The Digital Street

Abstract

This dissertation sets out to show what street life is like for teenagers in Harlem who stand at the forefront of mobile and social media. Through various roles in the community, I describe how the social life of the street flows in person and online. Networked media about people and events on the street reconfigures face-to-face interactions, and vice versa. This digital overlay--the digital street--informs rivalries and resolutions, scholastic ambitions, and the moral decisions teenagers make about their friends and dating partners. Family members, the street pastor, and police also use this online data to draw conclusions about neighborhood youth--assumptions that both direct and divert institutional consequences. The basic premise of this research is that relations on the street unfold through media as well as through people. This point is illustrated in four facets of street life: the school day, marginality, surveillance, and intimacy. Each chapter matches an issue on the street to an issue online in order to understand the convergence of physical and digital space. This ethnographic data motivates us to see the street as a place with and without physical confines. As such, we must take seriously the social properties of the online environment as we account for change in a ghetto beyond the standard explanations of policies, economics, and demographics.