"You Can Connect with Like, the World!": Social Platforms, Survival Support, and Digital Inequalities for People Experiencing Homelessness
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Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
FULL-LENGTH RESEARCH ARTICLE
“You Can Connect with Like, the World!”: Social
Platforms, Survival Support, and Digital
Inequalities for People Experiencing
Homelessness
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Will Marler
Communication and Media Research (IKMZ), University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
This study examines how people experiencing homelessness invest their efforts in locating sur-
vival 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.
Lay Summary
Among people experiencing homelessness in Chicago, some attempt to use social media or crowd-
funding sites as a way to connect with people online who might offer them support, such as money
for rent. This strategy is generally unsuccessful, people who are homeless often lack a social support
system and so they turn to online strangers for help rather than people they know offline. Others do
not even try to get help over social media, because they are worried about people who wish them
harm finding them online, or for their reputations if they admit to being homeless and needing
help.
Keywords: Digital Inequality, Social Network Sites, Social Media, Facebook, Crowdfunding, Social
Capital, Homelessness
Corresponding author: Will Marler; e-mail: w.marler@ikmz.uzh.ch
Editorial Record: First manuscript received on 5 October 2020; Revisions received on 14 July 2021; Accepted by Lee
Humphreys on 31 August 2021
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 00 (2021) 1–19 V C The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press 1
on behalf of International Communication Association. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any me-
dium, provided the original work is properly cited.Social Platforms and Survival Support W. Marler
https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmab020
Can a social media account or crowdfunding campaign help overcome the offline barriers to social
resources that members of disadvantaged communities experience? How do people in poverty under-
stand and pursue social network sites (SNSs) as avenues for accessing the material support they need
to survive? A body of research explores the social capital implications of SNS use (Burke et al., 2011;
Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007; Valenzuela, Park, & Kee, 2009) and more recent research considers
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the determinants of crowdfunding success (Borst, Moser, & Ferguson, 2018). There is limited insight
to date, however, on the ways that socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals understand and seek
out survival resources over social platforms and whether they tend to benefit in the process (Fritz &
Gonzales, 2018; Stuart, 2020).
In this study, I draw on 3 years of offline and digital ethnographic fieldwork with people
experiencing homelessness in Chicago to examine how individuals approached and pursued the idea
that money for rent could be found through social networking technologies. I propose “connective
ambition” as a concept to explain how ideas of the material promise of social media use formed out of
platform discourses and the lifeworlds of people with little access to offline sources of survival sup-
port. Such a “Bourdieuian approach” to digital inequality research (Ignatow & Robinson, 2017) fills a
gap in the literature by showing how offline and digital inequalities overlap to shape digital uses which
are less capital enhancing among particularly disadvantaged individuals (van Deursen, Helsper,
Eynon, & van Dijk, 2017). The study begins by addressing gaps in the literature in these areas before
turning to the methodology and findings.
Deep exclusion and third-level digital inequalities
In recent years, researchers have called for greater attention to how offline and digital inequalities in-
teract to shape gaps in who benefits from Internet use, known as the third-level digital divide
(Ragnedda, 2018; van Deursen et al., 2017). A step forward toward identifying the link in the chain
between socioeconomic status and Internet outcomes has been to explore socioeconomic differences
in “capital-enhancing” uses of the Internet (Hargittai & Hinnant, 2008; van Deursen & van Dijk,
2014). In this “usage gap” line of research, higher income and education has been found to correlate
with economic, informational, health, and other online activities likely to benefit users’ life chances,
while the less advantaged appear less inclined to take advantage of the Internet in these ways
(Livingstone & Helsper, 2007; Scheerder, van Deursen, & van Dijk, 2017; Zillien & Hargittai, 2009).
Research on usage gaps is limited in the SNS domain. Those with higher social status and better digi-
tal skills appear to use platforms like Facebook more often to mobilize resources and connect with di-
verse ties than do their socioeconomic counterparts (Correa, 2016; Pearce & Rice, 2017).
Lower socioeconomic status appears to make it less likely that an individual will turn to capital-
enhancing forms of digital participation. Why this is the case is less well understood in digital inequal-
ity research. One difficulty is in accounting for the complex sociocultural determinants of online par-
ticipation (Selwyn, 2004). Much research has referenced Bourdieu’s (1986) theories of capital and
“habitus” to explain how digital participation follows from class status (Ignatow & Robinson, 2017;
Robinson, 2009; Zillien & Hargittai, 2009). Through habitus, Bourdieu argues that structural inequal-
ities are embedded in personal “dispositions”—everyday mindsets and habits—that individuals absorb
2 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 00 (2021) 1–19W. Marler Social Platforms and Survival Support
from their broader place in the social structure and which thus tend to reproduce their class position
(Bourdieu, 1984).
Digital habitus emerges from the limitations of everyday life for people in poverty. For example,
Robinson (2009) showed how ample free time and flexible Internet access led higher-income students
to develop anexploratory style of Internet use which benefited their web-search savvy. Meanwhile,
lower-income students had less computer time available and thus developed a “taste for the neces-
sary” in their Internet uses. The idea that the Internet was “not for playing” developed out of the ev-
eryday limitations in low-income students’ access to digital resources and transferred into less
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exploratory and skilled Internet uses.
van Deursen et al. (2017) call for greater attention to contexts of “deep exclusion,” where tradi-
tional inequalities are overlapping. One digital-age example is the multiple challenges faced by young
women of lower income who seek out digital opportunities while living rurally (Rickman, 2018).
Studying settings of overlapping inequalities can help elucidate how digital habits form out of the bar-
riers and needs of everyday life to impact life chances.
Social platforms and material support
While research suggests that marginalized people are less likely in general to use the Internet to en-
hance their economic and social capital (van Deursen & van Dijk, 2014), people in positions of struc-
tural disadvantage may also turn to the Internet to make up for the marginalization they experience.
Understanding who gains access to tangible forms of support such as money, car rides, or places to
stay through the use of social platforms provides a useful case study of third-level digital inequality
(who benefits from going online) and one underexamined in the literature.
Because these environments appear less suited for the exchange of tangible support (Utz & Breuer,
2017), SNS research has primarily examined the exchange of informational and emotional assistance
over platforms such as Facebook (Burke & Kraut, 2016; Li, Chen, & Popiel, 2015). Yet, the material or
tangible benefits that may be available through ties forged or maintained on SNSs may be of particular
interest to members of disadvantaged communities (Rickman, 2018; Stuart, 2020). Another means by
which disadvantaged individuals may seek to make up for a lack of offline channels of support is
through crowdfunding, similarly underexamined for marginalized users (see Borst et al., 2018; Fritz &
Gonzales, 2018). How then do disadvantaged individuals approach the material potential of participa-
tion on social platforms, including SNSs and crowdfunding? What explains who succeeds and fails in
translating a social media account or crowdfunding campaign into survival resources?
Studying the tangible benefits of social platform use taps into an existing line of research on the so-
cial capital benefits of SNS use and determinants of success for crowdfunding campaigns. People of
lower income and education appear to start at a disadvantage, as they tend to lack a level of offline social
capital to translate into supportive online interactions (Borst et al., 2018; DiMaggio & Garip, 2012;
Ellison, Vitak, Gray, & Lampe, 2014) and may lack the digital skills (Hargittai & Micheli, 2019) to navi-
gate complex networked environments, such as cross-platform promotion of a crowdfunding campaign
(Hui, Gerber, & Greenberg, 2012; Parhankangas & Renko, 2017). SNSs like Facebook for their part may
be a poor channel overall for securing tangible support, in line with longitudinal studies finding little
overlap in perceived support over Facebook and measures of broader wellbeing (Li et al., 2015; Trepte,
Dienlin, & Reinecke, 2015; Utz & Breuer, 2017).
Supporting usage gap research more broadly, there is evidence that socioeconomic disadvan-
tage contributes to less capital-enhancing uses of SNSs. Studies have shown that those with fewer
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 00 (2021) 1–19 3Social Platforms and Survival Support W. Marler
digital skills are less likely to mobilize resources on Facebook such as by forming social media
groups (Correa, 2016) while those of lower income are less likely to make contact across socioeco-
nomic lines on SNSs (Pearce & Rice, 2017). On the other hand, studies have also offered support
for the social diversification hypothesis (Mesch, 2012) in online communication, if not SNS use
in particular. For example, Gonzales (2017) finds that disadvantaged urban residents in the
United States more often cross socioeconomic lines when communicating online than face-to-
face than more advantaged respondents. One gap in our knowledge then is how a general ten-
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dency away from mobilizing resources through more diverse ties on SNSs meets with the specific
motivation that some disadvantaged users likely have toward benefitting online where they lack
opportunities offline.
Platform benefits and homelessness
Ethnographic and qualitative research has gone some way to exploring how people with fewer tra-
ditional sources of socioeconomic advantage—for example, through skilled employment or higher
education—turn to social media with the hopes of making up ground. There is typically little suc-
cess in attempting to replace traditional with solely digitally networked sources of support,
though individuals can occasionally squeeze limited material or social resources from a social me-
dia presence (Arora & Scheiber, 2017; Burrell, 2012; Rickman, 2018; Stuart, 2020). Social media
platforms nonetheless advertise the novel economic or social potential for connection over their
networks (Duffy, 2017; Hoffmann, Proferes, & Zimmer, 2018), a message that falls on fertile
ground in disadvantaged communities where traditional resources are lacking (Arora & Scheiber,
2017; Stuart, 2020).
How barriers to digital participation meet expectations of tangible gain from social media connec-
tions is an area where digital inequality research through Bourdieuian perspective can offer insight. In
this study, I use ethnographic research to examine how ideas of the power of social platforms form
among a particularly disadvantaged group—people experiencing homelessness. Homelessness offers a
useful though unique case study of the pursuit of material support over social platforms. People
experiencing homelessness appear to perceive the supportive potential of SNSs (Hammond, Cooper,
& Jordan, 2018) and have more confidence in access to social resources when they are Facebook users
(Buente, Neo, Quiroga, & Greene, 2020). Yet people experiencing homelessness are likely to turn to
SNSs without the networks of well-resourced strong and weak ties that might aid in digital campaigns
for support (DiMaggio & Garip, 2012; Ellison et al., 2014). This may lead unhoused adults to explore
the potential of online-only or virtual ties outside of their existing networks as sources of support,
though research has not explored this scenario.
More recent research highlights the privacy concerns that limit various forms of digital participa-
tion for already disadvantaged Internet users (Marwick & boyd, 2018). These concerns may be exacer-
bated by lower levels of confidence in digital skills to protect one’s privacy online (Li, Chen, &
Straubhaar, 2018). Along with the harassment concerns that are prevalent over social media, particu-
larly for women (Sobieraj, 2018), there may be overlapping concerns that shape engagements with
SNSs and crowdfunding for survival support for vulnerable adults living without stable housing. To
offer an account of third-level digital inequalities in the use of social platforms, I ask how unstably
housed adults in Chicago pursue the material promise of social platforms in light of the potentially
unique and overlapping barriers that are likely to characterize deep exclusion.
4 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 00 (2021) 1–19W. Marler Social Platforms and Survival Support
Methodology
This study is based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted between 2017 and 2019 with unstably
housed adults living on Chicago’s North Side. The neighborhood and all participants are given
pseudonyms to protect participants’ privacy. I refer to my participants as “unstably housed”
rather than “homeless” as their housing statuses shifted over the course of research and involved
“literal” (sleeping outdoors) as well as related forms of housing instability (e.g., doubling up with
friends and imminent risk of homelessness due to inability to afford rent) (U.S. Department of
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Housing and Urban Development, 2012). I examine five cases out of a broader set of participants
I followed in an ethnographic project on homelessness and digital inequality. I selected Eric,
Vicki, Leticia, Briana, and Paul for the motivations they exhibited to seek out instrumental sup-
port over social platforms relative to other participants in the broader project. These individuals
allowed me compare important differences across in digital skills, education, and gender among
Facebook and crowdfunding users and nonusers (See Table 1).
I recruited participants through volunteer work at a nonprofit agency serving unstably housed
adults in Waterside starting in late 2016. From the agency site, I expanded my recruitment outward
in a snowball fashion, developing ties with other middle-age and older adults who were unstably
housed in the neighborhood. At different points in the fieldwork, I friended my participants on
Facebook and, with their consent, began to observe their activities and interactions on the platform.
Facebook was by far the most popular social media platform in use among unstably housed adults in
Waterside and the primary platform, aside from the crowdfunding site GoFundMe discussed in
depth, I observed to be connected to ideas and practices of seeking out survival aid.
The data for the study include 80 observations and 12 interviews on the subject of platform used
for survival support. Field site observations typically lasted between 1 and 4 hours—or longer depend-
ing on events in the field—and took place at a variety of public and semi-public sites including the
nonprofit agency where I volunteered, public libraries, cafes and restaurants, and outdoor spaces such
as parks, street corners, and places of shelter such as under bridges. Nearly all field observations in-
volved some form of unstructured interview, during which I jotted down notes in a notebook. Formal
Table 1 Participant Sociodemographics and Housing Status
Namea Gender Race Ageb Education Housing Status over Research Periodc
Vicki Female White 60–65 High school Street—Housed—Housed
Eric Male White 60–65 Less than high school Street—Temp—Street
Leticia Female Black 50–55 Some college Shelter—Housed—Housed
Briana Female Black 50–55 Some college Street—Street—Housed
Paul Male White 55–60 Master’s degree Street—Temp—Temp
a
Pseudonyms provided. Listed in order of appearance.
b
Age range provided for anonymization.
c
Change in housing status over 3-year research period, 2017–2019, with each term separated by
dash representing primary housing status over each year. “Street” ¼ sleeping outdoors. “Temp” ¼
Shelter or low-rent daily or weekly rental, such as a single-room occupancy (SRO). “Housed” ¼
housing subsidized in part or full by state, reviewed annually for ongoing eligibility.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 00 (2021) 1–19 5Social Platforms and Survival Support W. Marler
interviews were difficult to obtain for this hard-to-reach population of unstably housed adults, whose
locations, availability, and reachability shifted frequently, often week to week (see Snow & Anderson,
1993). In addition to unstructured interviews during 80 field observations, I conducted 12 semi-
formal interviews across my five participants lasting roughly between 45 and 90 minutes. In these
interviews, I asked a range of questions related to participants’ motivations, tactics, hesitations, and
experiences in seeking out survival support using social platforms. I regularly checked in on my par-
ticipants’ activities and friending practices on Facebook and used these observations as prompts in
interviews.
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I obtained informed consent for the study according to a protocol approved by a university IRB
before the study began. I obtained participants’ permission on a regular basis to join them in their
daily activities and observe, as well as to record interviews and social media observations. As a White
man with a suburban background, my identity shaped how I was perceived and allowed into research
settings (see Marler, 2020). I sought to account for influence of my positionality by slowing my data
collection when barriers to accessing participants of a different race presented themselves, and by
seeking out multiple perspectives across gender and race on what I was observing (Marler, 2020).
Field notes and interviews were analyzed through the grounded theory method (Charmaz, 2006;
Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Entering the field, I drew on the conceptual framework of digital inequality
for my sensitizing concepts (Charmaz, 2006), coding my data initially by digital motivations, access,
skills, uses, and outcomes (DiMaggio, Hargittai, Celeste, & Schafer, 2004; Van Deursen & Helsper,
2015). I also drew on social capital and support literatures, coding for instrumental, emotional, and
informational support; strong and weak ties; and bonding and bridging resources (Barrera, 1986;
Putnam, 2000). I adapted these existing codes to novel patterns as they emerged in the data. For ex-
ample, as I observed Vicki and Eric’s practices on Facebook, I began to code for “online-only ties”
and later “connective ambition” to account for social media interactions and motivations that did not
easily fit into existing conceptual schemes.
Findings
I examine how digital inequality operates on social platforms for a deeply excluded population
through the cases of five unstably housed adults who differently imagined, pursued, and realized the
material benefits of SNSs and crowdfunding. “Connective ambition” allows me to account for how
people with few offline resources invested hopes in online strangers as sources of support for rent
costs, and followed suit in their social media practices. The nature of overlapping offline and digital
inequalities becomes clear in examining those who chose not to pursue fundraising campaigns, even
when the “right” ties were available over social media. Finally, the case of a successful crowdfunding
campaign illustrates how much relative advantage is necessary to chart the narrow path around inter-
locking offline and digital barriers to benefit materially from the use of social platforms.
Connective ambition
Connective ambition describes the recurring notion among unstably housed adults in Waterside that
by striking up ties with strangers over SNSs they could make up for an absence of social support in
their offline lives. The idea that connections forged over social media platforms could translate into
rent money or a place to stay were in circulation on Facebook during the period of my research. In
2017, as my participants and I were adding each other as Facebook friends, an ad sponsored by
6 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 00 (2021) 1–19W. Marler Social Platforms and Survival Support
Facebook appeared in my Timeline. The ad featured two women, one White and one Black. “Meet
Rachel and Monique – strangers at first – until one needed a home after Hurricane Harvey and the
other reached out to help through Facebook.” A video narrated the connection struck up between the
two strangers through a public Facebook post and how the former invited the latter into her home af-
ter she was displaced by the natural disaster in 2017. Seen by over 4 million users, the company’s ad
extends the promise of Facebook from that of generally “making the world more open and connected”
(Hoffmann et al., 2018) to specifically connecting the unhoused with strangers willing to open their
homes to those in need.
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Connective ambition as idea
It became clear that among some of my participants in Chicago, the narrative of boundless, pro-social
connection had taken hold as a way of understanding Facebook as an alternative means of access to
social resources unavailable through traditional means such as family, friends, employment, or public
assistance. Eric’s case provides an example of the friending practices that follow from the optimism of
this connection narrative. “I love the Internet, I use it all the time,” Eric told me in our first interview
in 2016. “I have over 6,000 friends on Facebook alone . . . from all different cities, different countries.”
Without a high-school degree, Eric had trouble finding work over his adult life and had been home-
less for several years when I met him in Waterside. Eric turned to his Facebook account to seek out
connections with potentially sympathetic ties who might help him afford the cost of rent.
Eric had only met a small portion of his social media ties in person (“probably one in ten”) and
only 150 of the several thousand lived in Chicago, where Eric had rarely left in his life. Eric’s local ties
on Facebook included many other people living unstably in the neighborhood I knew from my field-
work. Aside from this low-resource group, another set were employees of nonprofit and social service
organizations with whom Eric had phone or in-person contact. The remainder of Eric’s connections
indicated that they lived abroad, according to my review of the profiles. Africa and Southeast Asia fea-
tured large in the locations of these connections. “If they send me a request, I’ll accept it,” Eric said
when I asked him about these online-only connections. “You never know who might help,” he added.
Despite Eric’s intentions to tap into support from a growing list of online strangers, over the course of
my fieldwork I was unable to verify with Eric any donations he had received from this globally spread
network of virtual strangers. One potential reason for this is that Eric did little to actually mobilize
resources over social media (see Correa, 2016), typically re-posting recipes and jokes and only on oc-
casion a news story about homelessness in Chicago. Instead, he continued to locate his material dona-
tions in more traditional form through nonprofit organizations in Chicago.
Connective ambition in practice
An optimism for the material potential of online-only connection also translated into action among
some of the unstably housed adults in Waterside. A Facebook user since the mid-2010s, Vicki had
heard of the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe in a local news report and decided to launch her
own campaign in the fall of 2017. Working from a public computer at a nonprofit in Waterside, Vicki
sat one day to upload an image of herself and a group of others without stable shelter in the neighbor-
hood. “IF ALL WE CAN GET IS ENOUGH MONEY TO PAY RENT FOR SOMEWHERE TO STAY
THIS WINTER THAT WOULD BE APPRECIATED,” Vicki wrote. She added that housing in
Waterside “coasted [costed] too much” and as winter approached, it was getting “quit [quite] cold
here in Chicago.” She set a goal of $19,000 to cover the cost of an apartment in Waterside for a year
for her and a few friends in the photo.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 00 (2021) 1–19 7Social Platforms and Survival Support W. Marler
Connective ambition passes from ideas into action when a lack of offline resources combines
with the connection narratives of social media (Hoffmann et al., 2018) to present platforms as an al-
ternative opportunity structure for accessing social and material support. The accumulation of on-
line-only connections presents itself as a lowest hanging fruit toward accessing material support in
this process. Indeed, social ties further up the socioeconomic ladder were the first offline deficit that
Vicki sought to make up for through online connection. Due to her life experiences, Vicki lacked the
well-resourced strong and weak ties that typically provide a baseline for a successful crowdfunding ef-
fort, which may later include contributions from strangers who come across the campaign online
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(Borst et al., 2018). Vicki had constantly traveled between unstable housing situations in various cities
over her adult life after leaving an abusive home after high school. Since moving to Chicago, Vicki
had formed close relationships primarily with others who were unstably housed (see Desmond, 2012)
or with social workers who offered assistance on aid applications but rarely lent the actual cash
needed to afford rent. Meanwhile, Vicki like others in my research waited in long queues to receive
housing support from the city.
The potential for digitally mediated social support appeared vast in comparison to Vicki’s offline
chances. Sitting with me at a computer at the nonprofit one day in early 2017, Vicki spoke of her mul-
tiplying connections. “All my friends, they are on here for a reason,” she told me, scrolling a list of
over 2,000 Facebook friends. By the end of my fieldwork in 2019, Vicki had accumulated nearly an-
other thousand Facebook friends. Vicki applied a light filter to the friend requests she sent and ac-
cepted, looking for accounts that were “work-at-home” entrepreneurs and “Christians” like herself
who exchanged business leads or spiritual support through posts and comments.
Having built out a friends list of thousands of online strangers who appeared similar or sympa-
thetic, Vicki sought to bend these ties against the second barrier to her fundraising effort: a lack of
funds to promote her campaign page through advertising on Facebook. The platform had promoted
its advertising services to Vicki via the Facebook page she had created to promote her crowdfunding
campaign. For Vicki, the platform’s suggestion that she should pay to spread word of her campaign
ran contrary to its core promise of free global connection. “They say [by paying for an ad], they can
present it to more people. But that’s weird,” Vicki commented, running the mouse over the advertis-
ing opportunity on the screen. “Because regular Facebook is presented to the whole world. But yet,
this here, they wanna get money off of you for it.”
Unable to afford paid advertising, Vicki leaned again on the mass of online-only ties she had ac-
cumulated as a workaround. "I’ve been thinking of a sneaky-clever way of getting [the campaign] out
there anyway,” she explained, scrolling her Facebook feed. “I find the only way I can really do that is,
I have to make friends with everybody that I want to send it to. I have to find 5,000 people that want
to join me as a friend. . . That’s the only sneaky way I can think to gather everybody.”
The promise of a global network of supportive strangers fizzled out almost as quickly as it started
for Vicki. A month after starting the campaign, Vicki and I stared at a banner on her GoFundMe
page, reading “$0 raised.” “It’s as if [the campaign] is completely invisible!” Vicki said. Reviewing
those who had engaged with the campaign, it was clear that Vicki had reached ties that, on the one
hand, were similar to her in socioeconomic status and housing condition and were thus unable to
support her campaign. Among followers of the campaign Facebook page, there were around a dozen
others like Vicki who were living without stable housing in Waterside and who hoped to benefit from
Vicki’s $19,000 campaign, appearing alongside Vicki in the photo she had uploaded to the campaign
page. The weakness of Vicki’s thousands of virtual ties was apparent from the failure of the campaign
to raise any money and made more clear from examples of the kinds of virtual ties Vicki had expected
to be supportive. One example of a “work-at-home” friend Vicki had accepted over Facebook was a
8 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 00 (2021) 1–19W. Marler Social Platforms and Survival Support
woman in the United Kindom who advertised her online business prominently on her account. Vicki
scrolled through direct messages from the woman with me that asked Vicki to participate in a
multilevel-marketing-style “business opportunity,” which Vicki briefly considered as a means of in-
come to afford rent, but never pursued (see Krige, 2012).
An unstably housed woman with few offline resources, Vicki made sense of Facebook’s narrative
of boundless, pro-social connection as a workaround to gaps in locating survival support through
more traditional means. The failure of Vicki’s campaign suggests that survival resources cannot be
manifested from the thin air of online-only connection. Indeed, online-only ties in Vicki’s friends list
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often appeared to be reaching out with their own interest in the potential to translate virtual ties into
an income.
Barriers to resourced ties
Not all people experiencing homelessness in Waterside honed their connective ambition toward the
ability to connect to online strangers. Briana and Leticia had a different sense of the connective power
of social media, one less tied to the desperate circumstances of marginalized individuals and thus
more likely to succeed according to what it known about how SNSs support social capital (Ellison,
Steinfield, & Lampe, 2011). Their belief in the potential of rekindling weak ties with old friends and
classmates over Facebook provides a counterpoint to Vicki and Eric’s expectations of new ties forged
online. In this way, the following cases test the proposition that a more capital-enhancing use of
SNSs—connecting with well-resourced, existing weak ties up the socioeconomic ladder —could pro-
vide a pathway for disadvantaged individuals to benefit from the networking opportunities of social
platforms.
Self-presentation concerns
Unlike Vicki, it was not from a lack of access to resourced ties that Briana was unable to find the sup-
port she required to get off the street. A Black woman in her early 50s who lived in a tent in a park in
Waterside for the first 2 years of my fieldwork, Briana possessed a store of what SNS researchers have
referred to as “maintained capital” (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2011) through her Facebook account.
These were connections with former high-school peers, including many who were well established in
the middle class. During the start of my fieldwork, Briana’s friends list of 350 including 34 who had
attended Briana’s high school on Chicago’s South Side.
Yet Briana’s Facebook posts rarely, if ever, reflected the severity of her material status. In 2018,
Briana posted a selfie to Facebook on her way to a part-time job as a parking attendant, wearing
makeup and a chic blouse. Briana received 74 “likes” and “loves” and compliments flowed in, includ-
ing from her former classmates who were middle-class professionals. One commenter wore a business
suit in her profile picture and reported a college degree and job in real estate on her profile. Another
reported a white-collar job and master’s degree in public administration.
I asked Briana why she did not reach out to her friends online for help, such as in a Facebook
post or crowdfunding campaign asking for donations to afford rent. “Myself, I have always been a
private person,” Briana said. Referring to becoming homeless in 2016 after losing her job, she
added:
When you think about social media, as it is now, things get misconstrued. You aren’t hearing
the person’s emotion or the sincereness behind [people’s words] when you’re reading the
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 00 (2021) 1–19 9Social Platforms and Survival Support W. Marler
text. . . So, when I thought about even telling people [I had become homeless]. . . I hadn’t
even posted on Facebook that I was laid off. I told a few of my friends. But I did not post it on
Facebook. . . It’s just something about me, that I wouldn’t do.
Briana compares her hesitations around sharing that she was homeless on social media to that of an-
other woman who was experiencing homelessness in Waterside, whom Briana was friends with on
Facebook.
Now my friend who was out on the streets, she is in a state where she is lonely. And, she is el-
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derly. And, she is fighting disabilities. . . She is very forthcoming on Facebook. She’s angry
and bitter about the state of affairs that have led her to where she is now. So, the family that
she has, is not trying to reach out and look out after her. . . So, she gets on Facebook and let’s
all her frustration and all her anger out on Facebook. Me, on the other hand [taking on the
cheery tone of her Facebook posts]: “Hey, it’s so and so’s birthday.” For me, it was just not
[something] to broadcast.
Despite her need for housing and the affordance of one-to-many communication, Briana continued
to prioritize personal privacy and a positive self-image over the networking potential of a social media
platform.
Overlapping inequalities
The potential for physical harm emerged as another barrier to reaching out for support over social
media among unstably housed adults in North Side Chicago. A Black woman in her mid-50s who
was living in subsidized housing during my fieldwork, Leticia became homeless in the mid-2000s
after falling behind on rent while managing chronic back pain. During that time, she was involved
in a physical altercation on the street with people she described as “gang bangers” in the West Side
neighborhood where she was raised. After spending time in prison for her role in the altercation,
Leticia become homeless and applied for temporary shelter on the North Side to avoid contact with
people who she felt wished her harm in her old neighborhood.
On the lookout for ways to supplement her earnings from temporary jobs, Leticia turned her at-
tention to her Facebook account, which she had opened after being released from prison. “It’s a free
way to find people, right?” Leticia asked, as we sat at a computer at the nonprofit. “Who knows, some-
one coulda stuck it rich, an old classmate! They could give me some mon-ay [money]!” Leticia had
graduated high school on the West Side and completed an additional year of community college.
Leticia wondered if her former classmates had fared better economically than she had, and whether
they could be a source of sympathy and monetary support. In imagining online connection as a way
to overcome a lack of existing offline resources, Leticia like Briana held ideas resembling the connec-
tive ambitions of Eric and Vicki, though in a form that better aligns with what SNS researchers expect
for benefitting from platform use. Like Briana’s maintained capital, and at odds with Vicki and Eric’s
targeting of online-only ties, Leticia had in mind a store of resourced weak ties to reconnect with in
the interest of finding support (see Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2011).
Despite having resourced ties in mind for fundraising, Leticia’s past experiences of violence while
living on the street made her feel unsafe in expanding her online presence. Leticia described to me the
“low profile” she kept on Facebook: She did not accept friend requests nor would she upload a per-
sonal photo or make any posts on the site. Leticia used Facebook to keep up with the activities of ex-
tended family and friends to the extent she could by navigating to the publicly visible portions of their
accounts. Leticia was concerned that adding connections or providing information about herself on
10 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 00 (2021) 1–19W. Marler Social Platforms and Survival Support
Facebook would allow her to be more easily located by people from previous street encounters who
she believed still wished her harm. “I don’t want my picture posted and I don’t wanna be active on
the Internet. That’s the only reason,” Leticia told me.
A lack of confidence in her digital skills prevented Leticia’s from better addressing her concerns
over being exposed to harmful ties on social media. One day while we were reviewing her privacy set-
tings, Leticia admitted to me that she did not know how to delete a Facebook friend, a lack of confi-
dence that led her to avoid friend requests altogether. Another sign of Leticia’s limited skills with
Facebook was that she presented her full legal name on her account, the only personal information
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she volunteered. This contrasted with Leticia’s preference to not let her name be known around the
nonprofit where I volunteered, where Leticia went only by her initials. Leticia explained that she used
her real name under the impression that it was “the law” to register under her real name on
Facebook, taking the terms of the site seriously rather than providing a pseudonym, as is common
practice among many users, including Vicki and Eric who held multiple accounts under different
spellings of their names. Leticia’s limited familiarity with Facebook thus led her to provide more in-
formation than she intended, increasing the risk of her exposure to physical harm, while preventing
her from managing her boundaries with others in a way that might allow her to use the site to pursue
material support.
Narrow paths to platform benefits
Connective ambition drives those with few offline social resources, like Eric and Vicki, toward the ac-
cumulation of virtual ties to no apparent material gain. Meanwhile, the privacy and safety concerns
heightened by homelessness discouraged support-seeking for Briana and Leticia, who did have access
over social media (whether latent or active) to resourced ties. In this sense, offline marginalization
contributes to less-capital-enhancing SNS uses for those lacking in offline social capital (e.g., by en-
couraging connection to online strangers) while raising the height of barriers for those who do possess
bridging resources (e.g., by . With the right social ties on hand, a strong digital skillset, and an avoid-
ance rather than embracing of connective ambitions on social media, however, the use of social plat-
forms for survival could yield success. Paul’s case illustrates the narrow path that marginalized people
must chart to dodge overlapping offline and digital inequalities and experience tangbile benefits from
platform use.
Skilled presentation and relative privilege
A White man in his mid-50s, Paul was raised in a middle-class suburb of Chicago and obtained a
master’s degree in information technology (IT) after college. After working for several decades as an
IT professional, Paul became homeless in 2016 when he was fired as part of a company downsizing.
Turning to alcohol to manage his stress, Paul struggled to apply for jobs in his field and turned to sell-
ing magazines on street corners for a temporary income. He moved into a shelter in Waterside and
started a crowdfunding campaign with the hopes of renting an apartment to provide stability prepare
for future interviews.
Eric and Vicki sought to make up for their lack of offline resources through virtual Facebook ties,
while Briana and Leticia debated, though ultimately avoided, seeking survival support through contact
with old friends over Facebook. Paul, meanwhile, limited his digital outreach to a crowdfunding cam-
paign through which he burnished his credentials as a deserving candidate of support. Paul also
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 00 (2021) 1–19 11Social Platforms and Survival Support W. Marler
targeted social ties he had met in person, unlike Eric and Vicki, sharing the link to his GoFundMe
page with a number of former friends and classmates through text and email rather than over
Facebook.
Popular narratives of the “deserving” poor in the U.S. center on the ability of disadvantaged indi-
viduals to prove their willingness to work (Katz, 1989). In his campaign pitch, Paul played up his pro-
fessional status and ongoing job search while emphasizing circumstances outside of his control that
led him to becoming homeless. “I lost my last job due to company downsizing (600 jobs specifically),”
Paul wrote on his campaign page. “You can find out more about me at my LinkedIn page,” he added,
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including a link to his account on the professional networking website, where he listed a string of pre-
vious jobs in IT.
Paul’s crowdfunding campaign succeeded in raising enough money for a few months’ rent and
did so through a combination of skillful self-presentation and contact with middle-class ties, through
text and email as well as over a crowdfunding platform. Paul raised $1,300 in his campaign over
months. Two of his former college classmates donated $500 each and additional smaller donations
came from people he had met since becoming homeless, whom he had advertised his GoFundMe
campaign to while selling magazines on street corners. Paul’s relative privilege and career experience
allowed him to communicate a deservingness for support with middle-class ties in a way that Vicki in
her campaign could not.
Exclusion despite relative privilege
Despite his relative success, Paul’s case exemplifies the way that homelessness as a condition works
against the ability to draw tangible benefits out of SNSs, even for the relatively privileged. Paul like
others imagined the expanded possibilities of Facebook, as a supplement to crowdfunding, for raising
money to get himself off the street. Yet, Paul had left his Facebook account idle several years ago after
being “bullied incessantly” over the platform by former friends. Paul allowed me to review his idle
Facebook account. In his last post, made 6 years earlier, Paul expressed a political opinion that re-
ceived several personal attacks in the form of comments from “so-called friends.”
Paul explained to me why becoming homeless had raised the liability of his having a Facebook
presence, particularly as a means of seeking out support. “There are people out there who would love
to hear that my life turned into the disaster it has in the last few years,” he explained “And it’s all I
can do to make sure that those people do not find out anything about me. That’s why I’ve been avoid-
ing the Facebook thing.” Rather than using Facebook to boost his crowdfunding effort by broadcast-
ing his situation to other middle-class ties, as Briana and Leticia had also considered, Paul avoided
using Facebook due to the reputational concerns he had over his former middle-class network learn-
ing that he was homeless.
Discussion
What happens when people lacking in access to basic needs such as stable housing turn to social me-
dia with hopes of finding support unavailable to them offline? By examining the cases of five unstably
housed adults in Chicago, this study has sought a better understanding of how social platforms are
understood and adapted as avenues for material support in the context of deep exclusion. The insights
offer new inroads for understanding the overlapping nature of offline and digital inequalities and the
role of platform narratives in shaping a digital habitus which reinforces exclusion for marginalized
users.
12 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 00 (2021) 1–19W. Marler Social Platforms and Survival Support
The first contribution of the study is to illustrate how digital and traditional inequalities overlap
in blocking access to the material benefits of social platforms. The usage gap question of why some
Internet users realize the tangbile benefits of digital participation more than others takes on immedi-
ate significance in the context of homelessness. Why did Vicki fail to raise funds for rent despite in-
tense circulation of her campaign on Facebook, while Briana and Leticia turned away from their
connective ambitions despite having supportive circles of well-resourced friends potentially available
on the platform, and Paul succeeded in crowdfunding despite avoiding a key platform for promotion,
Facebook, altogether?
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The answer requires understanding how different resources and barriers are arranged to block or
allow passage toward the benefits of platform use (see Table 2). For example, taking digital skills as an
example, the presence or absence of a given resource has different meaning depending on the addi-
tional inequalities that pile on for marginanlized individuals offline and on. Higher digital skills
helped account for fundraising success in Paul’s case. Yet Paul’s advanced skills did not allow him
greater participation on platforms, in general, as he had quit Facebook years earlier after being har-
assed for his politics on the platform, a concern of his which grew after he became homeless. On the
other hand, Leticia’s lower level of digital know-how does have the expected role of limiting her plat-
form participation, by making her less confident in managing social boundaries on Facebook and ren-
dering the platform moot for tapping into social support, piling on to her greater fear of online
exposure from experiences living on the street.
In this way, the pathways leading from digital resources (e.g., digital skills) toward platform bene-
fits (e.g., material support) cannot be understood without reference to a broader set of offline condi-
tions and statuses, even within a group of people who are unstably housed. Paul and Leticia’s cases
provide a comparison of unstably housed individuals with significantly different resource and status
backdrops. Paul is buttressed by his digital skills and recent white-collar employment, as well as by
relatively active, middle-class ties, in addition to being male in a digital environment, where women
often experience heightened harassment and abuse (Sobieraj, 2018). Leticia, meanwhile, is a Black
woman with limited secondary education, only blue-collar work experience, and a history of incarcer-
ation, who as a result maintains only faded connections to potentially resourced ties.
The more predicable story of digital inequality is Paul’s online fundraising success relative to
Leticia’s hesitations to ever pursue a campaign. In this case, offline privileges of income, education,
and gender are reproduced in the digital realm. What the findings of this study point to beyond the
traditional story of digital inequality is the way that offline and digital dimensions of inequality over-
lap in producing such an outcome. Namely, Leticia’s lack of digital skills limited her in two important
ways tied to her offline background and status. Leticia was limited in her ability to practically manage
an online fundraising campaign (the more typical story of lacking the skills needed for productive dig-
ital participation) but also keeping her from feeling safe in a networked social environment as a pre-
cursor to participation. The latter concern over online exposure resonates with women’s experiences
more generally of harrassment online (Sobieraj, 2018), but is heightened for Leticia, who is unstably
housed and has experienced physical harm while living on the street. A lack of physical safety and sta-
ble housing doubles the costs of lacking digital literacy for a multiply marginalized individual, ulti-
mately standing in Leticia’s way of a capital-enhancing use of the Internet, that is, mobilizing social
resources over an SNS. In this way, offline and online inequalities overlap in unique arrangements to
limit access to the social benefits of social platforms for the deeply excluded.
An additional contribution of the study is to show how, even among those who are relatively priv-
ileged within a marginalized group, the overlapping nature of inequalities tends to block the most
beneficial forms of participation. More specifically, had Paul not feared that he would be harassed on
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 00 (2021) 1–19 1314
Table 2 Pathways to Platform Outcomes: Barriers, Motivations, and Strategies
Namea Digital Online Exposure Connective Ties Imagined/ Channels of Support- Facebook Crowdfunding
Skillsb Concerns Ambition? Targeted for Seeking Friendsc Earnings
Support
Social Platforms and Survival Support
Vicki Low Low Strong Online strangers Facebook (intensive), 2,500 $0
GoFundMe
Eric Low Low Strong Online strangers Facebook (moderate) 2,050 (primary No campaign
account)
Leticia Low High (physical and Moderate Former high-school None 0 No campaign
reputational harm) peers (passive user)
Briana Moderate Moderate Weak/none Former high-school Facebook 500 No campaign
(reputational harm) peers (latent)
Paul High High (emotional and Weak/none Former high-school GoFundMe, 0 $1,300
reputational harm) peers, friends face-to-face and text (inactive acct)
message (intensive)
(Dash “-” represents nonuse of platform).
a
Pseudonyms provided. Listed in order of appearance.
b
Skill levels are assessed through observation over the course of fieldwork and are relative to other participants.
c
Counts are approximate to protect privacy.
W. Marler
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 00 (2021) 1–19
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Facebook as a result of broadcasting his status as homeless, he would have taken advantage of the
platform and his digital skills in an attempt to boost his crowdfunding earnings. Deep exclusion thus
finds ways of blocking access to the benefits of a digitally networked society even for the relatively
privileged among the socioeconomically disadvantaged.
The study also contributes to our understanding of how status-specific uses of social platforms
emerge out of contexts of disadvantage. Connective ambition adds to the literature on digital inequal-
ity by accounting for the shaping of a novel digital habitus among members of a marginalized com-
munity. Through connective ambition, masses of virtual strangers are imagined and pursued as
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alternatives to offline bases of survival support. The concept helps better explain why socioeconomic
marginalization may result in certain more intensive forms of digital participation rather than make
them less likely. In the cases of Vicki and Eric among the unstably housed adults I observed in
Chicago, this more intensive form of digital participation came in the form of adding thousands of
Facebook friends from “around the world” in the search of access to social resources. For Vicki, this
intensive form of digital participation included sharing a Facebook page she created with thousands
of virtual strangers as a means of mobilizing resources for her and others in similar economic need,
setting her apart from the trend connecting lower socioeconomic status to less mobilizing forms of
SNS use (Correa, 2016). Yet, in connecting users primarily to others in need or who are seeking to
profit from other strangers online, connective ambitions such as Vicki’s reify rather than transform
the limited access to social resources of an already excluded individual (DiMaggio & Garip, 2012). In
this way, the digital habitus (Ignatow & Robinson, 2017) of connective ambition accords with
Bourdieu’s original formulation of habitus, as a generally status-reinforcing process (Wacquant,
2005). Connective ambition as a means of attempting to circumvent exclusion through social plat-
form use does not so much enhance digital capital (Ragnedda, 2018) as provide the illusion of it.
Vicki and Eric appear to be motivated to seek out the support of virtual strangers by an inability
to imagine where they could find support from people they already knew. Here, the relative differen-
ces in privilege even within contexts of exclusion are once more notable. Paul and Briana, by compari-
son, both had active ties to the middle-class. Paul and Briana could imagine old high-school friends
as sources of support and, in Paul’s case, tap into them for material support. Without similar ties of
potential support, Vicki and Eric were left to imagine other kinds of supportive ties, that of online
strangers. Yet neither experienced any material gain from their investments in the idea of a global
mass of virtual strangers ready to offer a helping hand. Instead, connective ambitions fizzled out as an
artifact of outsized expectations in the promise of virtual-only connection.
Here, platform discourses might be said to have a direct role in shaping a digital habitus that rein-
forces marginalization. I have referred to the literature (Hoffmann et al., 2018) describing the general
discourse of pro-social connection and an ad from Facebook passing through my own feed during
this time. The understandings that Vicki, Eric, and Leticia had of Facebook (“friends from all around
the world!,” “you never know who might help,” “a free place to find people”) appear to be shaped in
this mold. As I argue, this form of advertisement takes hold uniquely in the context of deep exclusion
to inform digital habits that are unlikely to offer material benefit. Instead, through indiscriminate
friending and other status-specific attempts to overcome offline barriers, those who are already vul-
nerable may expose themselves to an additional range of privacy and exposure harms online, which
future research might explore.
Finally, a line of ethnographic and qualitative research examines the outsized digital expectations
fostered in various geographies and communities of need, in a kind of emerging canon that has been
largely unarticulated. These include Burrell’s (2012) work on youth and Internet cafes in Ghana,
Duffy’s (2017) research on “hope labor” and social media influencers (in a middle-class context);
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 00 (2021) 1–19 15You can also read
