Over 50% of people in poverty in the United States no longer have a landline telephone, and this same population is more likely to have a no-contract cell phone plan requiring the continuous purchase of minutes. As a result, the poor may increasingly experience short-term phonelessness, which may disrupt access to healthcare and other services. To explore this we conducted 37 client interviews and 7 staff interviews at two free health clinics. Cell phone disconnection was a regular occurrence that delayed access to care and threatened client privacy. Temporary disconnection also contributed to lost employment, lost welfare benefits, and strains on social support networks—all of which are critical for optimizing health. Results are interpreted through a lens of technology maintenance, which argues that the poor will struggle to maintain digital access after ownership and public availability are realized. The potential worsening of health inequalities and related policy implications are discussed.

Social media use by health practitioners helps articulate a subculture-centered approach to public health communication. This article explores public health practitioners’ communication strategies with one subculture: young (18- to 29-year-old) men who have sex with men (MSM). Interviews with staff at a public health clinic reveal the use of a variety of social media systems to engage potential MSM clients (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Grindr, and Google+). Public health communicators’ social media use reflected the esthetic, behavioral, and media preferences of a high-risk target group and the ethical risks associated with publicly viewable communication. Social media became a platform for integrated multi-channel communication that comprised both top-down (i.e. institution centric) and bottom-up (i.e. subculture centric) communication flows that work together in a complementary fashion. Ultimately, subculture-centered social media use in this setting helps minimize cultural barriers between members of a public health subculture and the institutions that provide critical care.

The recent proliferation and impact of protest events in the Middle East, northern Africa, and the development of a worldwide Occupy Wall Street movement have ignited inquiry into the people, social structures and technologies that have helped give these social movements form. Three cases are described here which add to this discussion and lead to a pruning of the analytical landscape in this subject area. By looking to the use of Twitter as a tool for political protest in Iran in 2009, Moldova in 2009 and the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh in 2009, the complexity of the intertwined social and technological strands that have given rise to these new political protests is acknowledged. By realizing that this distinction is salient yet fuzzy, it becomes possible to make new observations, ask new questions and begin to understand the nature of recent political tussles and the communication tools used in them. For instance, this article posits that by seeing the particular use of a new communication tool – a socio-technical assemblage – as an artifact, analysts can learn something new about the motivations of those sitting at the negotiating table.

Interviews with northern Indiana Amish business owners reveal a tendency to create complex technological workarounds that allow them to abide by shared religious values while remaining competitive in the marketplace. These observations support theoretical approaches to understanding Amish technology use that view technology use as socially contextualized, dynamic and contested. It draws on literature from science and technology studies which views technology as an artifact that is socially constructed. The participants in this study report struggling to manage tensions between maintaining economic stability and traditional family, community, and religious values when deciding whether or not to adopt new technologies. These Amish entrepreneurs feel technology use must be possible but should also be complicated in today's world. Two categories of workarounds emerge from the analysis of interviews: limitations on use and use via a trusted non-Amish person. These two categories illustrate interactions of economic forces, religious values, and professional tradition. In this way, technology adoption is seen as situated in a particular social context and functions as a signal of one's "Amishness" or association to an Amish identity.

This paper explores the ethnographic methods used to study information communication technology (ICT) non-use among a group of ardent non-users, the Old Order Amish. During a multi-year investigation in two Amish settlements, three specific strategies proved essential to gaining access to members of the target population and acquiring relevant and meaningful data for analysis: 1) engaging a principal informant, 2) privileging the body as a communication medium, and 3) developing new personal connections through existing personal connections. By employing these techniques, barriers to access were productively mitigated. The data collected using these techniques yielded rich insights about Amish ICT use, and non-use and what those variable modalities meant for the perceived empowerment of Amish communities in an increasingly high-tech and globally networked world. This study documents a set of techniques, which have been successful in collecting rich ethnographic data to describe Amish ICT use as inherently situated in a complex ecology of socio-technical life. Additionally, it presents a toolkit for studying ICT use and non-use among the Amish, as such toolkits have not been described in previous research. The application of these techniques for researching ICT non-use in other contexts is also discussed.