For decades urban ethnographers have studied neighborhoods by being out on the street and getting to know residents personally. But this is no longer enough to understand young people today. In his new book The Digital Street, Jeffrey Lane needed to be connected to teenagers in person and online to understand how they experienced their neighborhood. By becoming an outreach worker in Harlem and developing relationships with teenagers and the adults in their lives, he found that street life had essentially split along the physical street and digital street. Online, residents created a staging area to perform street life for each other, creating new forms of engagement in the process. The Digital Street demonstrates that many of the risks and opportunities we associate with poor urban neighborhoods are mediated through the use of popular technologies like Facebook and Instagram. This first digital urban ethnography shows how youth, neighborhood adults, and the police interact online and illustrates how the digital life of a neighborhood shapes the lives of black teenagers in Harlem.

For more information:
Oxford University Press (https://global.oup.com/academic/produ...)
Jeffrey Lane, Ph.D. (https://comminfo.rutgers.edu/lane-jef...)
@TheDigitalStreet (  / thedigitalstre1  )

Related publications:

Lane, J. (2018). The digital street. New York, Oxford University Press.
https://global.oup.com/academic/produ...

Lane, J., Ramirez, F.A., & Pearce, K.E. (2018). Guilty by visible association: Socially mediated visibility in gang prosecutions. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, first published online before print October 22, 2018.
https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/advance...

Lane, J. (2018). Rethinking the brand–community relationship: Wearing a biggie in Harlem. Journal of Consumer Culture, published online before print May 11, 2018.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/1...

Lane, J. (2016). The Digital Street: An Ethnographic Study of Networked Street Life in Harlem. American Behavioral Scientist, 60(1), 43-58.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/1...

Patton, D.U., Lane, J., Leonard, P., MacBeth, J., & Smith-Lee, J.R. (2016). Gang violence on the digital street: A case study of a Southside Chicago gang member’s communication on Twitter. New Media & Society, 1–19.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.11...