Jeffrey Lane
Biographic Data
| ID | 3619965 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jeffrey Lane |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jeffrey |
| FAMILY NAME | Lane |
| SIGNATURE | LANE J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2369-1700 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 78 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Authentic listening as relational praxis: Theorizing from interpersonal, journalistic, ethnographic, and community work to a reflexive framework
This essay advances the concept of authentic listening as a multidimensional and multilevel process of relational, political, and ethical labor. Rather than conceptualizing authenticity as an individual trait or expressive ideal, as is often the case in communication research, we reframe it as a co-constructed achievement that emerges through listening, and is therefore shaped by power, positionality, and the conditions of reception. Drawing on f…
Leveraging digital spaces and datafication in communication research: Contributions of digital qualitative fluidity to ethnographic interviewing
The digitalization of communication practices affords major gains for qualitative methods of communication science. What we term digital qualitative fluidity captures the way traditional boundaries between interviewing and ethnography may dissolve through the use of contemporary, digital technologies. We illustrate how communication scholars have leveraged the digital to open ethnographic spaces within interviews to examine situated communication…
Defending against social media: Structural disadvantages of social media in criminal court for public defenders and defendants of low socioeconomic status
Secondary data collection practices are often opaque to platform users and researchers but known to shape individuals’ life chances in significant and unequal ways. In this paper, we articulate a clear relationship between invisible, unwanted data collection and its adverse, downstream consequences for marginalized groups by examining instances in the criminal justice field where social media data function as criminal evidence. We show how social…
Outside the brackets: Why school administrators fail to see gendered harassment within an antibullying law
Much of school bullying involves students policing the gender roles and sexuality of other students. The proliferation of antibullying laws presents an opportunity to formally punish and mark gendered harassment as unacceptable. However, when this form of peer policing involves girls, administrators often consider it to fall outside the purview of the law. We use bracketing theory to understand how middle school administrators in New Jersey asses…
Carceral communication: Mass incarceration as communicative phenomenon
This article introduces the concept of carceral communication to focus attention on the role of communication in mass incarceration’s racialized, criminal justice process. To argue that a communication perspective helps explain how individuals, neighborhoods, and prisons are linked together, the article uses publicly available indictments that charged three New York City youth gangs with violent crimes. It identifies three facets of carceral comm…
Digital Ethnography for Sociology: Craft, Rigor, and Creativity
How Social Media Use Mitigates Urban Violence: Communication Visibility and Third-Party Intervention Processes in Digital Urban Contexts
Defending Against Social Media: How Public Criminal Defense Helps Us Address Social Media Governance
As justice-minded academics, we want to understand the role of social media in civil society with a vested interest in ensuring that social media serves a pluralistic society fairly and equitably. Gillespie (2018) has helped frame this task in terms of both governance of platforms and by platforms, but we also want to know what state governments do with social media (Gorwa, 2019). This paper focuses on how social media companies cooperate with st…
A smartphone case method: Reimagining social relationships with smartphone data in the U.S. context of Harlem
Young people are living their lives online and offline, but research rarely incorporates both in a synchronous way. This paper explores a way to address this issue through the use of smartphone data in ethnographic research. It puts forward an updated, case study approach that serves youth and media researchers by focusing robustly on social relationships and connectivity. To illustrate the method, I walk through my collaborative fieldwork with J…
In the mix: Social integration and social media adoption
The Digital Street: Adolescence, Technology, and Community in the Inner City
This book delves into the street-level experience of a set of African American and Latino teenagers and adults worried about or after them. It argues that the risks and opportunities associated with a poor urban neighborhood get filtered through smartphones and popular social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. The book shows that street life in Harlem plays out on and across the physical street and the digital street among youth, neighborhood…
Rethinking the brand–community relationship: Wearing a biggie in Harlem
In one of the most cited studies in business and economics, Muñiz and O’Guinn established that a brand can serve as the basis of community. Their seminal fieldwork showed that through digital communication, consumers loyal to the same brand formed a community unbounded by geography and rooted in collective imagination. This article provides an alternative ethnographic account in which the relationship between brands and community runs in reverse:…
Guilty by Visible Association: Socially Mediated Visibility in Gang Prosecutions
Using an affordances framework, we consider how increased visibility afforded by social media impacts the criminal justice process. The use of social media as criminal evidence is a development that particularly impacts low-income populations of color already under heavy surveillance. Content analysis of seven gang indictments filed by the District Attorney (DA) of a large U.S. city that included a total of 1,281 overt acts of conspiracy revealed…
Gang violence on the digital street: Case study of a South Side Chicago gang member’s Twitter communication
Social media connects youth to peers who share shared experiences and support; however, urban gang-involved youth navigate ‘the digital street’ following a script that may incite violence. Urban gang-involved youth use SNS to brag and insult and make threats a concept known as Internet banging. Recent research suggests Internet banging has resulted in serious injury and homicide. We argue violence may be disseminated in Chicago through social med…
Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday
The Digital Street: An Ethnographic Study of Networked Street Life in Harlem
This article makes the case that street life is characterized by its flow online and offline. Such change requires a new way of doing street ethnography that holds great promise for urban and digital scholars alike. I walk through a set of empirical cases drawn from years of participant observation on the ground and in the network with the same set of teenagers in Harlem. The fieldwork modeled also shifts concepts of public space, reworking Elija…
Gang violence on the digital street: Case study of a South Side Chicago gang member’s Twitter communication
Social media connects youth to peers who share shared experiences and support; however, urban gang-involved youth navigate ‘the digital street’ following a script that may incite violence. Urban gang-involved youth use SNS to brag and insult and make threats a concept known as Internet banging. Recent research suggests Internet banging has resulted in serious injury and homicide. We argue violence may be disseminated in Chicago through social med…
The Digital Street: An Ethnographic Study of Networked Street Life in Harlem
This article makes the case that street life is characterized by its flow online and offline. Such change requires a new way of doing street ethnography that holds great promise for urban and digital scholars alike. I walk through a set of empirical cases drawn from years of participant observation on the ground and in the network with the same set of teenagers in Harlem. The fieldwork modeled also shifts concepts of public space, reworking Elija…
Guilty by Visible Association: Socially Mediated Visibility in Gang Prosecutions
Using an affordances framework, we consider how increased visibility afforded by social media impacts the criminal justice process. The use of social media as criminal evidence is a development that particularly impacts low-income populations of color already under heavy surveillance. Content analysis of seven gang indictments filed by the District Attorney (DA) of a large U.S. city that included a total of 1,281 overt acts of conspiracy revealed…
How Social Media Use Mitigates Urban Violence: Communication Visibility and Third-Party Intervention Processes in Digital Urban Contexts
Digital Ethnography for Sociology: Craft, Rigor, and Creativity
In the mix: Social integration and social media adoption
Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday
Outside the brackets: Why school administrators fail to see gendered harassment within an antibullying law
Much of school bullying involves students policing the gender roles and sexuality of other students. The proliferation of antibullying laws presents an opportunity to formally punish and mark gendered harassment as unacceptable. However, when this form of peer policing involves girls, administrators often consider it to fall outside the purview of the law. We use bracketing theory to understand how middle school administrators in New Jersey asses…
Gang violence on the digital street: Case study of a South Side Chicago gang member’s Twitter communication
Social media connects youth to peers who share shared experiences and support; however, urban gang-involved youth navigate ‘the digital street’ following a script that may incite violence. Urban gang-involved youth use SNS to brag and insult and make threats a concept known as Internet banging. Recent research suggests Internet banging has resulted in serious injury and homicide. We argue violence may be disseminated in Chicago through social med…
Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday
The Digital Street: An Ethnographic Study of Networked Street Life in Harlem
This article makes the case that street life is characterized by its flow online and offline. Such change requires a new way of doing street ethnography that holds great promise for urban and digital scholars alike. I walk through a set of empirical cases drawn from years of participant observation on the ground and in the network with the same set of teenagers in Harlem. The fieldwork modeled also shifts concepts of public space, reworking Elija…
The Digital Street: Adolescence, Technology, and Community in the Inner City
This book delves into the street-level experience of a set of African American and Latino teenagers and adults worried about or after them. It argues that the risks and opportunities associated with a poor urban neighborhood get filtered through smartphones and popular social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. The book shows that street life in Harlem plays out on and across the physical street and the digital street among youth, neighborhood…
Rethinking the brand–community relationship: Wearing a biggie in Harlem
In one of the most cited studies in business and economics, Muñiz and O’Guinn established that a brand can serve as the basis of community. Their seminal fieldwork showed that through digital communication, consumers loyal to the same brand formed a community unbounded by geography and rooted in collective imagination. This article provides an alternative ethnographic account in which the relationship between brands and community runs in reverse:…
Guilty by Visible Association: Socially Mediated Visibility in Gang Prosecutions
Using an affordances framework, we consider how increased visibility afforded by social media impacts the criminal justice process. The use of social media as criminal evidence is a development that particularly impacts low-income populations of color already under heavy surveillance. Content analysis of seven gang indictments filed by the District Attorney (DA) of a large U.S. city that included a total of 1,281 overt acts of conspiracy revealed…
In the mix: Social integration and social media adoption
Defending Against Social Media: How Public Criminal Defense Helps Us Address Social Media Governance
As justice-minded academics, we want to understand the role of social media in civil society with a vested interest in ensuring that social media serves a pluralistic society fairly and equitably. Gillespie (2018) has helped frame this task in terms of both governance of platforms and by platforms, but we also want to know what state governments do with social media (Gorwa, 2019). This paper focuses on how social media companies cooperate with st…
A smartphone case method: Reimagining social relationships with smartphone data in the U.S. context of Harlem
Young people are living their lives online and offline, but research rarely incorporates both in a synchronous way. This paper explores a way to address this issue through the use of smartphone data in ethnographic research. It puts forward an updated, case study approach that serves youth and media researchers by focusing robustly on social relationships and connectivity. To illustrate the method, I walk through my collaborative fieldwork with J…
Carceral communication: Mass incarceration as communicative phenomenon
This article introduces the concept of carceral communication to focus attention on the role of communication in mass incarceration’s racialized, criminal justice process. To argue that a communication perspective helps explain how individuals, neighborhoods, and prisons are linked together, the article uses publicly available indictments that charged three New York City youth gangs with violent crimes. It identifies three facets of carceral comm…
Digital Ethnography for Sociology: Craft, Rigor, and Creativity
How Social Media Use Mitigates Urban Violence: Communication Visibility and Third-Party Intervention Processes in Digital Urban Contexts
Outside the brackets: Why school administrators fail to see gendered harassment within an antibullying law
Much of school bullying involves students policing the gender roles and sexuality of other students. The proliferation of antibullying laws presents an opportunity to formally punish and mark gendered harassment as unacceptable. However, when this form of peer policing involves girls, administrators often consider it to fall outside the purview of the law. We use bracketing theory to understand how middle school administrators in New Jersey asses…
Defending against social media: Structural disadvantages of social media in criminal court for public defenders and defendants of low socioeconomic status
Secondary data collection practices are often opaque to platform users and researchers but known to shape individuals’ life chances in significant and unequal ways. In this paper, we articulate a clear relationship between invisible, unwanted data collection and its adverse, downstream consequences for marginalized groups by examining instances in the criminal justice field where social media data function as criminal evidence. We show how social…
Leveraging digital spaces and datafication in communication research: Contributions of digital qualitative fluidity to ethnographic interviewing
The digitalization of communication practices affords major gains for qualitative methods of communication science. What we term digital qualitative fluidity captures the way traditional boundaries between interviewing and ethnography may dissolve through the use of contemporary, digital technologies. We illustrate how communication scholars have leveraged the digital to open ethnographic spaces within interviews to examine situated communication…
Authentic listening as relational praxis: Theorizing from interpersonal, journalistic, ethnographic, and community work to a reflexive framework
This essay advances the concept of authentic listening as a multidimensional and multilevel process of relational, political, and ethical labor. Rather than conceptualizing authenticity as an individual trait or expressive ideal, as is often the case in communication research, we reframe it as a co-constructed achievement that emerges through listening, and is therefore shaped by power, positionality, and the conditions of reception. Drawing on f…
Sociology (14 works) · Political science (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Social media (8 works) · Social science (7 works) · Anthropology (6 works) · Ethnography (6 works) · Social Media and Politics (6 works) · Criminology (5 works)