Event

This talk introduces the digital street, the mediated communication that structures street life. Based on the networked lives of teenagers and adults in Harlem, I describe some of the features and conditions of the digital street. My objective is to approach the street as the community itself does--through layers of digital information and interaction as well as through observations and encounters in person. Compared to earlier generations, today’s inner-city teens experience their neighborhoods differently because they are linked to each other online and are around one another—and the adults looking for them—at different and shifting digital and physical proximities. I elaborate on key transformations in the social life of the street, treating mediated communication as both a vector of neighborhood change and as an ethnographic lens.

Jeffrey Lane is an urban ethnographer who writes about the ways in which mediated communication and community come together in the life of the inner city. His research integrates face-to-face and digital fieldwork to understand how interpersonal relations and ties between people and institutions unfold over time. The Digital Street is the title and subject of his forthcoming book with Oxford University Press on the networked communication that brokers street life. The project draws on nearly five years of ethnographic research on- and offline in Harlem with a set of teenagers and the adults concerned about them. Professor Lane previously wrote a book called Under the Boards (University of Nebraska Press) on the production of race, masculinity, and popular culture in the basketball industry. Before joining the faculty at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, he received his PhD in Sociology from Princeton University and was a fellow of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Professor Lane, whose research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, is currently a Junior Fellow of the Yale Urban Ethnography Project. This fall at Rutgers, he teaches Mediated Communication in Society.