The Materiality of the Virtual in Urban Space

Abstract

Digital technologies such as social and mobile media reorder media worlds and ecologies in global contexts, generating anxieties around youth, class, and social space. By the 2010s, emerging technologies like social and mobile media had become part of everyday life not just for teens and fan communities, but for transnational families, neighborhood groups, and many others. This chapter examines ways digital media platforms, taken as inseparably material and representational, stabilize in temporary configurations of people, places, devices, knowledges, and affects in relation to selfhood and urban space. Drawing on fieldwork in Berlin and New York City, I consider everyday engagements with lively, material media and infrastructures (such as social media, mobile apps, streaming television, and digital music) among cosmopolitan Europeans in Berlin and residents of gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Digital media, as simultaneously virtual and material, remake urban and public spaces in ways that reconfigure experiences of youth, identity, and social class.