and other people's reality and identity [implying that they] have a sense of [their] presence in the world as real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal sense, continuous persons” (Laing, 1960/1990, p. 39), a sense that every individual wants to preserve. Importantly, the relationship between media and the social setting is significant, because it challenges people's sense of ontological certainty, and at the same time may also offer a potential building block for this to evolve (Hartmann, 2010, 2014). The implications are for everyone; however, media use for people experiencing homelessness proves to be distinctive in that for this population, “public space is at the same time their private space” (Hartmann, 2014, p. 644). Having a house as a place of retreat, where already built-up tension from constant surveillance in other settings can be relieved, is still the normative base from which to achieve or maintain ontological certainty. Nevertheless, as Hartmann argues, we could think of media as home in that it can provide a safe environment. Therefore, homing, which is the gradual creation of a safe environment through media (Hartmann, 2014), can take place everywhere, and may play a crucial role for people experiencing homelessness.

In the narratives of the respondents, a potential app for people experiencing homelessness becomes a surface on which projections and imaginaries are tested. Against the backdrop of their marginalized social position and their concrete experiences of struggle and hardship, homeless people associate the use of this potential app with particular fears and desires. These go hand in hand with online practices, which it is assumed would have an impact on their situation offline. Therefore, their fears and desires reproduce both social structures and relations as well as subjective perceptions and individual experiences. It seems as if the idea of an app for people experiencing homelessness is a digital mirror for how they experience the society they live in. As will be shown in the analysis, fears and desires go hand in hand with discourses of visibility and invisibility, which ultimately provide a lens through which to understand the experience of homelessness.

Discrete and discreet: An online presence shaped by both fears and desires

In order to contextualize our findings from the analysis further and interpret them, we need to discuss the social function of fears and desires and how they may have an impact on the actions of people experiencing homelessness both online and offline. When it comes to understanding fears as a social fact, a relational sociology perspective shifts the focus away from fears as an individual pathology and as societal dysfunctionality toward understanding fear relations and their functional meanings, because fear relations emerge in a variety of individual and social contexts. Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence (2001) together with Schmitz’ continuative ideas on the functions of fears (2019), shed light on the relevance of different fears with regard to the formation of social groups and generally of social order. Because of their contribution to the (re)production of psychic, practical, and social structures, fears are functional in many ways. Such a heuristic framework enables potential functional connections between emotions and social structures to be made and also creates awareness of the functional and dysfunctional consequences, both of which vary according to different groups of people (Rösch et al., 2021). Thus, for people experiencing homelessness, fear serves as a protective mechanism. As such, we can conclude that fears emerge as a response to their vulnerability, which is caused by their experience of homelessness. Vulnerability can be understood at both the individual and the societal level. At the individual level, it is expressed by experiences of physical harm, from violent expulsion from an urban space (for example, if homeless people have been sleeping, meeting with peers, or begging) to mugging, violent disputes with peers over places and resources through to being beaten up, raped, or even almost being killed (Lutz et al., 2021). At the societal level, vulnerability arises due to the perception of being othered, excluded, and marginalized, and because of the corresponding treatment, which, in turn, leads to experiences of suffering severe emotional and physical harm. If the disregard of the right to housing is seen as a human rights violation, it may even be regarded as violating a person's dignity. Furthermore, people experiencing homelessness are at the forefront of stigmatizing actions as and when they are denied access to institutions and opportunities, and to societal goods and resources such as the labor market, the housing market, and social welfare, among others (Gurr et al., 2022). Due to their marginal position, the options for action for people experiencing homelessness are limited, and they may even be criminalized or ostracized. They especially struggle in legal terms when it comes to enforcing their civil and human rights (Walsh, 2011). Therefore, they experience significantly limited agency, although not a complete loss of this (Annen, 2020). As we have illustrated with quotes from the group discussion, using a potential app specifically designed for people experiencing homelessness comes with a risk of surveillance. We argue that the app is perceived as traitorous in these instances. When data security is not a concrete fact, the respondents feel the need to be invisible. It seems as if the app serves as a mirror of a society, reflecting a situation in which people experiencing homelessness no longer trust social institutions or social relationships with family, friends, or acquaintances (Heinzelmann et al., 2023). However, trust is central to all of our lives. For instance, Luhmann (2014) sees the function of trust as the reduction of complexity in order to gain agency. For those experiencing homelessness, it is probably the other way around: complexity is not reduced and goes hand in hand with pervasive social control. Thus, invisibility is preferable to an online presence, which may result in undesirable consequences for the very real offline lives of people experiencing homelessness.

However, desires are associated with a certain sense of scarcity. As human beings, we long for something that we think is meaningful or that creates meaning in our lives. Desires may then represent an alternative to the current state or situation in which we find ourselves. In a way, desires help us both to find fault with the present reality, and also realize what is essential to it (Boesch, 1998). For people experiencing homelessness, and all the scarcities that come with it, the potential app becomes a projection screen on which desire for access to housing and other resources and information, ideas of autonomy and self-determination, and meaningful social relationships based on an equal footing, especially with peers, can be realized. It is not a new finding that being homeless also often involves the loss of meaningful and reliable social relationships such as those with spouses, children, parents, siblings or friends and colleagues because of divorce, separation or death, job loss, insuperable disputes, or whatever has caused the homeless problem. A person’s own feelings of shame and mortification at the situation they find themselves in can be added to this. For those people who find themselves living on the streets, new relationships emerge, some of which are with social workers or other professionals. However, these often have an uneven power dynamic and people experiencing homelessness find themselves in the weakest position because they are embedded in a hierarchical power structure (Cohen, 1998). This is why these new relationships are often neither maintained nor persist in the long term. Other new social contacts with peers and further loose connections emerge; these serve as alliances, often creating relief when it comes to navigating the hardships of everyday life on the streets. Therefore, many suffer from loneliness and isolation (Sanders & Brown, 2015).

However, the comparable struggles and hardships associated with homelessness do help to establish nonhierarchal social relationships and create feelings of social closeness. It is certainly understandable that people experiencing homelessness prefer to seek partnerships that enable them to share hardships and lifeworlds. Obviously, we can think of these partnerships as responses to the loneliness that many people experiencing homelessness face. We also see this as a way for individuals to (re-)gain self-determination in that they choose their own social contacts with like-minded people and peers, who may even share the same interests. In doing so, they can move beyond defining themselves only by their experience of homelessness. In other words, there is more to them than “merely” being homeless. Drawing upon labeling theory, we assert that such broader definitions are important insofar as once someone has been successfully labeled as deviant, which undoubtedly happens with the shift to homelessness and its lived reality, the label may attain master status. In other words, it obscures all other aspects of the person, such as their personality, character traits, interests, or values (Becker, 1963/2018). However, with regard to this and all the other desires the respondents projected onto the potential app, there is a need to display visibility. Only when a person is visible can they intentionally get in touch with peers and only then can their online actions transform into self-determination as a response to their limited agency in the situation of homelessness. In both instances, whether they wish to be invisible in certain situations or visible in others, the respondents similarly anticipate the possible consequences of their online actions for their very real offline lifeworld.

Conclusion

For this contribution, we asked the following research question: How would people experiencing homelessness in Germany make sense of an app dedicated for the homeless, one not yet developed, and would it benefit them? The analysis presented suggests that by locating themselves situationally on the continuum of (in)visibilities by either choosing to be visible with the smartphone on one occasion but choosing to be invisible with it on another, homeless people actively and strategically respond to their current state of vulnerability, feelings of loneliness, and limited agency. We have shown that the latter are due to the urban figurations of social control. Therefore, the discussion about an imagined app can only be understood against the background of people’s experiences of homelessness. Our results indicate that respondents would use the app strategically and situationally to appear visible as a digital user in the hope of beneficial offline consequences, or to become invisible spatially to protect themselves against undesired offline consequences and sanctions. In turn, the suggestion of a rating function attached to the app emphasizes the desire to draw attention to poor treatment or even to expose those responsible. Thus, in their use of the app, the respondents are strategically and situationally placing themselves on the continuum of (in)visibilities with regard to others. Arguably, the strategic use of the app responds to their state of vulnerability by reducing their feelings of loneliness, allowing them to get in touch with peers and like-minded people, restoring their agency because it grants them self-determination and, finally, by allowing them to come to terms with the emotional harm and mortification they have endured. At best, they can regain a little bit of lost dignity. Moreover, according to Hartmann (2014), we can think of the strategies with regard to visibility or invisibility as homing, in that this particular way of using the app is to create a safe environment gradually, and along with this, stabilize the respondents’ ontological certainty.

Furthermore, the results of the group discussion indicate that the respondents have a strong emotional need to reveal (in the sense of making visible) how actors in the system of assistance for the homeless who normally would wield power over them, have wronged them, or treated them badly. We could even go so far as to say that by strategically and situationally choosing visibility or invisibility in their use of the potential app, people experiencing homelessness can beat the institutional actors at their own game, considering how social problems are established on the political agenda in the first place. As we have argued, the urban figurations of social control that create the conditions for people’s experiences of homelessness strongly depend on how homelessness is represented. As long as homelessness is labeled as a security problem, people experiencing it cannot have trust in society's institutions. The right to housing can only be asserted through a set of processes including claims-making, media coverage, public reaction, policymaking, social work, and policy outcomes (Best, 2008). The respondents themselves are very aware that homelessness has long been defined as a social problem; however, by using the potential app in order to shed light on the matter and to make the grievances about assistance for the homeless (e.g., emergency shelters) visible to others, the system of help in place is revealed to be the social problem itself. Therefore, users prove they can appropriate the institutional and political actors’ logic and act according to their own best interests in a given situation. In the context of policymaking, our findings with regard to the strategic and situational use of (in)visibility by way of the smartphone demonstrate that the current framing of homelessness as a social problem ought to be held responsible for the vulnerability, loneliness, and limited agency of those people affected. However, we should be careful of proclaiming “tech solutionism” with a proposed app, because the solution for homelessness is not only technological. The app can help to meet several needs; however, it is more of a “symptom treatment” than a “cause control.” A big part of the solution is political: the provision of affordable housing. Hence, our contribution suggests new paths toward redefining homelessness and advocates that housing as a human right should be taken seriously.

Acknowledgements

This manuscript has benefited from professional English language editing by Dr. Alexia Moyer, to whom we would like to express our gratitude. In addition, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of the Special Issue Homelessness and Mobile Media for their comments which were of great help to improve the article.