Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Use of Digital Ethnography to Understand Violence

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SES-1029910Mitchell DuneierJeffrey LanePrinceton UniversityEthnographers strive to capture rich and precise data about the social lives of the groups they study but miss the digital components of contemporary life when they focus squarely on face-to-face participant observation. The daily flow of inner city life, like social life elsewhere, alternates between online and offline spaces, requiring ethnographers to move accordingly to retrieve essential interactions and representations of self that group members display for one another. This dissertation on digital lives of youth crews (sometimes called "gangs") in Harlem, New York advances data collection and data quality in the field of urban ethnography by capturing, integrating, and interpreting what happens in both the physical city and the digital spaces where people concurrently live. The methodological objective is to create a new model for urban ethnography that supplements and synthesizes conventional ethnographic data drawn from face-to-face observation and interaction in a physical field site--fieldnotes and audio recordings--with the multimedia content that comprises social media sites (i.e., a profile, network of friends, and comments or conversations) and conversational bits of text from text messages. The researcher applies these new methodological tools to the substantive and theoretical goal of understanding violence in the digital era. Members of youth crews in Harlem live vast digital lives, communicating online with peers about music, sex, daily life, and, sometimes, violence. When crew members make threats or coordinate confrontations on social media sites like Twitter, these exchanges sometimes result in violence. How violence transpires or is diffused reflects complex processes from the social histories of those involved to how online comments are interpreted by the antagonists as well others watching the interaction, namely monitoring adults like clergy, concerned residents, and police. Broader Impacts. This dissertation research will help us to understand how and why Harlem residents concerned with violence--those perpetrating and responding to violence--engage digital media in the ways they do to find out what is and what is not different about violence in a digital world. The research presents innovative forms of data and data collection techniques, and integrates online and offline data and observation to understand an offline outcome of primary social importance,interpersonal violence.