Panhandling and the plight of the needy were hot media issues during the 1980s, a decade that produced both the Reagan presidency and "We Are The World." The debate about whether and how to help the needy was framed by the classic liberal and conservative outlooks: either panhandlers are helpless victims in need of assistance, or they are morally deficient and lacking traditional work values.
This simplistic exchange did little to educate the public then, and lacked enough complexity or vital ideas to stay in media focus into the 1990s. Much has changed in American culture from the last decade to this one. What hasn't changed is that people continue to be in need, and to beg on the streets for money.
To bring panhandlers into the public eye requires a fresher, more comprehensive take on the issues surrounding panhandling. It requires a method that uses satire to slip past intellectual defense mechanisms and stereotypes of poverty, a method that gives us better tools (more data!) to understand our own perceptions of the needy, the worthy, and ourselves.
NeedCom is a Web site that combines two classic American capitalist activities: panhandling and market research. Panhandling is an economic enterprise of individuals in need. It occurs outside the bounds of traditional business, and often the law. Market research is a tool large corporations use to quantify the impulses and personalities of the consumers they target.
I started this project with a theory: When panhandlers ask people for money, they are involved, consciously or unconsciously, in a form of market research. This theory is literalized in the Panhandler Effectiveness Survey. I began NeedCom by interviewing and photographing panhandlers in New York City (one bitterly cold January week), asking them questions about how much they earned, what they thought about their jobs, how much strategy they had about who and how they asked for change. I gave each of them a photocopied sheet of instructions on how to view the final posted project at free Internet terminals at the New York Public Library. I paid them twenty dollars for an interview I anticipated taking about 20 minutes.
Many of the panhandlers I interviewed were excited to talk about what they did: regading it as a job, rather than a source of shame. I learned that most of the panhandlers' pitches were products more of necessity or habit or beliefs about poverty than tested strategy. Despite the clinical, factual questions I asked, the panhandlers often wanted to tell me about emotional and philosophical factors of their jobs. Most of the eleven interviews I conducted were voluntarily extended over an hour, because there were so many subtleties to clarify.
By not editing the interviews into pithy sound bites, by posting them wholesale for you to wander through topically and respond to in the Focus Group, I allow you to determine for yourself whether my theory is true. Confirm or disprove your own assumptions about panhandlers, and follow your interests and curiosities.
NeedCom is also about the other side of the coin, the panhandling customer: what strategies do customers form in response to panhandlers and their "sales pitches"? The Customer Focus Boards and QuickPolls are designed to essentialize ways people respond to panhandlers, breaking down their decisions just as real marketing research breaks down a consumer's responses to a product. You may find these questions frustrating, and I hope you retaliate by discussing the issues in more depth.
A relationship exists between panhandlers and the people they ask. That relationship and the perceptions of poverty it's based on are what NeedCom seeks to uncover: what happens to expressions of need in a culture which is increasingly mediated by marketing? How has the language of advertising influenced age-old moral questions like "Am I my brother's keeper?" How do we relate to other human beings in need in a culture where consumption is the highest priority?
The goal of NeedCom is not to encourage or discourage you to give to panhandlers more. Instead it is to provide you with data and context to examine your own perceptions of panhandling and how these perceptions form responses to panhandlers.
- Cathy Davies and Drew Gorry, 1999.
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