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 groups, 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 it. 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.

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.

The true story of basketball lives as much off the court as on the hardwood; it is about politics and race and cultural clashes as heated as a final-four buzzer-beater. This story unfolds in all its gritty and colorful detail in Under the Boards. From the birth of the Larry Bird legend to the ascendancy of a hip-hop-infused NBA to the backlash against bling and the contemporary American game, Jeffrey Lane traces the emergence of a new culture of basketball, complete with competing values, attitudes, aesthetics, and racial and economic tensions. The revolution Lane describes resonates in the way Latrell Sprewell's assault on his coach forever changed NBA power relations; in legendary coach Bob Knight's entanglement in high school basketball history; in the dramatic shift in attitude toward European players; in the impact of the deaths of two rappers on rookie Allen Iverson's career; and in conflicting cultural models rooted in ideals of black masculinity and white nostalgia. In these moments Lane's book documents a profound change in basketball and in American culture over the last thirty years. Jeffrey Lane is the founder and director of Schoolhouse Tutors, a mentoring program for middle and high school students in Manhattan and Brooklyn.