Online Lives, Space and Place: Exploring the Mobile City

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Over the last two decades, as Berlin reinvented itself as a "creative city," social media both mirrored and shaped shifting social landscapes—offering new possibilities while also reinforcing inequalities. How did digital media practices reshape urban life? And what can Berlin’s story tell us about the broader relationship between technology, culture, and the places we live? Today’s guest is Jordan H. Kraemer, the author of a new book that tries to answer these questions and more. It's called Mobile City: Emerging Media, Space, and Sociality in Contemporary Berlin, published by Cornell University Press.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Jordan Kraemer:

I'm Jordan Kraemer. I'm the director of research at ADL's Center for Technology and Society. I'm also an affiliate at UNC's Center for Information Technology and Public Life, and I'm the author of Mobile City Emerging Media Space and Sociality in Contemporary Berlin.

Justin Hendrix:

So we are going to nerd out a little bit on the role of media and placemaking, the relationship between media and cities in particular Berlin in a period of time where you were there 2007 to 2015, what you call the late capitalist transition to an information economy, when many young people moved to Berlin as part of a nascent knowledge or creative class. I remember that period. I remember visiting Berlin in that period. Did you go specifically to study or did you go because it was cool?

Jordan Kraemer:

I went there the first time, I guess in 2007, and then I just went to visit, and I was really taken by the changes the city was undergoing, the vibrancy, the cultural life. There was a lot going on in Berlin at that period. But then I went back to the States, and I enrolled in a PhD program in cultural anthropology, and I was really interested in the role of these emerging social media technologies, platforms like back in the day, MySpace, then very nascent Facebook, Twitter, and so forth. And so then I proposed going back to Berlin to study how these technologies were being taken up by this kind of emerging middle class of young people who were themselves moving to the city for the first time. A lot of the people in my research had arrived in Berlin only in the past year

Justin Hendrix:

So you've captured a period of time in Berlin, a period of time in your life. Also a period of time in which various new platforms were coming online and growing to scale. You write urban and digital spaces alike became new sites of contestation over class mobility and identity at multiple spatial scales, generating new abilities. This is some pretty good communications research language. What were you trying to do in terms of setting out this study? What's the purpose of this book?

Jordan Kraemer:

I think when I first started looking at social media, particularly in the context of youth and youth culture, there was still a lot of anxiety and a lot of concern about what young people were doing online. I worked for a youth development nonprofit between completing my master's and going to study for my PhD. And there was just all this concern about MySpace and what young people were getting up to. I realized there was not a lot of understanding about what it was that people got out of social media and what they were doing online. But as an anthropologist, it was really important for me to understand those practices in the context of people's everyday lives. Not just about what people do on platforms, but how the way they interact online is very much based in what they're doing every day. But one of the things that made what I found in Berlin really different from what I had been seeing in the US context is the way people spent time together online wasn't seen as a source of isolation or something that was really different from everyday life.

The same groups of friends spent a ton of time getting together with each other. And some of this is about age and stage of life. Some of it's also about the sort of way urban life is different in a lot of European and other cities. It's a much more dense transit. People spend a lot more time hanging out in each other's homes or getting together at cafes. And so I saw that social media were being included in the set of social practices around friendship and broader social networks rather than being seen as this separate world.

Justin Hendrix:

So this is the early days of Facebook really taking over things. In your first chapter, you spend quite a lot of time on Facebook. This idea of inhabiting the local online, the idea of localness as a kind of media experience in addition to place experience. What are some of the features of this?

Jordan Kraemer:

I really wanted this book to rethink a lot of our assumptions about online lives and space in place. So I think that in a lot of popular imagining, digital worlds are this separate place, and sometimes they are, there are online virtual worlds that really are separate places from other kinds of places. But I think at the time, there were a lot of ways in which we thought of online spaces as separate or different from everyday life. And I wanted to rethink that and think about how do people bring their everyday practices that are place-based and how do they exist online? And part of the reason I wanted to do this is that rather than thinking of online worlds as separate from everyday life or disembodied, I wanted to recognize that we go online from particular places, both geographic places, but also from particular social locations and online spaces are not places where we lose our bodies or we lose the places that we're from or that we're moving through.

And in fact, the ways that we interact through digital media, whether it's through social media, there are lots of different people and places in Berlin, through mobile phones, as I address a lot of different kind of emerging media in the book, the ways that we interact through these technologies, they then shape the places that we live, our sense of identity. And in particular in the book, I talk about the relationship between identity and changing ideas about nationalism or place in Europe because this period is also the period of European integration. It's the period where Berlin had just gone back to being the capital of Germany, the EU is continuing to expand which member countries were part of it. And at that larger scale was this sense that there was a connection between digital media and global or supernational identity that Europe will be integrated as a shared community. What I wanted to understand is that what was happening was digital media making, giving people a sense that they were part of a global community and when it wasn't what was happening. And so what I found, for example, was that life in Berlin is very diverse. Of course, there are lots of different people and places in Berlin, and there's a ton going on there. But some of the ways that people moved through urban space in Berlin, they shaped life online. Some of the aesthetics for these sorts of young people that I was studying shaped their lives online. And so I wanted to document and understand that.

Justin Hendrix:

And where were you staying in Berlin? I understand you were in East Berlin.

Jordan Kraemer:

That's correct. But I lived there for about 10 months, from 2009 to 2010, and then I came back. This is the way anthropologists do our research. We often in grad school can go and do a much longer fieldwork, stay of up to a year or more, and then we come back for shorter stays. And I think one of the things that distinguishes the kind of research methods I use in this book from other methods in sort of media communication studies is it's based on really long-term in-depth fieldwork where I, so I lived in Friedrichshain, which is part of East Berlin, but on the border with former West Berlin with a neighborhood called Kreuzberg, which is the heart of the German Turkish community and was up against the wall before the wall came down and had been really underdeveloped and resourced in a lot of ways. But the neighborhood that I was in at the time was also very vibrant. Cost of rent was really low. A lot of people compare Berlin at the time to sort of New York in the eighties, lots of artists and social movements and a very creative place, but also a very vibrant public space. There were flea markets every weekend, a farmer's markets, people really use the cafe life that people really socialize in public space in a particular way.

Justin Hendrix:

You were also observing how the infrastructure of Berlin or Germany as a whole was changing during that time. That seems to be part of what you were observing was not just how people were engaging with social media or using mobile phones or how all those things were generally present in the more intimate aspects of their life, but also the underlying infrastructure, the investments in broadband, the towers going up. What role did that play in the development of these ideas?

Jordan Kraemer:

The history of the development of digital infrastructure plays out very differently in different parts of the world. In a lot of Europe, mobile phones had, in fact, been developed much earlier than in the US. They were much more widespread. They were much less expensive. So the people that I was studying were groups of young people, including a group of young people who were mainly a mix of those who had grown up in East Berlin, sorry, in West Berlin and moved to East Berlin or former East Berlin, many of whom had gone to university together, but were also connected to lots of other, what they call EU slander people from the European Union, from France and Denmark, and back then sometimes the UK and various places who moved to Berlin. There were also a number of anglophones. There were folks from the us, there were folks from New Zealand, but Berlin is super diverse and there are people from really all over the world who come and go to Berlin's nightclubs and get by working at galleries or DJing and so forth.

And then there was another group of young people who had all grown up together in the same town, towns, and villages of a region of former East Germany, not too far, about an hour's train ride out of Berlin. Germany had unified after the wall came down. So in 1989, the wall came down, and in 1990, Germany was officially reconstituted as a single nation. And this is the bigger backdrop for some of the questions about space in place as you have this context in which Germany and Europe more broadly had been divided into sort of capitalist west and socialist east. And then you had this story in which allegedly the European Union was replacing the conflicts of the 20th century through with economic cooperation and technological development. And there was I think a vision or an expectation that economic and technological development would make the world smaller, make it more socially and culturally integrated and replace some of the conflicts and violence of the 20th century.

So Berlin inhabits this intersection or this nexus where it's seen as this place where the literal city had been divided. And from 1990 on, it started being stitched back together along with Germany more broadly. But that process is very uneven and was very uneven. And so one of the things I talk about in the book is how digital media and digital infrastructures themselves were very much affected by the process of reconnecting or stitching Germany back together. And it very much affected the experiences of digital technologies of young people that I was studying. So, both of these circles of young people they call themselves didn't call themselves this, but the term that they use is Freundeskreis, a friend circle to describe the closer circles of friends, the ways that they got online and used digital media were very much shaped by both their access that they had growing up.

If you grew up in East Germany and you were in your early teens or late tweens when the wall came down, chances are you actually didn't have a computer at home growing up. Certainly didn't have a laptop. So often school was the first place that you had learned to use a computer and you probably hadn't gotten a chance to go online. So for a lot of young people that had grown up in East Germany because they remembered the wall coming down, they were really going online for the first time or had gone online for the first time relatively recently, and it did open up a whole social world. It did open up access, particularly to popular culture. The young people in my study were really enamored of indie music and electronic music, and they tended to be really active in Berlin's electronic music scenes. And for them, both digital media and being in Berlin opened up new social worlds.

It wasn't just about technology makes the world more global. It was both the place and the media that opened up these new connections for them, connections to Ausländer from elsewhere, the EU and other places, connections, online, connections in person, and then I think, but for young people who had grown up in West Germany, it was a little bit different. They had been using, they had been online earlier, they had been using computers earlier. It lowers the barrier a little bit to navigating these technologies. They're not as novel. You're a little more familiar with them. So even though Germany hasn't been divided in, let's see, when I was there, it had been 15 years and now it's been 26 years. And yet the divide still shapes people's experiences of technology. It shapes the transit system, which actually still reflects the way that the subway had been taken down during the subway had been taken down in East Germany. And so there were tram cars instead. And so still today, Berlin's public transit reflects that history.

Justin Hendrix:

So this technological layer is being added on top of how Berlin is set up and governed. You write that mobile media encoded normative assumptions about class selfhood and mobility reflecting their design by and for tech professionals. How did you see that play out? What was the vision of those tech professionals?

Jordan Kraemer:

We still see this, I think in a lot of the ways that technology is designed today in Berlin in the two thousands and 2010s, I saw it in the way that mobile devices and mobile apps, for example, were very much designed with certain kind of assumptions in place about what people are going to do with them and who's going to use them. For example, at the time there was a popular app called Qype, which was very similar to Yelp and it was full of the kinds of restaurants that young, professional middle class was interested in going to. And so the app made it really easy to find and review those kinds of places. And sure you could add other places, you could add the local tcal, which is a convenience store, but people didn't. And so what I try to argue is that these technologies both have assumptions built into them about what they're for.

So a lot of mobile media, the smartphone actually was modeled on a personal digital assistant. But what is a personal digital assistant? It's a tool for an office worker. So the tools that it comes with are good for office work, it has a calendar and it has contacts and it has all these kinds of features that assume that you're going to use it in a particular way. Now of course, people are creative and they appropriate technology and they make it work for them. Anthropologists have found examples across all kinds of different cultural contexts of the ways in which people adapt technology to their social and cultural context. So I think that just because the technology is designed for a particular user or with a particular set of ideas about use in mind, that never determines what people do with it. And in fact, one of the things that really struck me every week at the apartment that I lived at with roommates who, like I said, had grown up in former East Germany, they grew up in East Germany before the event, and then every week a whole bunch of their friends from their friend circle came over to hang out, and everybody would get there and they would take off their coats and they would go get a beer out of the fridge, and then they would just put their phone down and just sit it down on the table and walk away and forget it.

Which was to me, from an American context, was not necessarily what I expected. And then what would happen is the phone would ring inevitably, often it be somebody who wasn't there who was on their way, or maybe a friend who still lived in the town they had grown up in and somebody else would answer. For me, this seemed a little bit strange to answer somebody else's phone, but what I came to realize is for them, rather than the phone being just an extension of their individuality, the way a lot of people, or some people in the US might think of it, the phone was actually allowed them to stay connected to this sort of broader social circle. So the phones actually became integrated into a more sort of collective sense of selfhood and social connection. And so it really struck me that just because the technology had been designed, mobile phones assume a single user, right?

When you had a wired landline, there'd be on one line, you'd have multiple handsets throughout a house, for example. And the design didn't presume a single user per device, obviously one person would mainly use them at a time, but today's cell phones, you're logged into all your accounts. Using someone else's phone is really, doesn't work very well. And yet people found ways to creatively reuse their phones that represented different understandings of sociality. And so I think to me again is from an anthropological perspective, it shows that technology, it's not deterministic, it doesn't have a single effect on social life. Instead, it's shaped by understandings of social life.

Justin Hendrix:

You already mentioned this, but I want to ask you a little more about what you call networked national feelings, how all this cultural production and placemaking adds up to something bigger to a feeling of what it meant to be German in that time. Of course, you were looking at one particular group of people, I'm sure that many people had many different views on what it meant to be German on some level. Yet it seems to me this idea of national selfhood, the extent to which technology plays a role in the formation of that, that's something worth understanding.

Jordan Kraemer:

This finding really surprised me because it wasn't necessarily what I had been looking for. And good research is always research that surprises you I think. So there's a lot of literature in media studies and anthropology on the history of national media and nationalism, and it goes back to theorists like Benedict Anderson who articulated the idea of a nationally imagined community that print media like novels and newspapers because they circulate amongst people who are part of a shared nation, they actually bring a sense of shared national identity into being, and people recognize each other as fellow readers. This story, though is part of a story that I would call a scale-making story, a story about the change in scale of social life from, say, more tribal or parochial, which I would put in quotes to more regional and then national and then super national or global.

So I agree completely with Anderson about the role of national media in helping create a sense of national community. But I wouldn't assume that what preceded that is necessarily communities at the smaller scale. So what I actually argue is that historically, I don't know that people linked a sense of selfhood to geographic place at all in the same way. What I found was that itself is a shift that came about with modernity, that people began to link identity, which itself is a modern category or a modern idea to place. And that print media absolutely helped bring into being contemporary understandings of national selfhood and national identity. And what I found when I looked at the role of social media, so instead of social media undermining national identity and creating global or transnational identity, it brought both transnational and national senses of self and connection into the same online spaces.

So now, and this goes back to the idea of inhabiting the local ways of living. Local style and local aesthetics played out online, they played out on Facebook groups and the kinds of things that people talked about and the sort of images they used online, local ideas about life in Berlin could take place and alongside a feeling of shared national identity alongside transnational connections, these were all playing out online, but not in a way that collapsed these contexts into one. People found very creative ways to manage social relationships at different scales online. One of the ways they did that was through language practices. People, for example, move back and forth between English on the one hand and national languages like French or German on the other. And they moved in between more informal internet speech on one hand and more formal registers on the other.

So I think I observed is this complexity in the ways that identity at different sort of geographic levels played out. But what really surprised me about nationalism online is obviously in the German context for many young middle class Germans, particularly at the time when I conducted this field work 15 years ago now, people were very uncomfortable understandably with expressions of German nationalism. And so for other Europeans often felt more comfortable. There were a number of Dutch people connected to the young people in these circles, or French people who felt much more comfortable with expressing national identity. But if you ask most of the Germans in my study how they felt about being German, they would say, oh, I don't feel strongly about being German. It's not important to me. I could be from anywhere. But although they said that when it came to things that they associated with feeling German.

So for example, many Germans really love a white asparagus sparkle, which only comes in a certain season in the spring, in April and May, it's a big deal. Everybody gets together and goes out and buys fresh sparkle and eats it and it has to be eaten really fresh to be good. But people had a really positive both whether they were from East Germany or West Germany, really positive associations with this very German food and German regional practice. And so there were ways of feeling German that were often quite acceptable. But often what made feeling German acceptable was enacting these cultural practices in the context of Berlin and in the context of cosmopolitanism. So I talk about as an emerging cosmopolitan nationalism where people felt comfortable being German and embracing Germanist as part of a broader cosmopolitan world as Europeans in a multinational context, a number of people told me that the World Cup, I think the World Cup was in Germany in 2006 and people felt much more comfortable for the first time expressing a sense of German. Again because it was in the context of other Europeans expressing national identity. They were not comfortable with sort of German jingoistic sense of nationalism, but multicultural cosmopolitan nationalism. I think that you see this still in European context around identity and self. And I think you see it in what's going on in Ukraine, for example, where I think a lot of people have this strong sense of wanting to be Ukrainian in the context of a broader cosmopolitan multinational world and want to be oriented towards that.

Justin Hendrix:

So you do get onto the idea of what you call illiberal spaces. This is your epilogue. And even the phrase makes me think a little bit about where we've got to today. You are not in Germany anymore, of course, we're observing it from abroad. Things have changed there. There's a resurgent far right, the politics of that country have changed quite a bit. Is there anything that you feel like looking back on your study, thinking about the issues in the context of the time you were there, anything that signals to you something about the current moment?

Jordan Kraemer:

No, it does. And I think that one of the things that was interesting for me about writing this book is because I wrote it over an extended period of time, I had the luxury of hindsight and the ability to put the practices that at the time were contemporary into some perspective and to see some of the arc of changes. So I set out to write about the ways in which digital media don't necessarily make social life any more global or don't necessarily dissolve national connection and they don't replace local ways of doing things. Set out to ask those questions and look at that. And then, when I stepped back, I was writing this book when during the first Trump election in 2016. I was still doing some of my analysis and my writing, I was trying to come to terms with rising extremism, I went back to Berlin in 2015 to follow up on my fieldwork.

And I found that there were far right groups like Pegida, which is an anti-Muslim anti-immigrant group, not only had they gained in numbers and visibility, but they were of course using social media for their campaigns. And so when I had been in Berlin in 2009 and 10, social media really were spaces for friendship and leisure. People talked about music and they talked about what they were going to do that weekend and they really used it to connect mostly with friends. People read the news online, but that was a very separate practice and people didn't mostly talk about the news on their social media accounts, but by 2015 there had been a big shift and social media had become much more political and sometimes politicized spaces where people did talk more about politics, they took more of a stand on issues. And some of these changes I think were really positive.

I mean, a number of the people in my research, for example, got much more active in addressing issues of gender inequality in music scenes and addressing other sort of broader political questions around immigration. In Europe, some people went and volunteered to help migrants who were coming to Europe. So I think that there were ways in which these technologies enabled new forms of political organizing and mobilization, but Facebook in particular, but other platforms as well, made a lot of very intentional changes to their platforms from starting in at least 2013. It was a bit of a crisis for Facebook as millennials had used it, but the next generation of young people were not really as invested in it. They saw it as the place where older people went, where their parents were. And so Facebook had to figure out how to monetize their platform, and they began to try to keep ad revenue on the platform by ensuring that if you went to read a news article rather than going and clicking through to that site and having the news outlet get the ad dollars, Facebook would load the content in the app and Facebook would get the revenue.

And at first, the shift was great for news media and really helped I think, drive readership to a lot of particularly major national outlets. But within a few years, a lot of news outlets realized this was not a good deal and that Facebook was getting the revenue instead of them. By 2017, a lot of major national publications stopped partnering with Facebook, but it was too late at that point. People were used to getting their news on Facebook, and ad revenue cratered. And I think we can see there are a lot of reasons for the decline in local news media, but the US is suffering a huge void, a huge gap in local news media. And I think that's actually contributing pretty significantly to the rise of hate and extremism and bias and partisanship that we're seeing today. Local media is really important to keeping people informed, but I also think that as people started to get their news from their social networks online, they didn't necessarily vet the information.

I think one of the things that makes disinformation spread more easily is that people get information on social media through people they know and then they trust, and there is no role of a news editor to vet that information. And so I think that these platforms have taken steps that have allowed them to be weaponized and allowed them to become more divisive and polarized. But I don't think it's deterministic. I don't think technology has to have these effects. I think living in a really unequal society has those effects, and I think that a lot of research supports that. But what's happening that I think is continuing to shape our current media ecosystem is that what I call the scales of social life that had been expanding the transnational connections and so forth. Some of those scales started breaking down. And it was actually beginning when I was in Berlin with the Euro crisis of 2009, and then the sovereign debt crisis in Greece and Spain where Germany and other European EU nations, mostly northern EU nations bailed out a number of southern countries.

And the Euro lost a lot of its value. And then as a result, a lot of nations embraced austerity measures and we're still living with the consequences. A lot of those. And then following that Britain, the same year that the United States elected Trump, the first time Britain voted to leave the European Union, the European Union was supposed to be this achievement of scale making, of expanding the scale of social life. In the book, I compare the fantasy of the world getting more connected to Star Trek, right? Because in the world of Star Trek, the same thing happens. The whole earth becomes shared country, and then it joins up with various intergalactic alliances or galactic alliances. But the vision is the same, that we'll achieve peace and prosperity by having a larger polity that's more unified, that the territorial organization of society will get bigger and more global.

And instead what we saw was some of those scales started to break and fracture and Britain left the EU. And I think we've seen the rise of increasingly illiberal governments across Europe and now here in the us. And so I think these things are connected and that technology does have a lot of potential for sure to be democratizing, to make horizontal connections, to build social capital. But historically, technology exists to concentrate capital and to extract value from labor. And so I think that we're seeing social media ultimately has become very concentrated in the hands of a few very wealthy people, and of course can now be used to support their political goals and their economic goals. And I fear the same will happen with ai, and I think a lot of these same conversations are playing out around AI.

Justin Hendrix:

You and I both live in New York, we live in the United States now at a particular moment in time. You've just mentioned AIC. We talked a little bit about the growth or resurgence of the far right in Germany. We're seeing our own far-right movement here in the United States. What does the anthropologists in you tell you when you look closer to home? Is there anything you see with some of the learnings of this book in your mind that explain this moment in New York or in the United States to you?

Jordan Kraemer:

After I came back from Berlin and I came back, actually went back to California, and then I finished my PhD and I moved to the East Coast and I ended up in Brooklyn as people sometimes do, and I was here during the pandemic. One of the things that I was really interested in following up on after my work on social media in Berlin was precisely what was happening in spaces in places like Brooklyn and New York and in the pandemic, these questions around the role of digital platforms and placemaking suddenly became very front and center when all of the spaces that people had been able to get together in shared what you might call in-person or co-present, were suddenly unavailable. Since I finished this book, I've conducted research on the role of digital platforms in neighborhood life and particularly neighborhood organizing. And I think that one of the really positive things that I saw during the pandemic was that tools like Facebook, which were meant to connect young college kids and then have been monetized, were actually being used by mutual aid groups and by nothing groups, and were being used by neighbors, and they were being used to organize people to engage with the city around urban planning and city planning projects, partly because of the dearth of local news media, social platforms and social media have offered these alternative spaces for very hyperlocal life to unfold and for people to organize and to meet up and to again provide mutual support and care.

To me, that's our sort of best frontier going forward in the current time and place when I think federal legislation and federal government is going to be very much up in the air as to whether it will actually support most Americans real needs, particularly as inequality continues to grow as climate crisis continues to worsen. And so I think that, and I don't think we should be relying on the mega-platforms like Facebook if we can avoid it. I think there's a real need for platforms that better meet the needs of mutual aid networks and local communities. And in fact, what I've found in this research is that the biggest frustration people had is that the tools that are available to them, slack and Google Suite and Facebook and so forth, and even next door, they're designed for office use and for white-collar work, or they're designed for individual entrepreneurs. They're not really designed for mutual aid and care or for community organizing. So I think that there's a need for tools and technologies that are more decentralized, that are easy to use, that communities really get to drive and design. And so I think that's where I see a positive role for digital platforms is to recapture the potential that I think many of us hope social media would have 20 years ago, but be much more accountable to the communities that are using them.

Justin Hendrix:

Is there a next book for Dr. Jordan Kraemer?

Jordan Kraemer:

I've done a year of fieldwork, and I've written up a little of my findings, but it would be great if I were able to sit down and write that book on the role of digital platforms in local community life. But we'll see.

Justin Hendrix:

Well perhaps when that book comes along, we'll have another chance to talk. This book is called Mobile City Merging Media Space and Sociality and Contemporary Berlin. It's by Jordan H. Kraemer, and available from Cornell University Press. I appreciate your contributions to Tech Policy press and certainly your expertise on this matter, but also on the matters that you address in your day job. Grateful to you for all that you've done to help inform us on these things. Jordan, thank you so much.

Jordan Kraemer:

Thank you so much, Justin. I've been so happy to be on your show, and I'm also so thrilled to get to read Tech Policy Press. It's where I get informed about tech policy, so thank you, too.