The Digital Street

Book excerpt: The social impact of the Internet and new digital technologies is irrefutable, especially for adolescents. It is simply no longer possible to understand coming of age in the inner city without an appreciation of both the face-to-face and online relations that structure neighborhood life. The Digital Street is the first in-depth exploration of the ways digital social media is changing life in poor, minority communities. Based on five years of ethnographic observations, dozens of interviews, and analyses of social media content, Jeffrey Lane illustrates a new street world where social media transforms how young people experience neighborhood violence and poverty. Lane examines the online migration of the code of the street and its consequences, from encounters between boys and girls, to the relationship between the street and parents, schools, outreach workers, and the police. He reveals not only the risks youths face through surveillance or worsening violence, but also the opportunities digital social media use provides for mitigating danger. Granting access to this new world, Jeffrey Lane shows how age-old problems of living through poverty, especially gangs and violence, are experienced differently for the first generation of teenagers to come of age on the digital street.