The issue of Homelessness through the Internet Essay

The internet exists as a tool to facilitate the spread of information and ideas and as such also serves well as a tool to spread empathy and knowledge. To empathize with someone, you must first be able to address that they are struggling or that they need your help. The homeless of California are a group that are not presented in a very kind way on TV or normal information outlets. However, the internet helps to spread information on how to help these people, provides information to these people to get them help, and encourages not just the general population but also the lawmaking bodies of California and the United States to take action.
The homeless of Southern California and LA. are often presented as a nuisance problem. Either they are shown to be an aftereffect of some political party's inability to do their job or as some negative entity that must be dealt with, similar to smog. However, the picture that the news portrays is one without color, it is a presentation often of numbers and statistics sometimes adjoined with pictures of trash and clutter. However, the internet presents a much more humane and just picture of what it is to be homeless and the kinds of homeless there are. There are homeless children who are currently staying in homes, there are teens out there who move from place to place who are homeless and there are parents and grandparents in similar situations all are homeless. The way the news portrays the homeless makes it irrelevant that these people are children or are unemployed or have a family. The statistical approach to homelessness is one that is truly unempathetic and inhuman while as organizations and news outlets on the internet take a different approach.
The news and information outlets on the internet portray the homeless as they rightfully are human. Perhaps the best example would be Invisible People, a site that dedicates itself to telling the stories of the homeless. This site was started when the founder Mark Horvath witnesses a homeless man who honestly thought he was invisible. Horvath went to meet the man, but what he witnessed was an empathetic act that would shape his professional life for the foreseeable future. He saw a child hand the invisible man a Christian pamphlet and the man was shocked that she could see him. Noting the treatment of these people "It isn't hard to comprehend this man's slow spiral into invisibility. Once on the street, people started to walk past him, ignoring him as if he didn't exist much like they do a piece of trash on the sidewalk"(Horvath). This excerpt is from his website where he documents the lives of the homeless and the stories they have to tell. It aims to help people connect to the homeless in the privacy and safety of their homes, where they may be more comfortable to learn about something that from a young age they are taught to look away from.