Producing Legal Subjectives Through Online Media
(2013) in a. Poletti & J. Rak (Eds.) Identity Technologies: Producing Online Selves, University of Wisconsin Press.
10 Pages Posted: 20 Aug 2014 Last revised: 1 Oct 2014
Date Written: June 18, 2013
Abstract
Homeless Nation (HN) is a Montreal-based non-profit organization dedicated to "democratizing technology" throughout Quebec and elsewhere in Canada. Its primary vehicle for so doing is a website which has been designed "for and by the street community," namely people living on or from the street. In step with new user-friendly media (file-sharing, portable cinematographic equipment, camera-ready phones, and new exposition venues such as YouTube), between 2003 and 2009, HN provided access to interactive communication technologies (e-mail, blogging) and training in new media technologies (digital cameras, sound equipment and editing software) to its members. I argue that HN’s richness lies less in its capacity for generating broad scale social transformation, but in the more mundane and tacit ways it reflects, generates and embodies what I call "street law" (the governance of and by people who are street-involved). I argue that Homeless Nation generates more intuitive or implicit street law by helping constitute at least three kinds of subjectivities. First, street-involved people are archivists documenting the street law that already exists as it is framed and communicated by the people most concerned with it. Second, street-involved people are artists, generating alternative visions of street law that disrupt more official and, often externally imposed, understandings of law. Third, street-involved people are mediators that constitute norms by furthering conditions of interactions among multiple street users.
Keywords: new media and communications technologies, homelessness, law and poverty
JEL Classification: I3, K00
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation