Accountability, Digital infrastructures and Urban mobilities

1 Accountability, Digital infrastructures and Urban mobilities 17 February, The Anatomy of Accountability, University of Sydney Justine Humphry Introduction I’m going to use today’s talk as a way to tease apart how access to and use of digital media is connected to demands of accountability by the state on recipients of income benefits and other welfare services. I understand accountability as a mechanism of discipline, in the sense developed by Foucault in his later work on governmentality, in which a state service, act or ‘benefit’ is tied to an obligation by individual subjects to account for and discipline their actions in a way that makes them more governable and self-governing. I’m interested in surfacing how accountability to the state is increasingly carried out in and through online systems and digital media, how new connectivity and compliance requirements add to the burdens of people facing extreme and usually various forms of hardship. I’m going to highlight some of the strategies that are used to carry out ‘accountability’ with reference to my research on homelessness and digital connectivity, and also point to the social media response to the Centrelink automated data matching system, as an example of how the meanings and mechanisms of ‘accountability’ are exposed and repurposed through social media. Essential communication I carried out research on the access and use of mobiles and the internet by people experiencing homelessness in 2014 for the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network. The study involved surveying and interviewing 100 homeless adults, families and young people experiencing homelessness. Since then I’ve carried out further participatory research on youth homelessness and urban digital connectivity for the Young and Well CRC. Both of these studies confirmed that a mobile phone with internet access is essential in times of homelessness, not only for maintaining social ties, but for surviving in situations of heightened physical risk, when essential communication takes precedence over other activities. We know for example that the readiness-at-hand of a mobile means that a person in a situation of risk can contact emergency services and have easier access to information, services, employment and housing opportunities. As one young woman explained to me, when you’re homeless, having access to a mobile can literally mean the difference between having a bed in a refuge and sleeping on the street (Humphry 2014). The mobile also plays an important, though under-estimated role, in supporting listening to music, movie watching and reading. These everyday activities provide essential comfort and connection in times of homelessness. In a study in the UK, one young participant said of playing online games, “I use it to help myself not think about my situation” (p. 4) and, “I love music. You don’t think about the shit in your life when you have music. It helps you stay calm” (Lemos and Frankenburg 2015, pg. 40). 2 The flip side to these benefits of digital connectivity is that mobile internet access has now become a ‘norm’ and it’s expected ‘by default’. This applies not only to everyday social interactions; the shift online of key government services means that homeless young people are heavily dependent on a mobile to gain access to services and fulfil a range of obligations of accountability including regular contact with caseworkers, income reporting and employment seeking requirements. The entanglement of everyday uses with demands of accountability is illustrated in this quote by Melinda who talks about the different mobile apps she uses on her smartphones. The main things are the school stuff, my banking, job searches. I’ve got my Centrelink on there. I’ve got the deals, a lot of shopping deals, OurDeal, CatchofTheDay, Groupon, so if I can always buy something cheaper from somewhere else I’ll do that… When we’re talking about essential communication then, it’s important to understand that there are different forces behind what makes a form and mode of communication essential, for whom it is essential and in what context. For people experiencing homelessness, the essential nature of mobile internet is intimately bound up in digital systems of accountability. Accountability as a form of discipline The shift of many key government services online such as Medicare and Centrelink have created new expectations of contact and connectivity. These are pushed by demands of regular contact and reporting, the need to record information and respond to it, in order to access and be eligible for assistance. The South Australian Council for Social Service (SACOSS) has made similar observations, finding in a study carried out for ACCAN, that “people are increasingly being forced by technology and government services to engage essential services online and via the telephone.” (cited in Kemp 2017). Just a few examples of these accountability requirements include the need to supply a mobile number to register for housing assistance, to submit employment seeking records to Centrelink, to take calls and respond to call backs from case workers and other support providers, and in the case of the Centrelink automated compliance system (which I’ll talk more about shortly) to be able to receive an SMS, or a physical address, to which automatically generated debt letters can be sent, without which debt collection processes are automatically triggered. For people experiencing homelessness, the heavy reliance on mobile access is compounded by the high level of interaction of people experiencing homelessness with government services and agencies (Baldry et al., 2012), much of which takes place by phone. While government agencies rationalise the shift to online servicing in terms of increased efficiencies and being able to reach out to more customers, the obligation on service recipients to be contactable and accountable increases the cost of contact, which becomes an onerous burden in their lives. This table shows the monthly costs of a mobile as proportion of income (based on the monthly costs reported by participants in my study for ACCAN). For a person on youth 3 allowance, the proportion ranged from 6.4 to 8.7% of their monthly income. For someone on Newstart it was 4.8 to 6.5%. This compares to 1.4% spent by someone on an average monthly salary. More recently SACOSS found that two thirds of low income Australians rate telecommunications in the top five items of their household budget. The cost of mobile voice and data charging schemes is not only a barrier to access, it can also increase the risk of debt and this is directly tied to the need to account. In one instance, a young woman living in a refuge without a pay phone had signed up to a mobile phone contract to meet Centrelink reporting requirements because her pre-paid mobile service kept running out of credit while on hold, only to end up in serious financial difficulty at the end of the billing cycle when she exceeded the cap on her mobile plan. Connectivity solutions and programs to subsidise and supplement the cost of communication can help to ameliorate much of this additional burden of cost that comes with the digitisation of systems of accountability. Last year, in a follow on project to respond to some of the key findings, I worked with homeless young people and a participatory designer to develop new digital connectivity solutions. However, as Virginia Eubanks has argued, it’s important to understand that simply having access does not change the relation that some people have with technology. “Some may ''have'' access to the technology but for certain reasons experience the requirements of the relation as an onerous discipline rather than as just another cool download.” We can see this very clearly in the way that many of the strategies that people who are homeless use to negotiate the connectivity barriers are fundamentally bound up in obligations of accountability to the very services that might be able to assist them to move on from homelessness. There is a kind of ‘impossible bind’ that arises from this disciplinary regime. Requirements to be accountable produce new costs and barriers, and these in turn produce new imperatives of movement, mobility that is enforced rather than chosen, and which can perpetuate homelessness. Looking for ‘wifi’: urban mobility Homeless young people spend a large portion of their time wandering the streets, looking for free Wi-Fi. George, a young man from western Sydney who also attended the Making Connections workshop explained it like this: Pretty much like everyone else, just walking around endlessly just trying to find a simple connection…I’m walking around and I just have my Wi-Fi open checking, trying what crops up on the page, trying to find something that works, usually you can’t even find anything anywhere it’s pretty hard. George’s account of wandering the city looking for Wi-Fi captures an experience that is a big part of young people’s everyday experience of homelessness. It might sound all too familiar to many of us but… For people who are homeless, the time and effort spent to secure a digital connection disproportionately structures their daily lives and prospects, time and energy that might otherwise be directed to getting the support needed to move out of homelessness. 4 You might have read about the ‘flâneur’, a figure featured in Walter Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire and in The Arcades Project. The flâneur is the modern urban citizen who strolls the passages and arcades of Paris in the nineteenth century, visually taking in the capital’s commodities and delights. In contrast, the ‘wireless wanderer’ (of the twenty-first century) purposefully searches for a means to secure affordable digital access and find a safe place to settle. Digital connectivity barriers induce a state of wandering, shaping movement and its meanings. Far from being an experience of inclusion and enjoyment of the city’s spaces and times, wireless wandering is an experience of exclusion, shaped by the availability and location of free internet and strict limits on the ability to stop and settle. Sociologist Emma Jackson, who carried out research on homeless young people in London, explains the imperative of movement which is part of the condition of homelessness as being ‘fixed in mobility’: where the physical and political structure of the city imposes movement to access the resources necessary to survive. Comparing homeless young people’s mobility to her own as a cosmopolitan academic, she points out that “our mobilities are shaped by different forces and different kinds of choices about where we can go.” Meeting the cost of service contact and accountability requirements are some of the forces that shape homeless young people’s urban mobilities, and perpetuate homelessness. Practices like ‘looking for wifi’ are one of a variety of tools and techniques used by people who are homeless to maintain connectivity and fulfil obligations of accountability but there are many others. While many of these practices are innovative, they can also lead to interrupted connectivity, which can in turn impede service access. They induce a need to move to reconnect, reinforcing the condition of being ‘fixed in mobility’. Exposing and resisting the automation of accountability Having mobile access would not have prevented being caught up in Centrelink’s automated compliance system. Nevertheless, it would have been essential (though costly) for responding to it, whether through calls to Centrelink to seek clarification, for addressing payment interruptions or for protesting with others on any one of a number of social media platforms. The Centrelink automated data matching system was introduced in July last year but it didn’t attract much media attention until just before Christmas when it moved into full implementation and generated tens of thousands of debt letters to income recipients around the country. Some of the changes that garnered the most complaints, were around decisionmaking processes – unfortunately these have been framed in the media as a case of human versus machine, a popular cultural trope – but which can otherwise be understood as the removal of key points in the compliance process that prior to automation may have provided opportunities to identify errors – such as incorrectly issued debt claims. One of the most striking aspects of the Centrelink automated debt event was the way in which the system’s accountability was challenged and repurposed through social media. I followed the response on twitter and collected tweet data for a week from 2nd January through to the 9th. Over this period I was able to scrape 40979 tweets which mentioned the hashtags #Centrelinkfail and #Notmydebt. The sheer volume of twitter interactions and size of the conversation was notable in itself (but requires further study to properly understand) but I 5 was also struck by the use of the hastags which re-articulated the nature of the problem to that of a system failure and failure of government accountability. Conclusion Thinking about ‘accountability’ in relation to what makes a media form and mode of access ‘essential’ and its connection to urban mobilities raises a number of issues and insights for understanding the production of marginalisation. First of all, it contributes to the project well underway to go beyond distributive justice, the idea that digital barriers can be overcome by providing the technological means. It points the need to expose the mechanisms and requirements of accountability built into government services, especially as these are automated - a new phase of service digitisation – and which in turn, creates the need for new connectivity and compliance requirements. It raises questions around the design, placement and governance of digital infrastructures and how these are connected to differential urban mobilities, where for people who are homeless and other low income groups, mobility is a result of unaffordable mobile internet access and the lack of alternatives. It raises questions around the potential for social media platforms, to provide a space for challenging and resisting strategies of accountability by the state, for example, through online automated debt systems. However, its important to bear in mind that these embed their own logics and obligations of accountability – to the platform, and to the uncountable and unaccountable imagined audiences that use them. References Baldry,E., Dowse, L., McCausland, R. and Clarence, M. (2012). Lifecourse institutional costs of homelessness for vulnerable groups. Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. Eubanks, V. (2012). Digital dead end: Fighting for social justice in the information age. MIT Press. Humphry, J. (2014). Homeless and Connected: Mobile phones and the Internet in the lives of homeless Australians. ACCAN, Australia. Humphry, J. and Pihl, K. (2016). Making Connections: young people, homelessness and digital access in the city, Young and Well CRC and Western Sydney University, Australia. Jackson, E. (2015). Young Homeless People and Urban Space: Fixed in Mobility. Routledge. Lemos, G & Frankenburg, S 2015, Trends and Friends: access, use and benefits of digital technology for homeless and ex-homeless people, Lemos&Crane, viewed May 2016, https://www.lemosandcrane.co.uk/lemos&crane/index.php?id=235023. Kemp, M. (2017) ‘High phone and internet bills punishing South Australia’s working poor, welfare groups warn’, The Advertiser, 7 February, accessed on 16 February: http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/high-phone-and-internet-billspunishing-south-australias-working-poor-welfare-groups-warn/newsstory/72b3dd1730994ef5bd336d648ac90d6b