Rutgers ethnographer Dr. Jeffrey Lane discusses his new book The Digital Street, which addresses the role of communication and technology in the transformation of an urban neighborhood. Based on five years of ethnographic observations, Lane illustrates the online and offline experiences of black teenagers in the shadow of the Harlem Children’s Zone and sweeping gentrification when social media came to permeate all facets of life. The book shows how street life in Harlem (New York, NY) plays out on and across the physical and digital streets among youth, neighborhood adults, and the authorities. This talk will explore the book's findings and research method of digital urban ethnography.

The roundtable will take place on February 27, 2020, from 1 - 2:30 pm in the Dean’s office (2nd floor) at the School of Communication.

Jeffrey Lane is an urban ethnographer at Rutgers University.

Dr. Lane is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is a digital urban ethnographer, who writes about the role of social media in urban life and criminal justice. Lane is the author of The Digital Street (Oxford University Press), which won the Nancy Baym Book Award from the Association of Internet Researchers and the Best Book Award from the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Section of the American Sociological Association, and Under the Boards: The Cultural Revolution in Basketball (University of Nebraska Press). He is a faculty associate of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University and a junior fellow of the Urban Ethnography Project at Yale University. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as American Behavioral Scientist, New Media & Society, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Journal of Consumer Culture and written about in popular news outlets like The Atlantic and Vice.