Digital Arrogance
by Miki Saxon
The Twitterverse and blogsphere are raging pro and con over the hiring of homeless people to promote mobile wi-fi devices at the South by Southwest conference calling it ‘exploitation’.
It matters not that Mitchell Gibbs, director of development at the Front Steps homeless shelter and involved in setting up the program, believes it has inspired an “entrepreneurial spirit” among its homeless participants, “It’s an employment opportunity, regardless of who is offering it.”
And homeless participant Clarence Jones must be wrong when he says, “Everyone thinks I’m getting the rough end of the stick, but I don’t feel that. I love talking to people and it’s a job. An honest day of work and pay.”
Obviously the pundits know more; they’ve probably spent more time working hands on with the homeless than Gibbs and studied homelessness more than Jones.
These days arrogance knows no bounds and this is a great example of that.
I don’t see this as any different than the human sign holders, many of whom are also homeless, that you see at major intersections promoting everything from mattress sales to cell phones to pizza.
Of course, the products they promote don’t infringe the promised land of tech, so nobody cares.
It’s likely that nobody would care if they hired the homeless as hotspots in other cities or even in Austin when SXSW wasn’t on.
I agree with Adam Hanft, who said that even if the effort was well intended, it seemed to turn a blind eye to that disconnect. “There is already a sense that the Internet community has become so absurdly self-involved that they don’t think there’s any world outside of theirs.”
Talking abut disconnect, perhaps the Internet community is catching up with the financial community.
Can you imagine the backlash if the homeless were hired as sign holders for banks anywhere?
Flickr image credit: Brett Jordan
