Abstract
The Digital Street is a rich urban ethnography on youth culture in Harlem. It is based on 5 years of immersion in the field as part of a local community project for the prevention of street violence among rivalling groups of youth. It thus capitalizes on the active participation of the researcher as outreach worker, longitudinally engaged in building rapport with a group of about 25 core teenage-participants and their vast local network of peers. The field sites for this work span physical spaces as well as communication on social media, together forming an exemplary multi-sited ethnography that systematically links the domains of online and offline life and offers deep analytical insights into teen life today in a local context shaped by gang violence, poverty and an ongoing struggle for social reputation and security.
Lane, a sociologist grounded in classic urban ethnography, situates the book at the intersection of urban studies and communication research, arguing that studying communication patterns of one-to-one and many-to-many on social media, and using participants’ social media content as elicitation tools when talking to them, is crucial for gaining a comprehensive understanding of how teens connect, relate and form social identities. As the author asserts, ‘The boundaries of urban community are different with digital communication’ (p. 3). As such, the book forcefully testifies to the valuable insights that media and communication research can bring to adjacent fields.
The central argument of the book is that developments in digital media have fundamentally altered street life along two trajectories: the physical and the digital street. Lane shows how urban life is filtered through digital technologies, photo-sharing practices, means of connecting and so forth, and the crossovers between these two stages of street life interlace new and old forms of sociality. The consequences for everyday life as such are complicated, both positive and negative – the street code affects boys and girls differently with regards to reputation management, safety and personal identity.
Lane’s analyses of urban teen life in Harlem are organized through three interrelated lenses. In chapters two and three, we follow the kids themselves as they traverse social media to forge new relationships, one-on-one, and new forms of courtship that mitigate some of the anxieties associated with making physical contact–a process more tightly bound to one’s place in specific social groups and hierarchies. But fake profiles, created by a range of actors (including youth, adults from the neighbourhood and police investigators), pressures on girls to undress for likes and so on complicate street life and insert new gendered power relations. Lane wants us to consider the possibility that girls, not boys, may control the street. Chapter 3 deals with code switching, and pursues an analysis of the Internet as an opening performative space for identity that contradicts, to some extent, identity management in the physical street. At the heart of Lane’s discussion is the notion of context collapse, and the youth’s practices of harnessing the publicity of social media for reputation management.
Chapter 4 views the digital street through the lens of the Pastor in charge of the community outreach project of which Lane was a part. Understanding the necessity of meeting the kids in their own arenas (the street and social media), the Pastor had built an expanded, networked communication infrastructure to allow for the backchannel flow of information from teens, a unique point of access to anticipate and mobilize community members against street violence. In chapter 5, finally, the lens turns onto the police and prosecutive work enabled as surveillance, databasing and investigations street crime leverage of social media networks and content. In line with the other analyses, Lane shows how the increased use of social media forensics ultimately changes interpersonal life, especially boy-girl-relations, in the physical street.
In addition to the richly nuanced, sometimes mind-blowing analyses, Lane offers an appendix of urban ethnography to spark methodological developments and reflections on how digital data may be used in urban ethnographic work. Together, this makes the book a highly recommended reading.