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© Jeffrey Lane 2019
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Names: Lane, Jeffery, author.
Data
Title: The digital street : adolescence, technology, and community in the inner city / Jeffery Lane.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018012936| ISBN 9780199381265 (hard cover) | ISBN 9780199381272 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780199381289 (updf) | ISBN 9780199381296 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Online social networks—New York (State)—New York. | Social media—New York (State)—New York. | Digital communications— New York (State)—New York. | African American teenagers— New York (State)—New York. | Harlem (New York, N.Y.)—Social conditions. Classification: LCC HM742 .L357 2019 | DDC 302.30285—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012936
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Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada
Contents
Preface | vii
Acknowledgments | xiii
Author’s Note | xvii
1. Introduction to the Digital Street | 1
2. Girls and Boys | 27
3. Code Switching | 61
4. Pastor | 93
5. Going to Jail Because of the Internet | 121
6. Street Lessons | 161
APPENDIX: DIGITAL URBAN ETHNOGRAPHY | 169
NOTES | 189
REFERENCES | 211
INDEX | 225
Preface
The premise of the street code is that respect in the inner city is transmitted through face-to-face encounters. Young people test each other’s nerve to fight in front of a peer audience who evaluates each challenger’s toughness and heart. Neighborhood reputations hang on this process.
Today such confrontations are increasingly filmed and uploaded to social media or even streamed live. When this happens, youth must contend with a public record of their performance. The meaning of the encounter changes as it moves online, as it did for Rugged, a thirteen-year-old boy I came to know through outreach work in Harlem.
On a Wednesday, in 2010, several of Rugged’s friends tweeted about a video uploaded by one of their neighborhood adversaries. I followed a link in one of their tweets to their rival’s unlocked Twitter page, which integrated a video-hosting platform that contained several clips seemingly created to antagonize Rugged’s group.
The most recent one, titled “GOTTA TOUGHEN UP,” was a fifty-one-second video of Rugged taken with a phone. Along with the tagline “UNDER PRESSURE 1 ON 1 SHIT,” the video
showed Rugged on a popular shopping street where someone off camera held him by his backpack strap with one hand and appeared to film him with the other. The video depicted an intimidation during which Rugged, speaking frantically, swore on his “dead pops” that he did not hang out with his friends on their usual block.
According to urban sociologist Elijah Anderson, the code of the street dictates that kids must be prepared to fight when threatened in public space.1 But other research by Robert Garot points out that kids, even gang involved, do not always abide.2 They dodge such fraught encounters or decline to fight, and when they do, they face social pressure to come up with rationales for noncompliance. But Rugged’s failure to enact the code of the street was caught on camera.
Before the video, Rugged was known for having brought a gun to school, notoriety he depended on for status and for safety. His reputation was now undermined by a video that was viewed 1,715 times within its first twenty-one hours of publication, with links to the clip and discussion on multiple social media platforms. I observed online comments disparaging to Rugged, and then when I went to his block the next night, he was nowhere to be found. Two girls I chatted with seemed satisfied: Rugged talked “too much,” they said. Rugged, a fixture on his corner, did not hang out there for the next eight days.
In court and elsewhere, video is often privileged as a record of the “truth.” But the offline story also matters.
In the days following the video, I heard from a girl in the neighborhood that others had been present during the intimidation, but were positioned off camera. As I learned more, I came to believe that Rugged’s rival did not act alone but approached with two other boys, both older and bigger than Rugged and previously involved in shootings directed toward Rugged’s group.
The online depiction of a one-on-one intimidation was probably three on one, far less shameful by the standards of the street code.
The Rugged incident demonstrated that the street code, traditionally based on the urban inequality that makes poor neighborhoods fraught, shifted also with new media and aspects of digital space. Online fight videos—or nonfight videos—alter the interpretative process through which neighborhood reputations get decided. The secondhand accounts of a fight that those who witnessed it firsthand would tell, in which case the listener accepts as inevitable a level of exaggeration or other distortion, compete now with a video. People can watch for themselves.
For Rugged’s encounter, there was no peer audience present. He was held accountable to the code entirely online. The meaning of the event transformed through its visibility and the scale of audience on social media where users can play, replay, and easily share content, and through other aspects of what digital scholars like danah boyd call “networked publics.”3 Played 1,715 times the fifty-one-second video broadened exponentially to about twentyfour hours of total screen time over Harlem and potentially elsewhere beyond the peer context of the neighborhood.
This book is about how the experience of a neighborhood gets filtered through digital technology. It argues that neighborhoodbased risks and opportunities associated with urban poverty are socially mediated through the use of popular communication technologies like Twitter and Facebook and the ways teenagers, community adults, and legal authorities handle the designs and features of these platforms. In the course of roughly five years of study, I found that street life had effectively decoupled from its geographic location to split along the physical street and the digital street. In the pages that follow, I examine the parallels, differences, and crossovers between these two layers and forms of sociality.
I show that social processes and outcomes related to “neighborhood effects” and especially the street code are cocreated in the physical and digital spaces of the neighborhood.4 In particular, the enactment of gender roles, code switching between street- and school-centered identities, informal social control, and formal gang suppression play out on and between the physical and digital streets.
This book focuses on Harlem where the proliferation of social media is changing neighborhood life in a traditionally black community being transformed as well by conventional urban forces. I conducted my study at a time of accelerating gentrification and as the Harlem Children’s Zone became the national model of urban education under the Obama administration.
I have written this book with two goals in mind. First, I wanted to examine the connection between physical and digital life in the absence of a dominant account and given that scholars often look at one side without the other. I studied the same people in person and on the Internet to move in real time with naturally evolving situations. By being on the ground and in the feeds and networks online, I was able to see how face-to-face and digital interactions were similar or different, how each affected the other, and, in some cases, why one form of engagement took place over another.
Second, I wanted to center this examination on the streetlevel experience of African American and Latino teenagers like Rugged to shed light on the digitization of urban violence and promote a constructive response. Early predictions emphasize at least three troubling possibilities: First, violence simply gets worse with increased exposure online; second, the bystander effect carries digitally so that any one person becomes less likely to help the more people look on; and, third, most cynically, online videos of street fights, especially among young black people, are a form of fame and amusement for audiences near and wide.5
I saw aspects of amplification, inaction, and entertainment. But I also observed digitization as a tool to anticipate and control violence and to make street life more predictable, utilized by youth and adults, working in tandem, separately, or even opposition. I attribute some of these buffering effects to the specificities of Harlem, but I also see lessons that pertain more widely. I’ll spell this out in the coming chapters, which I think will interest both general readers and academics alike, and I end with a research appendix on digital urban ethnography.
Acknowledgments
For the kindness and trust with which I have been received, and for the opportunity to write about their world, I am forever thankful to the young people in this research and to their parents, family members, and elders. I am always indebted to Pastor because he graciously opened a social world for me and then encouraged me to be myself in it. Pastor passed suddenly in 2018, almost two years after the passing of Coach, Pastor’s close friend and collaborator, in 2016, leaving a void in Harlem. I hold these men dear to my heart.
I am immensely appreciative of the community leaders, outreach workers, social workers, teachers, attorneys, police, and administrators at numerous community-based organizations, agencies, and schools who shared the workings of their neighborhoods with me.
I thank Richard Lecky and Hearts in the Streets, Inc. (HITS) for sponsoring the college trips I took with young people.
The research for this book originated with my doctoral studies at Princeton University in the Sociology Department. To the faculty, administration, and my fellow graduate students of Princeton Sociology, I am thankful for an intellectual environment that was
Acknowledgments
rigorous, collegial, and flexible—somehow all at the same time. I could not have asked for better training or support.
My dissertation advisor, Mitch Duneier, instilled a love and respect for the hard work that makes any research worth its weight. Mitch showed me the craft of fieldwork and coached me in all aspects of the academic life. He remains a mentor and dear friend I appreciate always.
Devah Pager and Paul DiMaggio, the generous, brilliant mentors on my dissertation committee, challenged and encouraged me from my qualifying exams through my defense. I was honored to have Paul Starr and Bill Kornblum read my dissertation, and I benefited significantly from their feedback.
I thank the National Science Foundation for financial support in the form of a Dissertation Improvement Grant in the early stages of research and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for financial support during the writing stages of my dissertation as a doctoral fellow.
I’m lifted by wonderful colleagues whom I thank for their support with this book project at different times, in various ways, including, most certainly, Mike Benediktsson, Brandon Berry, Bart Bonikowski, Sarah Brayne, Lynn Chancer, Angèle Christin, Rachael Ferguson, Alice Goffman, Amir Goldberg, Keith Hampton, Patrick Inglis, Vikki Katz, Tami Lee, Jennifer Lena, Alexandra Murphy, Kathleen Nolan, Desmond Patton, Jasmin Sandelson, Mike Schlossman, Hana Shepherd, Christo Sims, Forrest Stuart, Naomi Sugie, Janet Vertesi, Erik Vickstrom, Frederick Wherry, and Terry Williams.
I’d also like to thank Charles Lemert for my introduction to sociology when I was a freshman at Wesleyan University, and for his ongoing support.
I appreciate the editors and reviewers who offered valuable feedback on an article from which parts of this book were
previous published as “The Digital Street: An Ethnographic Study of Networked Street Life in Harlem,” American Behavioral Scientist 60, no. 1 (2016): 43–58.
To my fellow faculty, students, and the deans at Rutgers University School of Communication and Information (SC&I), I am grateful for the vivid thinking, inspiration, and support all around me. Thank you to the Communication Department, Chairs Laurie Lewis and Craig Scott, and SC&I Dean Jonathan Potter, Acting Dean Claire McInerney, and Associate Deans Karen Novick, Dafna Lemish, and Mark Aakhus for the marvelous opportunity to see this book through and develop and teach an agenda around this research. I am very fortunate. I value also the collegiality of the Rutgers University Sociology Department and Chairs Deborah Carr and Paul McLean.
This book was strengthened by the opportunities to present and workshop its contents at numerous universities and institutions: in special gratitude to Elijah Anderson and the Urban Ethnography Project at Yale University; David Grazian and the Urban Ethnography Workshop at University of Pennsylvania; Mats Trondman and the Cultural Sociology and Education Conference at Linnaeus University; and danah boyd and thoughtful commenters Alondra Nelson and Alice Marwick at the Academic Workshop at Data & Society Research Institute.
My experience with Oxford University Press has been inspiring and really fun from the start, especially with the vision and humor of President Niko Pfund. Publishing with Oxford has been an honor. James Cook is an unusually kind editor, and his judicious feedback developed the best of what’s written. It’s been a pleasure to work with James, and I’m grateful for his encouragement and direction, and each of our conversations.
My sincere thanks to Lynn DeRocco of DeRocco Editorial Services, for thoughtful copyediting on the first submission of
the full manuscript and the professionalism and warmth of her service. I thank Victoria Danahy for her excellence in copyediting the final book. I recognize Raj Suthan for his care in the production of the book.
I’m honored that Rodrigo Corral designed the book cover.
I’ve had exemplary research assistance at various key points, from Andrew Bristow, Joe Cruz, Lauren Davis, Kiara McClendon, and Fanny Ramirez. I thank Rebecca Henretta for her design of the conversation diagram.
I am profoundly grateful to my father, Roger Lane, and my mother, Anna Falco-Lane, for their love and support, and their generosity in all forms. And I thank them for the chats when I was stuck or wavering in my path.
I drew on the inspiration of my godparents, the late Sheila Taylor and Brett Flamm, throughout this project.
To my wife, Emily Henretta, I am forever indebted. I cannot express how much the sacrifices she has made and the love she has provided has meant to me in this writing process.
Author’s Note
This book is based on my fieldwork in Harlem, which was conducted in person and online. With the exception of public figures, I have changed the names of the people involved or have referred to them only by title. All digital communication is quoted as it originally appeared, except for the occasional minor change to prevent confusion or mask identifiable details.
THE DIGITAL STREET
Introduction to the Digital Street
In 2010, I attended a safety meeting convened by Geoffrey Canada, the founder and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), at Promise Academy, his flagship high school. As helpers gave out copies of the graphic novel of his memoir, Canada told parents it was “a whole different scene” from what he had experienced growing up. He was not just talking about the proliferation of guns or cops. His point was that kids also experienced their neighborhoods online. Canada called for intervention that was both “old school,” meaning measures like curfews, and digital, somehow linked to students’ smartphones.
So far Canada’s counter to street life was to lengthen the school day and expand what schools gave to the community: early childhood learning programs, youth jobs and internships, parent training, and other wraparound services for enrolled students as well as for their friends and family members. He was struggling now with the changing boundaries of street life as it flowed through digital interaction and with few adults in the community outside of the police monitoring youth on social media. The most serious violence in Harlem, including incidents that had recently claimed the lives of two teenagers and alumni of the HCZ, combined old and new aspects of street life. Gun violence transpired
between groups of boys divided by neighborhood turf but connected online through ties to the same girls on social media.
Canada’s programming widely served youth in Harlem, and his approach to urban education had become a model that President Obama and other national leaders hoped to replicate. But he sought now another way to address the changing nature of the street life that surrounded his facilities and students. In the neighborhood was another African American man in his early fifties (about seven years younger than Canada) known simply as “Pastor.” Pastor understood and ministered to this new social world of the street that operated in the shadow of the HCZ.
This book is about what I learned as an outreach worker in Pastor’s peace ministry and through other firsthand research in person and online with teenagers in Harlem and many of the adults worried about or after them. This book examines the experience of street life at a time of quickening gentrification and just as social media became ubiquitous. I ask, how has street life changed with the use of social media and smartphones? The answer, I found, was the emergence and progression of a digital street. As those entangled in street life became involved digitally, this domain essentially bifurcated into two concurrent layers of social life that exist on the physical street and the digital street. Each resembles, shapes, and references the other, and yet distinct forms of sociality become possible on and across each location. This book elucidates the digital street in terms of its development and organization, performances and boundaries, mediation and oversight, and surveillance and punishment. I focus on situations and interactions that start either on the physical street or the digital street, carry through in one location, or move between the two in order to understand how these spaces and engagements fit together as street life. In the process, I hope to bring the reader
through the multifaceted lives of teenagers and adults at the center of this study, people whose lives have been changed with the spread of sites like Twitter and Facebook.
For youth, digital media have given them new opportunities to construct and live out various social identities, to incite but also de-escalate violence, and to expand their myriad social relationships. For neighborhood adults, it provides a new forum for agonizing over, but also interceding into neighborhood violence. For police and prosecutors, it affords an additional means of investigating, arresting, and incarcerating youth involved in gang violence and those who dare to perform toughness and criminality on the Internet. For scholars of cities, poverty, and violence, it provides an immediate warrant for taking very seriously the role of communication and technology. Outside of the communication tradition, urban scholars typically overlook the use of communication technologies within the geography of the city and its spatial distribution of crime, victimization, and order.1 Scholars locate the risks and opportunities for young people in the physical boundaries and face-to-face experience of neighborhoods. Urban scholars examine the socialization of youth through interactions with peers, adults, police, and other influencers in their neighborhood. Scholars measure “neighborhood effects” in terms of local friend and dating pools, the availability and engagement of positive and negative role models, and access to public space and local resources.2 The rise of digitally networked technologies has radically changed the ways people connect and relate, presence and awareness of others, access and exposure to information, and the very structure of everyday life.3 The use of new technologies shapes the identities, decisions, and behaviors of urban youth within and as a consequence of the neighborhood that surrounds them. The boundaries of urban community are different with digital communication.
Communication scholars who study cities recognize neighborhoods as communication environments that combine faceto-face and technologically mediated forms of involvement. The study of urban neighborhoods and communities revolves around the interconnections of local residents, institutions, and the technology and media they engage with everyday.4 Communication scholars have embraced neighborhood-effects studies, but most urban research excludes media, information, and communication processes by looking for other mediating variables or mediated effects to explain social order. I hope to bridge and expand both the communication and urban fields by grounding the study of digital media in the people, processes, and craft of urban ethnography.
Urban ethnography developed as a style of immersive research in American sociology out of work in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward neighborhood by W. E. B. DuBois at the turn of the twentieth century and the Chicago School studies starting roughly two decades later.5 One of the most popular and influential urban ethnographies of more recent years, Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street, considers many of the field’s long-standing concerns with urban community, inequality, poverty, and racism, and issues of reputation, decency, and respect. Anderson locates the mechanism of neighborhood disadvantage in the interactions that occur on the street, especially those involving youth. In the most economically depressed and racially segregated parts of the city the threat of interpersonal violence creates a form of public order bounded by the home, school, and other domains that challenge or give way to the street code. The code of the street provides an orienting concept for this book for two reasons. First, it allows us to understand digital interaction because the street code depends on the temporal and spatial boundaries of an urban neighborhood and community. Where and how it’s enacted and
counteracted traditionally varies with the visibility and access of young people to each other and to adults in person on the physical street. Second, the street code joins the teenagers and adults in this study as they dealt together and in their different ways with neighborhood violence. Locally, Geoffrey Canada put in practice ideas he and Anderson share (with one key exception to be discussed).
Canada wrote a memoir of neighborhood violence that motivated his founding of the HCZ with the mission to create “a counterweight to ‘the street’ and a toxic popular culture.”6 Both Anderson and Canada were responding to an urban environment that for some African American youth was characterized by direct experiences of neighborhood violence and the indirect influence of popular media that, according to Canada’s mission statement, “glorified misogyny and anti- social behavior.” For Anderson, films like The Godfather and Menace II Society “along with rap music as well as their everyday experiences, help youths become inured to violence and, perhaps, death itself.”7 Canada and Anderson each imagined that youth related their own experience to the creative expressions of actors and rappers. The relationship between street life and media use has since shifted. Youth face the same people and problems in the neighborhood that they do online. Youth still draw upon popular culture but they live their actual street life in the media they consume and produce. They move between face-to- face and digital interaction to manage their own neighborhood situations.
To lay the foundation for the digital street, I am going to run through what Canada and Anderson as well as urban ethnographers in more recent years have said about the street code. As I go along, I’ll update the relevant social changes in urban conditions that coincide with digitization. Here, I preview the findings I flesh out in the coming chapters.
