How to Live in a Digital City
While the vibrance, innovation, and cacophony of online life can feel completely unlike anything humanity has ever created before, its newness isn’t wholly unprecedented. Humans reckoned with many similar challenges to life as they knew it while navigating a different kind of social web: the city.
In this episode, danah boyd, a partner researcher at Microsoft Research and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Georgetown University, explains how the sociological work conducted during a time of rapid urbanization in the United States reveals a lot about human behavior and what we need to feel safe, secure, and inspired.
Listen to the episode here:
Listen and subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts
The following is a transcription:
Andrea Valdez: I’ve lived in a few different cities, and each one seems to have its own rules, its own way of functioning. Like, I grew up in a city dominated by cars. Which is pretty different from a walkable city. Oftentimes, what you find ... is when you’re in a walking city, you do have a different experience of “What does it mean to actually walk among people?” And you’re not just in your car, isolated, listening to the radio or whatever, and you are actually kind of face-to-face with people. But you’re also trying to be polite and not stare and not make too much eye contact, but, you know, if someone does make passing eye contact with you, you have a little smile. There’s all those little things that you’re trying to figure out and navigate, which is different than city car culture.
Megan Garber: Oh, it’s so interesting thinking about the differences, too, between a walkable city, like you said, or a car city—and the way those different infrastructures really do affect the cultural codes between people and the ways that we interact with each other.
Valdez: I’m Andrea Valdez. I’m an editor at The Atlantic.
Garber: And I’m Megan Garber, a writer at The Atlantic.
Valdez: This is How to Know What’s Real.
Valdez: Megan, do you ever feel like you’re just actually living online?
Garber: Oh, say more about that.
Valdez: I work from home, so a lot of my work relationships, they happen online through Zoom, through Slack, through Gchat, email. And then when I log off, I go to veg out or watch television, and I often have my phone in my face, and I don’t know if—I’m sure I’m not alone in that.
Garber: You’re not.
And I do have hobbies. I have a social life, I promise. But even though I, of course, hang
