Please join the Rutgers Digital Ethnography Working Group (DEWG) for our upcoming Book Talk with Dr. Jordan Kraemer, author of Mobile City: Emerging Media, Space, and Sociality in Contemporary Berlin!
Friday, October 24, 2025
1-2:30 pm EST
Online
This conversation is moderated by Dr. Jeff Lane, co-director of the Rutgers Digital Ethnography Working Group, and Grant Lattanzi, PhD student in the Rutgers Department of Journalism and Media Studies!
About Mobile City:
In Mobile City, Jordan H. Kraemer charts the rise of social media and an emerging "knowledge" class in early-2000s Berlin. Many young Germans and EU-Ausländer (foreigners from other EU countries), attracted to Berlin's vibrant post-unification counterculture, moved to the city just as they began using social media like Facebook and Twitter. Social media and Berlin alike became hip sites for urban, middle-class aspirations, but, as Kraemer accounts, social media users became embroiled in contestations over class mobility and identity, as urban planners and developers remade Berlin into a neoliberal "creative city."
The rise of this creative city involved scale-making projects that fused imaginaries of digital technologies with the expansive impulses of late capital: a vision of world peace and economic cooperation through global interconnection. But in Berlin, scalar transformations were lived out through ordinary practices that reconfigured daily sociality, mobility, and urban space. Mobile City explores how digital media practices forged emergent scales like the global and supranational yet were equally complicit in potential European disintegration and illiberalism.
Jordan Kraemer (she/they) is a digital anthropologist and research leader with expertise in tech policy and advocacy. She directed mixed-methods research at ADL’s Center for Technology and Society to combat online hate and harassment, and has conducted grant-funded studies of digital platforms, gentrification, and neighborhood organizing with support from the SSRC and New_ Public. She is most recently the author of Mobile City: Emerging Media, Space, and Sociality in Contemporary Berlin (Cornell 2025), an ethnography of social media among Berlin’s early 2000s creative class. Her work has also appeared in Tech Policy Press; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; Anthropological Quarterly; and Fast Company, among others. She previously taught feminist technology studies at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering and media anthropology at Wesleyan University as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow. She holds a master’s degree in social science from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from UC Irvine.
Jeffrey Lane is an Associate Professor of Communication at Rutgers University in the School of Communication & Information. He uses urban and digital ethnographic methods to study urban life, work, criminal justice, and youth culture. Lane is the author of the award-winning book The Digital Street (Oxford University Press, 2019), a neighborhood study of social media use in Harlem (NYC). His current streams of research include micromobility, youth exposure to gun violence, and the impacts of social media on teenagers and their parents. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Communication and New Media & Society and written about in popular outlets like The Atlantic and New York Times.
Grant Lattanzi studies media technology and everyday social life from interpretive social scientific and historical perspectives. He is a PhD student of Communication, Information, & Media at Rutgers University and holds a Masters of Arts in Communication, Culture, and Technology from Georgetown University. His ongoing research projects examine social considerations around increasingly mobile digital images; discourses of technology and urban futurity in the climate tech sector; mobility & media; and brand retrospectives (i.e., Spotify Wrapped). Grant is also the co-host of the media theory podcast, Media, Culture, & why we feel like crying so much. Lattanzi's teaching, research, and media production engage a range of fields, including visual culture, science and technology studies, sociology, and media ecology.