ABSTRACT
The picture in the May 30, 2009 online edition of the Wall Street Journal was a curious one. In it, a black man wearing baggy, worn pants and an untrimmed beard is sitting in what looks to be a bus terminal, a sleek laptop perched on his lap. While he concentrates on the computer screen, a man sleeps next to him on the wooden bench. We do not see the sleeping man’s face; it is buried underneath a dirty coat and sandwiched between two trash bags. It turns out that the terminal is San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal and the men are two members of the city’s homeless community. Although he is homeless, the man featured
with the laptop has accounts on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. He also runs an Internet forum on Yahoo! and communicates regularly with family and friends by email. Even on the streets, the accompanying article proclaims, “the homeless stay wired” (Dvorak 2009).
