Food and discussion begins at 12:30 pm. Everyone invited.

This talk expands theory in the uses and social affordances of Information Technology by considering the busy digital lives of young persons in block-based youth crews across Harlem. Like young people elsewhere, teens in Harlem crews move seamlessly across digital and physical space in the course of daily communication and in hanging out. Unlike their middle-class peers, however, these young persons adapt interactive technology to a competitive social scene removed from school and located instead on the street where status is derived from violence. This presentation explores the application of mainstream social media like Twitter to the promotion, production, and coordination of status-based youth violence, as well as to its prevention.

Bio:

Jeffrey Lane is a PhD student in Sociology at Princeton University and author of Under the Boards: The Cultural Revolution in Basketball. He has received a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation for his current research synthesizing face-to-face and digital ethnography to understand violence, youth, and community in Harlem.