Networked Street Life
In this chapter on networked street life, the authors explore the intersection of urban poverty and information and communication technologies as an emergent area of research. The concerns of the “street” as an organizer of social life for many urban poor communities and the affordances of social media, smartphones, and other networked technologies are topics ripe for theoretical integration. In this chapter, the authors argue that urban and digital forms of inequality are constitutive of one another and manifest in technology access, use, and outcomes of use for street-involved youth and adults. Ethnographic studies of neighborhood gang violence, homelessness, and other street-level issues illustrate the importance of a networked approach to neighborhood street life and urban-digital inequality. Future research can expand on the intersectional nature of networked street life, the tensions of physical place and digital networks, and the mass recording of police violence to grow this burgeoning area of study.