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.

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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.

Valdez: And I do have hobbies. I have a social life, I promise. But even though I, of course, hang out with my friends in real life, a lot of our interactions are via text. So I have all these group texts. Each of my group chats has kind of its own little personality. Just feels like there’s screens, screens, screens.

Garber: Okay, well, by that definition, I too live online. You know, it’s interesting, because all of those apps you’re talking about, I have my own versions. Most of us do—and I’ve been thinking a lot about how even though the web feels expansive ... we can basically design our own unique spaces.

Valdez: That’s true.

Garber: And that environment, even though it’s not strictly a place, can feel to me like this ever-growing city, where you have all these people trying to navigate the same space at the same time. And there are so many things in the city that are great that are also great about the internet. You have, you know, all that sort of ferment, all this culture. Like, exposure to people who are different from you, who you probably otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to and wouldn’t be able to interact with. So it’s so wonderful in that way—but I think there are so many new challenges to navigate, too.

—

danah boyd: I mean, one of the fascinating things about cities, of course, is scale, right? Not just the scale of buildings, although that’s often part of it, but the number of people. When it comes to a city, you never expect to know everybody, and that’s okay. And there’s something beautiful about walking down, you know, a busy street, and not to necessarily get to know everybody intimately, right? But just to smile at, you know, the different fashion or the different ways of moving about the world. This way of acknowledging that humanity is bigger than your own little part of it.

Garber: So, Andrea, to think more about that idea of the internet as a place , I talked with danah boyd, who’s a partner researcher at Microsoft Research and also a distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University. She studies the intersection of technology and society, and she thinks really deeply about how people build communities in digital spaces—and we talked about what the history of cities can tell us about the way we live online.

[Music.]

boyd: When we go online, you know, there’s joy in interacting with the people we know. But there’s also pleasure to—you know, what I think of as that digital street, right? The ability to just see other people living their lives in ways that you’re just like, Wow, that’s different, and I’m intrigued.

And I used to love this, living in New York. Every morning I would go into the guy at the deli, and I never knew his name. He never knew my name, but we would nod, and we would smile. I wouldn’t even have to order, because he knew what I was going to order. And then we would make small talk about something random. And it was—there was something comfortable about that, where we didn’t have to become best friends, but it was still a recognition of humanity. And those moments where, you know, we move relationships in different phases in our lives in different ways, but we still have this recognition of humanity of strangers, I think, is a really important part. And that’s something that’s core to the city.

Garber: I’m so interested in how people adjust their behavior, not just in relation to their physical settings, but also in response to the types of people they’re interacting with. But also: Those rules are kind of unspoken, and can be really hard to discern! You know, after the shift toward mass urbanization, a bunch of social scientists turned those rules into a fascinating field of study. I’m thinking of one in particular—could you talk about Irving Goffman?

boyd: Irving Goffman was a sociologist, and he was really interested in microdynamics within the social world. And one of my favorites of his was this recognition of civil inattention. And that’s this idea that, you know—you’re sitting in a cafe, it’s very crowded, or a restaurant, and you can hear the conversation next to you. And you listen in, and you sort of pay attention, but you’re performing as though you’re not paying attention. But at the same time, they know they’re in a public space; they know that somebody is likely to be able to overhear them. And there’s, you know, these ways in which you broker that sometimes people perform to be overheard. And the civil-inattention concept was really important because it was a recognition that you had the sense of publicness, but you also had this recognition of what was an appropriate norm and behavior.

Garber: Yeah; we know in a city that we can’t build authentic deep relationships with everyone whose paths we cross—but online, that idea and that obviousness doesn’t always translate. But I think there’s something very clarifying about that idea of the civil inattention that Goffman talked about. And I wonder: Are there other thinkers we could look to to learn more about the city?

boyd: Stanley Milgram was really interested in a notion of the familiar stranger. He’s best known for some of his post–World War II experiments of, you know—would you torment and torture somebody? Um, and of course these are very controversial experiments. But he really just wanted to understand different aspects of what, you know, made social life, social life. And he’s doing it in the mid–20th century, so also, not only is he responding to World War II, but he’s responding to mass urbanization. And so he’s looking at, like, “What is this thing called the city?”—you know, from different perspectives of the people interacting in it but he also did this really great study where he had his students go to certain public-transit stops, and you’d start to realize that, you know, the same people got the 702 train every day, or whatever. And so there was a level of recognition and familiarity with them. What happens when you take people out of that context and reach a point where you’re like, “Oh, I know you”? And the further away that context is, the more you’re like, “I really know you, right?” If you run into that person, you know, say, in Europe—when you normally would just see them sort of on the streets in New York City—you’d be like, “We’re gonna be best friends, right?” Because we have so much in common compared to our current context.

Garber: Oh, that’s so interesting. And it’s fascinating, too, that Milgram is such a touchpoint, because just like you said, I think most of us do associate him with his experiments with cruelty. And it’s interesting to think about the double edges of familiarity and strangeness that he was exploring, and how that can beget community or, on the other hand, be taken to another extreme.

[Music.]

Garber: Andrea, I think part of the reason why I am so interested in drawing parallels between the social patterns of cities and the internet is because we have this rich history of mass urbanization that we can point to.

Valdez: And one that wasn’t that long ago, right? In the last four or five decades, there’s been a huge move to cities. Over half our global population lives in cities—4 billion people. A lot of them adjusting to the changes Goffman and Milgram studied.

Garber: Right. Yep.

Valdez: And while that is a big switch … it’s even more drastic when we look at how many people have access to the web. So there’s 5.4 billion people who now have access to the digital world!

Garber: Wow.

Valdez: Right. 5.4 billion people living online together … and there’s practically no distance separating us.

Garber: [Laughter.]

Valdez: So right now, it’s like the sparkle and spectacle of the shininess of the internet, it’s started to fade, and we’re really aware in this moment of, you know, trash in the comments and crowds on the timeline and, you know, misinformation graffiti on the walls.

Garber: Misinformation graffiti is going to haunt me. But, cities, over time, learned how to deal with those problems to make cities more livable—but the web is so relatively new that we just don’t have many of those systems on it yet.

[Music.]

Garber: Dr. boyd—when I think about the comparisons between city life and this era of our lives online, I actually find myself thinking back to earlier times. Early cities—the cities before traffic lights and indoor plumbing, before all the infrastructure that was later created to keep people safe and healthy and, uh, to keep them from harming one another, actually whether intentionally or not. So I wonder, what are some of the strategies you’ve seen people make use of? How are people finding the calm or quiet away from the city feeling in digital spaces?

boyd: I mean, let’s be clear. A lot of people have checked out, right? Like, you know, it’s like, “I’ve had enough of the city,” and they’ve gone really private, right? Um, you know, it’s important to recognize that there’s ebbs and flows to this. People are like, “I want more public; I want less public”right? And that happens in terms of life stage, right? Where people actually have periods of their lives where, you know—the 20s are sort of a classic one, where a disproportionate number of people in their 20s are like, “Let me be in public! Wheee!” Right? And then, you know, you get these other moments where, you know, a classic one is after the birth of children—people really go into more intimate circles for a period of time. And so you see these ebbs and flows that are life stage; they’re temporal. They have to do with, you know, different economic dynamics. And we can think of, again, the parallel to the city. There are times where the city is, like, the place that everybody wants to be. And there are times where the city is narrated as dark and deviant and a terrible place to be. Retreating is a protective measure. And that’s fine at certain times; it’s emotionally protective. It keeps us safe. And sometimes we’re in a crisis. And to be clear, like: In the United States right now, we have a mental-health crisis. That’s not just young people. Those are very healthy times to retreat.

Garber: I think Americans tend to assume that if you are a public person in some way, if you have some level of publicity, that in some ways you get what you deserve, right? Angelina Jolie, you know, she has to know that she is being watched or could potentially be watched all the time. And I wonder if that idea is now becoming just more banal and more common. And one of the things that fascinates me about the city is that,in some sense, we are all surveilled whenever we are moving throughout the city. And there’s, you know, we have these environments where, um, everyone has their cameras on them. I could be filmed at any moment. I wonder what you think about just how we see other people in that environment, where anyone really could be on the receiving end of fame, of publicity.

boyd: Right. And I think this is where we see the shift from being watched to being surveilled. I think you picked up the right term here—which is that when we go out in the city, we also allow ourselves to be watched. You know, I’m going out to see and be seen, right? Those are part of the same. And, you know, in that moment, we expect to be seen. But, you know, we also expect it to go away. We expect a certain ephemerality. And in many ways, a lot of the public internet use for a long time assumed a level of ephemerality—even if there was the persistence of the particular content, what we’re racing to right now is that there’s more and more awareness of the persistence of a lot of this. And so you see the rise of tools like Signal, right, which are … part of the joy is not like, Oh, I want to use this to do illicit things. It’s like, I want this to go away, because it shouldn’t be persistent. It doesn’t need to be. It’s a bunch of poop emojis, right? It’s just funny at the moment. And I think that there’s a lot more empathy for the complexity of being seen.

[Music.]

Garber: So, Dr. boyd, I want to throw something new into the mix here. We’ve been talking about what we can learn from the city to understand the digital settings where we operate, but I want to point out something that makes this metaphor harder ... that is that digital spaces seem to be both big cities and small towns. And what I mean by that is: I grew up in a small town, and, you know, you sort of can’t escape being seen. Everyone’s going to know your business all the time. And so we have these sort of parallel phenomena online, right, where you have the scale of the city, but then you also have the intimacy of the small town. How do we navigate that? And also, to your point, how do we sort of conceive of ideas like justice? And how do we, you know, create the world that we want to create, while also navigating all of these different tensions at the same time?

boyd: A teacher of a school doesn’t really ever get to stop being a teacher when they leave the school, you know, in a small town. They run into their students at the grocery store. They run into their students, you know, out in the park. And that’s sort of part of a small-town dynamic—that you have to constantly navigate ust these different contexts. And you can’t really separate them. One of the beauties of city living is the ability to actually keep pretty discrete contexts. But there’s also moments, of course, where contexts collide. You suddenly run into a colleague at a gay bar, and you’re like, Whoa, I was not planning on outing myself at work, right? These are city-based context collapses. Well, these are so much easier to happen online, right? And they show us how this, you know, dynamic of the privilege of being able to separate out context—and maintain different voices or different styles or different aspects of our identity in different places—we don’t get the opportunity to do that as easily. And we end up more in that small-town-teacher experience, um, which is really hard for people. Especially more marginalized people, who don’t have to have a professional identity on themselves all the time.

And so, think about the ways in which we try to navigate anonymity offline. Perhaps most famously is, you know, Alcoholics Anonymous, right? Which is this way of respecting the idea that in AA, even in a small town, I may know you, I may see you. And this we have delineated to say, “This is a separate space, because it’s for everybody’s well-being that we create this separate space.” But we create these conditions of constant outing online, that we don’t allow that freedom. And we see this constant fight, because anonymity online is seen as fundamentally bad. So it’s interesting to see how we are navigating these distinctly and how we expect people to constantly cope with context collapse, you know, whenever they go online. And that’s one of the things people are genuinely struggling with—which is why you’re seeing these different layers of retreat, to try to not have to constantly navigate those collisions.

Garber: Are the challenges we are seeing online revealing something about us culturally?

boyd: We want a solution to something that we’re feeling the toxicity. We’re acknowledging that there’s a lot of cruelty out there; that there’s just things that make us sort of horrified. And so people do hope that ridding of anonymity would solve it. My hypothesis is that it won’t—but that’s not gonna stop people from trying. And just like with the city, there are times where, um, you know, things become darker. But usually the thing about that form of darkness, that form of toxicity—whether it’s in the city or whether it’s online—is: It’s reflecting back to us broader social structural issues, right? We usually have an easier time identifying them in the city, you know. Economic inequality, right?

Different layers of not handling mental health or poverty, lack of job opportunities, for example. Well, the thing is, is that online, a lot of the toxicity we are seeing is also due to similar factors, right? But we don’t identify them as much, because we’re not seeing what, you know, is often called the urban-blight issue. We’re seeing it, you know, just in terms of toxicity—and so we think it’s just individual bad actors rather than, you know, systemic degradation.

[Music.]

Valdez: So one of the things I’m most interested in right now is how this battle over anonymity plays out.

Garber: Mm, yeah.

Valdez: Is it bad for the internet? Is it good for people on the internet? Because, you know, there’s a really strong case for both.

Garber: Right. Right. There’s, you know, anonymity as permission, but also anonymity as protection.

Valdez: Yes. And I agree. I personally have used anonymity as protection online, you know. I’ve gone into incognito mode on my browser; I’ve used anonymous mode in Reddit. And it’s not because I’m searching something nefarious necessarily.

Garber: Really?

Valdez: No, it’s: I’ve been Googling myself. No, it’s really more because I know that there’s cookies that can follow me. And so I want to try and cut some of those cookies off at the pass. So I don’t have ads that follow me. Maybe I’m searching something innocuous, like running shoes. I’ll get ads that follow me around, and that’s more annoying—and maybe creepy a little bit—than anything. But if I search something that’s more personal—like, let’s say I get a medical diagnosis, and I want to learn more about it. I don’t want ads or information constantly surfacing that could remind me of something personal or painful. I don’t want to feel I’m in this informational Bermuda triangle I can never escape. There are just some searches that I want to be fleeting and ephemeral.

Garber: Oh, that’s such a good point. So anonymity is also kind of permission to evolve, right? And to sort of move through life, and yeah—not have everything follow you.

Valdez: Yeah; that’s a great way to put it.

Garber: But, and then I guess I’m thinking, too, of sort of the other side of anonymity—you know, a journalist. As you might imagine, journalists often get a lot of hate mail. [Laughter.]

Valdez: Yes, unfortunately very common.

Garber: [Laughter.] So most of the time, I will say, I just don’t engage. If someone doesn’t have anything productive to say, I’m just, I’m not gonna go there. But a couple of times I’ve gotten these really nasty, just invective-filled notes from people who are either anonymous or sort of quasi-anonymous, you know, but seem to feel like they are somehow protected in whatever they’re going to tell me. And I will respond to them sometimes.

Valdez: Oh, interesting.

Garber: Yeah. And it is actually kind of a fascinating experiment, because when I get a response—which is actually fairly often when I do those replies—people will respond seeming almost shocked. A: that they’ve gotten a response. B: that there was in fact a human on the other side of that email. And their tone just changes instantly. And there have been a couple of times when I’ve had, you know, not like completely deep back-and-forths with these people, but, like, where we actually have then gone on to have some kind of exchange—you know, meaningful exchange—based on this terrible email that started things off. And I think that actually think there’s something hopeful in that, because it’s a reminder that it doesn’t take a lot to kind of … nudge people back into humanity. Just, in this case, one reply. And that’s something I think a lot about the web overall, as we’re building out its infrastructure: How can we maximize empathy and humanity, really, in these digital spaces?

[Music.]

boyd: It’s tricky, because, you know, we’ve created it as these spaces that are controlled. And they’re economically, you know, managed in particular ways. Yes, the individuals are, you know, co-constructing these systems. Absolutely. But they’re doing it within an environment that has been defined for, you know, value extraction, not necessarily for pleasure or justice or other values that we might put forward. And so I think that there’s … like, honestly, I think we’re at a precipice of, like, what is that future that we’re going to move toward? I don’t think that the present is going to stand. The question is: Is it going to get much worse? Or are we going to find a new path forward that’s more constructive? You know, I think as an individual, part of it is: Start modeling the world you want to live in, right? And really think through your own actions and what you’re doing, you know, collectively. Because that’s the thing about a city: What does it mean to maintain morality? And not necessarily in a religious sense, but in a way of recognizing the dignity and humanity of the collective?

[Music.]

Valdez: Megan, I know I’m stating the obvious, but cities are simply incredibly nuanced, complex places. You know—they’ve been built up over time; they have cultural histories that have really shaped them over decades and centuries. So, I’m just not sure it’s going to be as simple as taking the recipe of what makes up all the good things about urban life and just transferring them over to digital life.

Garber: Mmm … yeah. Sadly.

Valdez: Yeah. But it is really helpful to think about the internet as an actual place rather than this enigmatic kind of other world that people have no agency over. And it’s something that actually we can control and create and shape.

Garber: You know, we can approach digital spaces with a little bit more skepticism or curiosity and sort of always be asking ourselves: Why is this place designed in this particular way? And then, especially, How could it be better?

Valdez: It’s scary that these norms and these rules—they don’t work. They just haven’t been formed yet. But I guess the upshot is that we still have a chance to create these norms?

Garber: And I think, along those lines, it’s actually just very helpful to descale as much as we can: you know, to think in terms of smaller communities, smaller groups of people. The neighborhoods that make the city.

Garber: That’s all for this episode of How to Know What’s Real. This episode was hosted by Andrea Valdez and me, Megan Garber. Our producer is Natalie Brennan. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.

[Music.]

Valdez: Next time on How to Know What’s Real:

Fazio: Our brains pay a lot of attention to emotion. They pay a lot of attention to morality. When you smush them together, then it’s this kind of superpower getting us to just really focus in on that information.

Garber: What we can learn about the web’s effects on people’s brains and our ability to discern real from the fake. We’ll be back with you on Monday.

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