STROLLING AND

SCROLLING

Lana Z Porter

Navigating the Local through the New York Times Brooklyn “Local” Blog

ABSTRACT

New media, particularly hyperlocal blogs, have reinvigorated and reframed scholarly interest in locality. Online renderings of the offline world inevitably leave technological, ontological and representational lacunae; this article addresses those gaps between off- and online imaginings of the local. Using the New York Times “Local” blog as a case study, this article examines how the “Local” blog socially and spatially reproduces — and produces anew — two Brooklyn neighborhoods that are in the midst of conspicuous social and spatial transformation due to gentrification. Strolling the streets of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, Brooklyn and scrolling the “Local” blog are two categorically different acts that involve notably different actors.

I argue, however, that gentrification’s alteration of the local in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill refashions the actual community into a brick and mortar version of blog, which, in its particular imagining of the local, acts as a site primarily for a neo-middle class that has recently planted its flag there. As the neighborhood changes and the blog persists, the scroller of the blog fuses with the stroller of the street and becomes a “lurker,” desiring to see but remain unseen and unencumbered by messy encounters with Others. The technological capacity to create an avatared version of a real world community has important and arguably problematic implications for spatiality, sociality and sociability both off- and online.

Keywords: blogs, citizen journalism, neighborhoods, gentrification, aura, flâneur

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ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION

METHODS

PRIVATIZATION OF THE PUBLIC

THE NEW SOCIABILITY

STROLLING AND SCROLLING

EX POSTMODERN

DECEPTIVE TOTALITY

CONCLUSION

REFERENCES

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7 - 8

8 – 9

9 – 11

11 – 14

14 – 15

15 – 17

17 – 19

20 – 21

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CONTENTS PAGES

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Introduction

On a New York City subway map, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, Brooklyn occupy the space between the Fulton and Classon stops along the lime green line of the G train. A sliver of Williamsburg abuts Clinton Hill to the northeast, and below, the intersection by the Atlantic Terminal Mall – a shiny collection of American consumer chains on a once-gritty block in southwest Fort Greene – adjoins the northernmost tip of Park Slope. For a long time, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, sandwiched between two neighborhoods famed for their “steroidal gentrification” (Powell, 2010:MB1), were the salami and slaw to Williamsburg and Park Slope’s contrasting slices of artisanal baguette; today, most old-time residents’ biggest fear is that their neighborhood is losing its authentic flavor.

“Bistros replace bodegas, cocktail bars morph out of old-style salons, and the neighborhood as a whole creates a different kind of sociability,” writes Sharon Zukin (Zukin, 2010:4). New eateries characterize the many spatial and social alterations brought about by gentrification, the process through which older, often-poorer residents of a neighborhood are replaced or marginalized by young, upwardly mobile professionals. Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, Brooklyn are undergoing these changes at the hands of a neo-middle class that imagines itself to be as gritty and cool as the neighborhood itself.

In March of 2009, the New York Times launched a blog by and for the citizens of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill – but under the supervision and curatorial authority of the Times – called the “Local.”1 The project was twofold: develop a blogging platform for hyperlocal community journalism that the Times could franchise and sell, and, in the meantime, invest in “retain[ing] a certain core presence and audience in New York … as the paper and the company [became] more and more national and global.”2 The New York Times chose the neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill for the same reasons that the neo-middle class has been moving there in droves: they’re cool, multicultural, quirky and authentic. By appropriating the term “Local” for the blog’s name,

the blog’s producers lay bare their intent to depict a particular imagining of the “local.” What the Local blog can and cannot capture vis-à-vis the local in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill is the subject of this article. Henri Lefebvre’s distinction between abstract and real, qualitative and quantitative space, and his contention that “Today more than ever, class struggle is inscribed in space” (Lefebvre, 1991:55) illuminates the kinds of battles – and battlegrounds – brought about by gentrification in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. The search for authenticity ultimately becomes a contest over space. The Local blog adds a new dimension to the struggle over space because it is at once abstract and ethereal yet real and navigable. I will employ Michel de Certeau’s notion of the urban walker, Walter Benjamin’s concept of the flâneur, and my own explorations of what it means to be a scroller or stroller of space to investigate the in-between-ness of navigating an online blog about the offline world.

As a venture in online citizen journalism and an acknowledgement of the Internet’s propensity for open source participation, the Local blog might enlarge and enliven the public sphere. But just as the requirements for membership in the ideal public sphere – indeed, the “bourgeois” public sphere (Habermas, 1989; Calhoun, 1992) – create barriers to entry that are insurmountable for most, the Local blog too becomes a space, like the gentrified blocks of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, whose primary characteristic is its inclusion of some and exclusion of others.Here, the medium of the blog is built upon the same exclusions that have precluded certain Others from participation in the public sphere since the advent of print. As a tool by and for the gentrifiers, the Local blog becomes a private space; as a publicizer of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, the site draws gentrifiers to the neighborhood and privatizes the public with high rents and the creation of new exclusive places. The voices that tend to be heard on the blog belong to those whose presence in the neighborhood is lamented by the old timers. The Times’s ability to contact municipal sources and grab the attention of local government officials whose careers depend largely on the desires of the new guard allows for the new guard’s complaints, proposals and opinions, articulated on the blog, to gain

* This is a condensed version of my undergraduate thesis, which was submitted to the Department of Anthropology at University of Pennsylvania in the spring of 2010.

1 In tandem with the Brooklyn Local, the New York Times launched a Local for the neighborhoods of Maplewoord, South Orange, and Millburn, NJ. The entire project is an experiment to see whether, as one Times

manager put it, “There is any place for the New York Times in … hyper local community journalism.” The particular combination of tools (the layout of the blog, its sections, uses of other social media, etc), tone, and community presence of the Local, if successful, would be marketed as a package to “a base of journalistic entrepreneurs.”

2 A New York Times manager. 07

recognition and, furthermore, gain credence. I argue that, more than simply reflecting and capitalizing on the change in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill (Zukin, 2010:228), the Local contributes to it.

Specific struggles over space, enacted on the Local blog and on the streets of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, codify the messy politics of power and belonging brought about by gentrification. I will make the case for the inclusion of the Local blog in conversations of spatial, and consequently social transformation in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill through a patchwork of ethnographic narrative and critical theory, favoring qualitative means of explanation over quantitative. (Perhaps my suspicion of the quantitative reflects a shared fear of space becoming too quantified as residents are priced out of the neighborhood and prospective renters/buyers determine the value of space in subway stops, street names, square feet and distance to the park (Jackson, 2005).) A discussion of the spatial reorganization and sanitization of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill will set the stage for explorations of public and private, social and antisocial, modern and postmodern, real and abstract, and strolled and scrolled space (Lefebvre, 1991; de Certeau, 1984; Benjamin, 2008; Jackson, 2005; Harvey, 1990). What certain spaces mean for certain people, who has access to space, how people navigate space, and the sociabilities that result will be my main foci.

The latter portion of the article rests on the assumption that an aesthetics of space – and therefore how one perceives it – is contingent on the representational technologies available in or native to that space. This calls for a supplementation of Harvey’s definitions of modern and postmodern to include what Robert Samuels terms automodernity, or what I will call “modernity of the self.” “Modernity of the self” is a model through which to think about how the act of reading the blog – and the content of the blog itself – elicits and affords feelings of autonomy, social inclusion and fulfillment that perpetuate the cycle of exclusion that produces social change in the neighborhood. The particular aesthetics of the site, a montage of stories and images that cover a particular range of subjects, appeal to the scroller and keep him or her coming back.The technology of the Local blog provides a unique lens through which to examine how spaces are filled (or left unfilled) physically, psychologically, theoretically and imaginatively. It is the imagination that allows the local to become global (Appadurai, 1996:7) and the real to become fantastic (Benjamin, 2008; Buck-Morss, 1991; Lefebvre, 1991); gentrification transforms the uniquely

local to a multiple of a particular rendering of space that is quite global. The Local serves as a viewfinder (complete with manual focus) through which one can witness that transformation. But Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, as seen by the scroller through the lens of the Local blog, is not – and can never be – the same as the Fort Greene and Clinton Hill experienced by the stroller. That the blog imagines it might replace the act of strolling reveals the utopian dreams at its core.

In this article I will make the argument that, first, in reproducing the spaces of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, the New York Times Local blog, like the gentrification of the neighborhood, privatizes public space. Second, the privatization of public space on the site and on the street produces a social chasm between those who are included or allowed to enter space and those who are not, altering sociability off- and online. Third, one can express this included/excluded dichotomy as the difference between a scroller of the blog and a stroller of the street, two categorically different acts that involve notably different actors in terms of the nature of the spaces they navigate (original versus copied, abstract versus real) and the experience of navigating them. Fourth, the technological aesthetic of the blog (modernity of the self) perpetuates the divergence between the scroller and the stroller yet, fifth, by virtue of existing in abstract space and therefore being a collection of floating signs, leaves interpretive gaps that allow the scroller to imagine him or herself to be a stroller. Finally, if gentrification continues to usurp the public spaces of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, making the neighborhood more and more like the blog, the scroller and the stroller will fuse and become a “lurker,” desiring to see but remain unseen and unencumbered by encounters with Others.

Methods

I base my findings and hypotheses in this article on five weeks of ethnographic fieldwork on the streets of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, in the offices of the New York Times, and online during July and August of 2009. The ethnographic examination of a local blog that exists both in the ether and on the ground presented new methodological challenges and necessitated a mixing of methods that I (only half-jokingly) call “ethblography.”3 Ethblography incorporates traditional, offline ethnographic practice with a new approach to online worlds that not only involves content analysis of the site itself but

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immersion into and constant upkeep of connections forged online with readers, contributors, followers and critics of the blog through social media such as Twitter and other blogs.

I engaged in participant-observation offline and on: the online portion consisted of reading the blog, monitoring and cataloguing comments, and reaching out to blog readers and contributors, while participant-observation offline involved sitting in on New York Times meetings, helping with the daily production of the blog, wandering the streets of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, attending community events, eavesdropping, and, on occasion, taking photographs for the site. In addition to participant-observation, I conducted over one hundred surveys (semi-structured street interviews) with residents of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill to gauge their feelings about the neighborhood, their media use, and, in particular, whether they had heard of the Local blog. I also carried out structured interviews with opinionated or especially open street interviewees as well as the producers, editors and bloggers of the site and other community members.

An understanding of how the New York Times produces the Local blog is important to my arguments in the article. Indeed, what makes the Local blog unique is its technological capacity to construct an avatared version of the local, which can only be as realistic as its participants. The structural constrictions placed on the blog, though perhaps inescapable from a technical – and legal – standpoint, create a strict hierarchy that enables only those with the password to access the Times firewall to actually post content directly to the blog. Articles, audiovisual media and stories written by the NYT-staffed blogger, NYT interns, or citizen contributors must make their way to a queue of material through which a NYT editor must sift before editing and “building” each post (adding hyperlinks, inserting media, selecting tags, title, etc.).

The backlog of content and the particular sets of hands it must pass through create barriers that render citizen contributions the least likely posts

to end up on the blog.4 Disconnects between the everyday local and the Local blog reproduce the spatial and social disconnects between the life of the street and the world of the site. That gentrification is producing spatial and social change in the neighborhood and the site aims to reproduce the neighborhood (or perhaps produce it anew) are tensions I aim to disentangle in this piece.

Privatization of the Public

Lime green and cobalt blue publicize the imagined social life of the cerveza garden on the corner of Fulton and South Portland. On summer nights in Fort Greene, Habana Outpost hosts crowds of locals and outsiders who come seeking authenticity not only in the cuisine but in the ambiance that the place exudes. Self-conscious cool pours onto the street in the island beats that play on the stereo, the brightly painted beach chairs that line the sidewalk outside the garden’s chain link fence, and the multicolored picnic table umbrellas that flap in the wind until the sun sets, when they’re lowered to free up space for the drinking and dancing that will carry on into early morning. Solar panels built along a creamsicle-orange wall inside the garden advertise the fact that Habana Outpost, which opened in 2005, is New York City’s first “eco-eatery.” If foodies are the new gentrifiers of Brooklyn, as Zukin posits, Outpost was, as its name overtly professes, among the first settlers of the frontierland, its sacred territory protected by coils of barbed wire. The Habana institution began in 1998 in a small storefront in Soho called Café Habana/Habana to Go; its opening in Fort Greene, telling in and of itself, coincides roughly with the publication of an article in Time Out New York hailing the strip of South Portland Street between DeKalb and Lafayette, just a few yards from Habana Outpost, “the king of all New York blocks.” The article’s identification and conquest of the street seizes it from the possession of the residents of the neighborhood and makes it the property of outsiders. Outpost, like the Local blog, is yet another spatial takeover wherein the only constituents are those who

3 Etymologically speaking, the accurate term would be ethnoblography, but, for brevity and ease of pronunciation, I have settled on the term “ethblography.”

4 On the one-year anniversary of the Local, the editor cited the statistic that the blog’s content has been 40% citizen-contributed. This does not adjust, however, for the fact that many citizen contributions are in the form of serial sections of the site that appear weekly.

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are privy to and can afford entry into these private, colonized spaces.

One can view gentrification as the privatization of the public spaces of a neighborhood (Jackson, 2005). The arrival of new residents with the ability to pay increasing rents and mortgages creates opportunities for new businesses and services to emerge. Habana Outpost5 represents just one kind of addition; new banks, boutiques, spas, specialty shops and realty offices represent some of the many others. These establishments alter the physical landscape of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill and create spaces that certain members of the community would not dare to enter for lack of financial means or for the feeling that they are not welcome. Price, distance to the park and other amenities, square footage, and proximity to subway stops become the Lefebvrian quantitative arbiters of space. Along with gentrification comes local government support (and the support of other gentrifiers) for the new members of the community whose deeper pockets and investment in the neighborhood afford them greater clout. Increased surveillance of spaces by city police, park rangers and fellow citizens renders public life increasingly private and neighbors increasingly leery while real estate development and public works projects to beautify and cleanse the neighborhood alter familiar spaces. Gentrification modifies space by transforming its particularities into recognizable, universal markers of middle-class-ness. In this way, one can see gentrified Fort Greene and Clinton Hill as a mechanical reproduction of the pre-gentrification Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura seeks to encapsulate the ‘something’ that gets lost when new technologies are wielded to mechanically reproduce an original work of art into multiple copies. Aura is that captivating energy of experiencing something unique and original; the experience of viewing – or, in this case, dwelling in – a copy of the original, according to Benjamin, is distracted and lacks excitement. Gentrification’s slow but persistent transformation of space strips Fort Greene and Clinton Hill of its aura.

Communications media privatize the public as well. Benedict Anderson wrote about the emergence of an imagined community of newspaper readers that transcends national borders through the shared experience of reading the same material (Anderson, 2006). Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere calls upon the notion of shared physical spaces in which propertied gentlemen, having availed themselves of the goings-on of the state through the medium of print, could engage in rational-critical debate and become participants in a nascent form of democracy (Habermas, 1989). The theory of the public sphere makes active citizenship contingent on the existence of and access to communications media; the notion of the imagined community couples nationalism, and therefore citizenship, with the same conditions. And all these linkages are necessarily bound to capitalism, which renders the goods and services that are preconditions of those forms of civic engagement available only to a select few. Those who do not have access to media, the time to use them, or the rights and privileges of full citizenship6 are often barred from participation in these discourses.

The Internet is often touted as a tool that gives freedom and power to those who use it. On the contrary, the Web and the technologies required to access it can be limiting. The physical set-up of an individual browsing the Internet is one in which the user sits, usually indoors, tethered to a computer and restricted by the breadth of his or her wireless network. The technology of the blog facilitates yet another step of removal and exclusivity by being geared toward and written by certain members of the population and policed by others through comment cleansing, editing and moderating. One must have the time, the interest, and the technological, literal and cultural literacy to engage. Simply having the means to access the blog does not guarantee readership; one must feel included too. Blogs can be perpetrators of a “discourse elitism” (Benkler, 2006) that amounts to claims that “The online public sphere is already a de facto aristocracy dominated by

5 John Jackson writes in Real Black that the restaurant, with its carefully secured outdoor furniture, is a “decidedly middle-class location” that serves as an arena for “performances of middle-classness” (Jackson, 2005:51).

6 See Sassen, 1991, Caldeira, 2002 and Appadurai, 2002 on the meanings and contingencies of citizenship. As Sassen, Caldeira and Appadurai have posited, citizenship does not always include the rights and privileges that official citizenship claims to offer. That the Local is a venture in “citizen journalism” complicates and casts doubt on the seemingly inclusive nature of the project.

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7 All names have been changed to ensure anonymity.

those skilled in the ‘high deliberative arts’” (Hindman, 2008:280).

The physical and imagined spaces that are exalted as open and public are in fact quite private. And when spaces are private, not everyone can be included. The spatial changes brought about by gentrification and the blog set up a division between the old sociability of the neighborhood (the excluded) and the new sociability of the neighborhood (the included).

The New Sociability

Moments after I met Anisa,7 a 31-year-old African American fashion merchandiser who lives a few doors down from Habana Outpost, she confided that she was moving to Crown Heights the next week after eight years in Fort Greene. When I asked her why, she cited the Time Out article, whose coronation of her block constituted for her the point of no return for the neighborhood. “… That was the year when the cost of living in downtown Brooklyn went up 82%,” she said. “I will never forget that number. I went from being able to find a studio for $700-900 to a studio costing $1,200-$1,300. Now it can run you anywhere from $1,400-$2,100.” The difficulty of putting words to the subtle experiences of qualitative change is perhaps reflected in the tendency to quantify it (a Lefebvrian nod to the hegemonic character of quantified space). Anisa articulated both with ease. She told me that she prayed for rain on summer evenings so that she could have a peaceful night without the ruckus of Outpost and the smoke of its patrons’ cigarettes wafting into her living room.

The crowd at Outpost exemplifies the younger, slicker urban middle class – the neo-middle class – that has planted its flag in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. The notion of gentrification as a suburbanizing and baby proofing of space doesn’t fly with the neo-middle class. Instead, the neo-middle class embraces its own version of grittiness and authenticity (smoking, loud partying, drinking, wearing certain clothes, eating certain foods), but with money. The microbrewery beer, ripped designer denim, gourmet ethnic cuisine, Lucky Strikes cigarettes and late-late-

night get-togethers simulate a perceived cultural and social capital that are in fact fully contingent on the possession of economic capital (Lefebvre’s quantification, by way of Bourdieu, strikes again).

For the families that have been in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill for a generation or more, the changes register something weightier. I first saw Raya when she was walking toward me on Fulton Street as I stood outside the Greene Grape Provisions specialty foods store. I could see the coral shades of Habana Outpost just across the street to my left, and to my right was a strip of restaurants, clothing shops and other small businesses. Raya was wearing workout clothes: black spandex pants, a purple tank top and a purple bandana that only barely tamed her thick, curly dark brown hair. When I approached her about my project, she was curious and attentive; she offered to sit for the interview eagerly. I soon learned that she has lived in the neighborhood all of her 29 years. Full of Fort Greene pride, Raya spoke with conviction about the transformation of the blocks of her – and her parents’ – childhood and adult lives. Raya’s father, Dan, is “a Jew from Queens” who came to Fort Greene for college, retired just a few years ago from teaching at a high school in Fort Greene and is an active participant in community politics; her mother, Dionna, is an African-American retired MTA employee who has lived in Fort Greene since she was in grade school. Raya and her family are the quintessential old-timers.

The second time I interviewed Raya we sat on a bench in Fort Greene Park. A landscaping crew was out cutting the grass, spreading sod and picking up trash. The lawnmower, loud and unwieldy, passed so close in front of us that grass tips landed in our laps:

Raya: I like that it’s cleaner. I like that people fuckin’ pooper

scoop their dogs. I like that. I like it. You know … I think the

changes are for the good, but I think that it’s important that

people remember how those changes happened and don’t

forget the reasons behind them. Because those reasons

aren’t always the best … you never would have seen that:

two white people walking their dogs through Fort Greene

park. That shit never would have happened. And I think it’s

important for that kind of thing to be recognized when you’re

talking … when you’re having these kinds of discussions

about Fort Greene, because they’re often lost after places

get gentrified, and it becomes this place that was discovered

and now it’s better and we don’t even need to remember

that right directly across the park are still fuckin’ projects,

and across from the projects they’re building some frickin’-

ass condos. Nobody wants to talk about the projects, and I

think that’s unfortunate because they’ve always been here.

… I don’t want Fort Greene to be forgotten of where it

comes from and why it actually is here.

Memory often serves as the only index of the former public life in places like Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. It is the selectivity of the memory the Local catalogues that worries people like Raya and her parents. “There’s a reason why [Fort Greene] has ended up being the type of neighborhood that it is today, and I think that all those reasons need to be addressed from a lot of different perspectives,” Raya said. “And I don’t necessarily think the Local … puts a premium on that kind of perspective.”

Road and sidewalk improvement questions are among the most frequent citizen submissions to the “You Asked” section of the Local. Investment in these seemingly mundane matters is in large part thanks to the Big Apple Sidewalk Protection Committee, which allows anyone who so much as stumbles to look up whether other incidents have been reported at that spot and, if so, encourages legal action. While hanging out with Steve Weiss, the New York Times blogger who worked full-time on the Local until January of 2010, he told me he thought it would be instructive for me to investigate one of the inquiries he had received that morning about a sinkhole on DeKalb and Cumberland. A representative from a large digital technology company was also observing Steve for the day, so he was in on the mission as well: find the sinkhole, photograph it, and contact the New York City Department of Transportation to find out what was being done about it. When the technologist asked Steve where to get the number of the DOT, Steve rattled it off from memory.

That afternoon, the post, complete with my photograph and the technologist’s text, went up on the blog: “You Asked: The Sinkhole on DeKalb.” Over the next day and a half, eight comments came in expressing thoughts about this particular sinkhole and other road and sidewalk issues, including a nine-paragraph rant

about the state of the streets and a post that starts: “The DeKalb/Cumberland Sinkhole dates back a long time …” The folks who had something to say about the DeKalb sinkhole addressed one another in their comments: they commiserated, shared personal stories, reminisced, complained and chastised. Though their interaction, made public through the blog, concerns a community-wide issue that called for a public works project (and indeed, there was a works project a few days later), the eight who cared enough to comment do not represent Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. They are, as one blog commenter wrote on another post (harshly, perhaps), members of an “… elitist sewing circle whose sole occupation is sputtering about cheesy liberal ‘neighborhood’ politics.”8 But they imagine themselves to be part of something much larger.

Many of the people I met on the streets of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill are not members of the public sphere the Local imagines itself to create. I was in front of Provisions when James first approached me; before I could tell him about my project and ask him if he’d be interested in participating, he asked me what I was doing there. It was the first time anyone had questioned my presence on this slab of sidewalk. But he had every right to wonder. In fact, it was then that I realized that the fact that nobody had suspected or contested my sudden appearance in the neighborhood was just another indication of the community’s familiarity with and submission to change.

James wore oversized camouflage cargo shorts, a tank top and a black cap and he didn’t walk – he sauntered. At 50, he’s lived in the neighborhood all his life and claims to know everyone and everything that’s going on; he’s not just a resident of Fort Greene, he’s a self-proclaimed product of it. It was clear from our role-reversed introduction that this interview would be different; indeed, I found almost immediately that the questions on my form were inadequate:

LZP: Do you read blogs? Or anything like that?

James: No, I’m not familia … what… was that blo … What is

blog? What is that?

LZP: It’s a website that people can go to and people can

make posts, and they can comment…

James: I’mma tell you somethin’. I don’t carry a cell phone, I

don’t do none of that stuff. I think that stuff is the thing that

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8 Comment, January 23, 2010 7:53 pm, by “baby Einstein.”

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keeps people on your business. I walk around, I need to

see people, people know how to get in touch with me. Old

School. Old Mobster. I know who I need to see, bada-boom,

bada-bing.

With discussion of the blog completely off the table, my interaction with James became a platform for him to wax philosophic about his neighborhood. With the aid of a bottle of Georgi vodka, which he pulled from his pocket after about five minutes of conversation, he spoke for half an hour about the way things were and the way things have become. People would walk by whom James seemed to know and he’d call out their names; occasionally they stopped, more often they’d smile, say hi back and continue on their way. Rocking back in his seat and turning his head toward my ear to ensure that I was the only listener, he commented on the proportions of attractive women who passed by and told me about the drugs of choice in the neighborhood and the old haunts of the prostitutes and their pimps back when things were rough.

The absence from the Local of people like James and the kinds of organic interactions that occur on a daily basis calls into question the qualitative distinction between what makes it onto the site and what does not. Is James too transgressive for the Local, his public drinking and talk of women and drugs unfit for publication? Instead, pictures of caterpillars,9 the ultimate unthreatening inhabitants of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill (who can be gazed at but not heard), appear on the blog as archetypes for beautiful and docile – indeed ideal – citizens.

When I told him why I was in Fort Greene, James promised that he’d introduce me to all the important people in the neighborhood. Sure enough, later that day when I was walking back down Fulton after having moved on to conduct interviews in Clinton Hill, James, who still sat on the benches in front of Provisions, called out that he had someone he’d like me to meet. He stood up and motioned for me to follow as he walked across the street to an outdoor market in a concrete lot on the other side of Fulton. A chain link fence barricaded the entrance, but James took hold of one of the fence posts and rattled it to get the attention of whoever was inside. Joseph emerged. Dark-skinned, skinny and slightly buck-

toothed, Joseph wore jeans, sandals and a faded green t-shirt. James said a few words to him and then left me standing alone opposite Joseph on the other side of the fence; I apologized for being thrust on him but he told me, in his distinctly Jamaican accent, that it was all right. The spontaneity of the social interaction, I realized, was only surprising and uncomfortable for me; for James and Joseph it was business as usual.

Joseph spoke slowly and softly. As he answered my questions, he repaired a handbag with a needle and yarn and every so often he’d pause and hum as if revving up for the next thought, slipping the needle through the porous threads of the bag until the words came to him. Joseph had been written up in the Local because of his shop (or “artisanal outdoor bazaar” as Steve called it in the story), so he was aware of the blog. But though the Local deemed Joseph acceptable for publication, his avatar on the site leaves something missing. One would also never know from the post that Joseph’s familiarity with the Local does not extend beyond his presence on it:

LZP: What do you do?

Joseph: Now, I’m a creator.

LZP: Do you use the Internet at all?Joseph: Yeah if I have a

computer I’ll use the Internet …

LZP: Where do you use the Internet?Joseph: If I have one, I’ll

use it. Where I will use it? By my home.

LZP: Why don’t you use the Internet?

Joseph: Because I don’t have a computer.

Joseph’s photograph appears on a blog that he cannot readily access at home. James didn’t know what a blog was. James and Joseph stand in for the old school, “Old Mobster” Fort Greene and Clinton Hill; they walk the streets, they lay claim to public space, and they say hello to passers by. But they are not an active part of the life of the blog. Their ignorance of and limited access to the Local reveal some of the ways in which the blog manufactures a new sociability in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill: as a private forum for its readers and a technological divider of neighbors. The perspective that the blog does promote – the one that Raya believes is askew – touts the merits of the new, trendy and cleaned-up spaces, attracts more people to the neighborhood and further delineates the social chasm between the

9 Steve’s love of caterpillars gave rise to a disproportionate number of posts featuring photographs of them; one day when I was in the neighborhood, I saw a caterpillar and,

knowing Steve’s penchant, snapped a picture of it. The image was up on the blog a few days later.

old and new, excluded and included residents.

Anisa and I met again in a small café beside Habana Outpost. It was the day she was moving to Crown Heights. “The people are very different,” she told me, gesturing to the waiter that we were ready to order. “Before, people used to be … it was lively and the people were very friendly. You could always find a friendly face. It was easy to meet people.” She stopped to chat with the waiter, whom she seemed to know; a few minutes later the owner walked in, recognized her and came over to say hello. “Now it’s loud but unfriendly. People are unfamiliar so when you pass people on the street they’re kind of eyeing you but they won’t smile and they won’t say hello.” We were the only two people in the restaurant, yet as we spoke, the owner went from table to table lighting candles, preparing for unlikely patronage. It was raining outside, and after I said goodbye and headed to catch the C train home, I saw that Outpost was empty too. It was as if nature had joined forces with the neighborhood to remind Anisa of the way things used to be and urge her to stay. Leaving is the most extreme form of exclusion.

Strolling and Scrolling

For, while abstract space remains an arena of practical

action, it is also an ensemble of images, signs, and symbols.

It is unlimited, because it is empty, yet at the same time it is

full of juxtapositions, of proximities … of emotional distances

and limits. It is thus at once lived and represented…

(1991:288).

The Local, as a dichotomy of lived and represented space, reflects and produces dichotomous constituents: the everyday strollers of the streets of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill and the scrollers of the Local who are part of the new sociability of the neighborhood. Michel de Certeau’s distinction between the walker/writer and looker/reader of the city helps concretize and characterize the different navigators of – and ways of navigating – space.

The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below,’ below

the threshold at which visibility begins. They walk – an

elementary form of this experience of the city; they are

walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks

and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to

read it (1984:93).

The walkers/writers (strollers) of the urban narrative, like James or Joseph, unselfconsciously engage in the old sociability of the neighborhood while the readers/lookers (scrollers) form weak social ties by viewing the neighborhood and its social life from a distance. Aura not only gets at what is lost vis-à-vis the gentrification of the neighborhood but also what is lost vis-à-vis the blog’s reproduction of the neighborhood in an alternate spatial and social reality.

Benjamin’s concept of the flâneur combines qualities of the stroller and the scroller. The flâneur is passive and disconnected from the life of the street but still present and witness to city life. From a distanced vantage, the flâneur (whose ability to wander indicates his middle-class-ness) takes in his surroundings and often inscribes them in feuilletons or small texts intended for newspapers or magazines. Benjamin’s comparison of the flâneur to the journalist critiques the bourgeois journalist who is present at the scene but uninvolved (Benjamin, 2008). Flânerie helps characterize the scroller/stroller distinction by merging the distinguishing qualities of the two: the stroller as an embodied wanderer of physical space and the scroller as a detached, middle class bystander.

The role of the stroller in space is embodied, egalitarian and public; strollers can use all their senses to take in the spaces and people that surround them, but their embodiment forces them to confront their environs and the Others within them. Like the walker of the city – the writer of urban text – the stroller lives down below and cannot see, as if from an aerial view, the strokes and collisions of his or her strolling. The scroller, on the other hand, is elite, tech-savvy, and selective. Hidden by the veil of technology, the scroller can anonymously browse the site at leisure without having to encounter Others unless he or she chooses. Like the flâneur, the scroller is generally bourgeois and uninvested in the interactions he or she witnesses. Yet the flâneur, by being embodied, is like the stroller in that he or she is faced with Otherness and can recount certain things about the sensory experience of his or her surroundings that the scroller’s sole sense of sight cannot detect. The particular qualities of the scroller delineate the space of the blog and the space in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill according to what their navigators can and cannot perceive.

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Ex Postmodern

Modernism and postmodernism are not chronological eras,

but political positions in the century-long struggle between

art and technology. If modernism expresses utopian

longing by anticipating the reconciliation of social function

and aesthetic form, postmodernism acknowledges their

nonidentity and keeps fantasy alive. Each position thus

represents a partial truth; each will recur ‘anew,’ so long as

the contradictions of commodity society are not overcome

(Benjamin, in Buck-Morss 1991:359).

Postmodern assessments of social space, like those of Jean Baudrillard or David Harvey, propose a series of characteristics associated with the outward manifestations of postmodernism. Postmodernity celebrates difference through the public display of heritage, cultural distinction, and heterogeneity (Harvey, 1989). This assertion of difference takes shape in the ornamentation of buildings and the personalization of space; one demonstrates his or her authentic and unique background through the cultivation and curation of signs and symbols that act as markers (for Baudrillard, empty simulators) of one’s cultural substance in the public sphere.

The public life once celebrated in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill before its gentrification bears a resemblance to the aesthetics of diversity associated with postmodernism (Harvey, 1989). The remnants of that former life, kept sacred by the presence of people like James and Joseph, are mere reminders of the openness and variety of the world of the street: before the cars, the arrival of the aloof and unfriendly, and the colonization of cool. One can see the establishment and conscious stylization of places like Habana Outpost as attempts to reify and reconstitute an aesthetics of diversity in order to attract a clientele that imagines itself to be progressive and cultured but that will always fall within a certain income bracket. Habana Outpost does business by selling a collection of signs that simulate authenticity.

Gentrification is a modernist project that disguises itself as a postmodern embrace of authenticity.10 Totalizing, technocratic, linear and positivistic, modernism as a ‘political position,’ according to its critics, is an attempt to establish social order

by constructing space according to a particular physical scheme. Le Corbusier’s City of Tomorrow, Haussmann’s Paris or Robert Moses’ 1950s housing projects exemplify, for Jane Jacobs and her contemporary Sharon Zukin, the misguided and pernicious fantasy of arranging society in such a way as to collapse and consolidate its differences and in doing so create a docile and governable polis (Scott, 1998; Jacobs, 1961; Zukin, 2010). Modern planning schemes go hand in hand with Foucault’s appraisal of the circulation of power, especially through panoptic surveillance and techniques of the self (Foucault, 1979 & 1995). Fort Greene and Clinton Hill have transformed into a version of modern space vis-à-vis its cleaned-up streets, newly developed buildings, police surveillance, the emergence and activity of neighborhood associations, and the privatization of public space. “The result …” Zukin writes, “when all cities pursue the same modern, creative image is not authenticity; it is an overbearing sameness, not too different – in global view – from the ‘great blight of dullness’ that Jacobs despised” (Zukin, 2010:231).

The core technologies of the modern and postmodern are divergent forms of architecture and city planning. Artistic movements reflect and inform the dominant aesthetics of modern and postmodern space and various literary movements attempt to describe and reproduce the tensions and struggles that take place within those spaces. The technology of the Internet, then, presents a new vessel through which to render the modern and postmodern. Just as the Internet is associated with a broadening of the public sphere, its ability to capture all kinds of social and ethnic difference, its infinite expandability through hyperlinks, and its invitation of personalization give it the appearance of something postmodern. Melissa Wall makes the distinction between journalism as a modernist industry and blogging as a postmodern activity:

… Blogs represent a new genre of journalism – offering

news that features a narrative style characterized by

personalization and an emphasis on non-institutional status;

audience participation in content creation; and story forms

that are fragmented and interdependent with other websites

(2005:153-154).

10 Zukin writes: “…authenticity becomes a tool, along with economic and political power, to control not just the look but the use of real urban places: neighborhoods, parks, community gardens, shopping streets. Authenticity,

then, is a cultural form of power over space that puts pressure on the city’s old working class and lower middle class, who can no longer afford to live or work there” (Zukin, 2010:xiii).

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While Wall’s characterization is appropriate with respect to personal blogs, the Local, by virtue of being tied to the New York Times, does not exemplify this postmodern genre of journalism. The Local is closer to journalistic modernism; it is a collaboration between a dominant member of the journalistic hegemony in America and the typical readers and contributors of a blog that self-consciously constructs and keeps tabs on a version of the neighborhoods in which it is based. The site, then, acts as a place from and through which a certain subset of the neighborhood watches and performs for itself. This is a special form of modernism wherein the dominant members of society enact surveillance not simply upon the subordinate but upon themselves as well.

“Modernity of the self” borrows theoretical credence from Robert Samuels’ concept of automodernity, a cultural period reflective of the digital age that captures its distinctive “ … combination of technological automation and human autonomy” (Samuels, 2008:219). Whereas postmodernism embraces personal difference (albeit simulated) and modernism seeks to collapse difference, automodernism recognizes the impression of autonomy and difference that digital technologies afford. Samuels writes: “ … the power of new media to cater to real and imagined feelings of self-direction threatens to hide and render invisible important social and public forces” (Samuels, 2008:229). Scrolling the Local blog, I argue, is an indulgent act similar to Christine Rosen’s “egocasting”11 that, in addition to fulfilling private, personal desires, sets up and perpetuates a dominant discourse that solidifies the division between the scrollers of the blog and the strollers of the street while giving the scrollers the sense that they are being somehow inclusive.

My emphasis on the vanity of users of automodern technologies differs from Samuels’ version of automodernism that sees the potential for every member of society to be duped by the perceived autonomy of digital technologies. In my reading, the pool of users is a specific one: with respect to the Local, namely a neo-middle class that has the means and opportunity to wield the technologies that enable surveillance of the self. Where Samuels’s automodernity and “modernity of the self” converge

is in their recognition of the antisocial, private nature of technologies often considered social by their users. Modernity of the self contributes to the establishment of a kind of sociability that readers of the Local celebrate but that, in reality, is far removed from the sociability on the streets of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. Scrolling through the blog and strolling in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill reveal the multiple, sometimes-gaping lacunae between the sociability of the site and the sociability of the street.

The New York Times’s sense of its intervention into and encapsulation of the spaces of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, vis-à-vis the Local, does not necessarily appreciate the difference between the scroller and the stroller. While discussing the function of the blog, Steve told me during our interview:

[The Local] introduces [residents] to even more of their

neighbors than they would meet in going around the

neighborhood and gives them a sense of some of their

richness of the place where they live. Though of course they

can get that by just walking around even better but who has

time to actually walk around the neighborhood.

For the Local’s producers, the blog can act as a replacement for the organic sociability of the street. Steve’s contention that nobody has time to walk around unwittingly captures the decay of public life and the privatization of space that gentrification brings about while proposing that the technology of the blog might somehow ameliorate or stand in for what gets lost as a result of the changes. But the strollers of the neighborhood, though perhaps only a precious few, are irreplaceable as the subtle enunciators and articulators of a pre-gentrification, auratic Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. Their acts of walking are reminders of the former social life of the neighborhood. When I asked Jenny, an artist and freelance writer whom I met outside Provisions, what might entice her to become an active reader of the Local (she had read it a few times), she replied: “ … if you really saw that they were on the grounds of this neighborhood, walking the blocks … maybe if I knew that the people who wrote for the blog actually lived in the neighborhood … ” For Jenny, the Local is not worth reading if its producers are not walkers of the street. Real social ties are irreplaceable.

11 Egocasting: “…the thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one’s personal taste” through technology (Rosen, 2005:52).

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On a bright day in early July, I shadowed blogger Steve on a trek from the New York Times Headquarters, where there had been a Local meeting, to a Fort Greene café from where Steve planned to blog for the afternoon. When we got off the train, we emerged from underground onto the sunny sidewalk outside Habana Outpost. On the sidewalk were four lime green painted planters, and there were three women bent around one of them examining something on the side. Without hesitation, Steve leaned in and asked, “What is that?” “Don’t know,” one of the women said, almost defiantly. She was suspicious of Steve’s sudden and unsolicited interest. “There’s someone who knows eco-stuff coming downstairs,” she said, and the three of them were off. “That was weird,” Steve said as he swung his backpack around, unzipped it and pulled out a digital camera. “They were kind of hostile.” He crouched down to look at the cocoon-like glob on the side of the planter, then pointed and shot with his camera. “We’ll ask the readers,” he said as he tucked his camera back into the backpack.

Steve had interrupted an organic social moment between locals who were genuinely curious about the bizarre growth on the side of a Habana Outpost planter. I could see his blog wheels turning the moment he spotted the commotion; rather than invest in introducing himself or warming up to the women, he bypassed a relationship with them in favor of getting a story and appealing to the blog readers, an entirely different group of people. His post appeared on the blog the next day:

As we wandered by Habana Outpost around noon Wednesday there were three women gathered around a wooden planter outside the restaurant, staring and pointing at a cocoon-like thing about two inches across, growing from or somehow attached to it. A ginger tactile examination revealed it to be relatively soft but dry (not sticky or clammy) and non-crumbly. When we expressed curiosity about the thing, the women seemed taken aback, said they had someone “coming down from upstairs” to tell them what the thing was, an “eco-type person.” Then they quickly beat a retreat.

But anyway. What is it? Eco-type people?

Steve’s quick and public dismissal of the three women from the sidewalk captures the disparity between the social life of the Local and the social life of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. In depicting a version

of the local and catering to a particular kind of reader, the blog is both a mechanical reproduction of the imagined sociability of the street and a reflection of the likeness of those who look at it, like at a mirror. This is modernity of the self: a perception of near-totality that amounts to a collection of mirror-imaged individualities. The readers of the blog look in on themselves and imagine that they are a part of a wider community when they are in fact its sole constituents. Samuels too uses the metaphor of the mirror to describe automodern technologies:

… when every user also becomes a producer of media,

the multiplication and diversification of potential sources

for information increases to such an extent that individual

consumers are motivated to seek out only the sources and

blogs that reinforce their own personal views and ideologies.

Here, the screen truly becomes an automated mirror of self-

reflection (2008:233).

Samuels argues that the feeling of personal autonomy digital technologies afford is not unlike Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage of personhood whereupon one becomes acquainted with one’s own body by assembling a patchwork of external images that one has seen of oneself. One can never truly see one’s whole likeness by looking into a mirror, so one fills in the gaps with an internal notion of the self that is made up of many external parts. Automodern technologies build up and enhance that sense of personal autonomy. The Local blog enables its readers to view a particular edition of themselves and their neighborhood that doesn’t necessarily have a real world referent.

Deceptive Totality

In March, a few weeks after the launch of the Local, Steve introduced a new section of the blog called “Local Locals” that endeavors to create social ties among residents of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill by introducing blog readers to members of the community through short interviews. The Local Locals section demonstrates how scrollers of the blog might come to imagine themselves to be strollers of the street. The first post began:

Note from Steve: Time to meet a neighbor. For your edification and enjoyment, The Local, through the services of Clinton Hill resident Louise Lennox, will occasionally stop random people, ask them a few

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random questions, take their picture and post the results here.

Louise, according to her bio on the Local, is a managing editor at an “online media and marketing company;” her Local Locals each week are the most popular postings on the site. The people who agree to have their interviews and pictures published range from young business professionals and artists to residents of the projects and senior citizens. But not everyone understands where the interviews will go, who will read them, and why. Some of the Local Local posts, like Steve’s story about Joseph’s shop, are unbeknownst to or generally unreadable by their subjects. For these locals, their status as walkers (strollers) – cemented by the fact that the Local Locals writer stopped them on the street – exemplifies de Certeau’s assertion that a true walker cannot also be a reader. The reader/looker (scroller), from the vantage of the blog, views and simulates participation in a rendition of the text written by the walkers of the city. But, as Lefebvre and others write, one cannot rely on sight alone (Jay, 1994; de Certeau, 1984; Virilio, 1998):

In the course of the process whereby the visual gains the

upper hand over the other senses, all impressions derived

from taste, smell, touch and even hearing first lose clarity,

then fade away altogether, leaving the field to line, colour

and light. In this way a part of the object and what it offers

comes to be taken for the whole. This aberration, which is

normal – or at least normalized – finds its justification in the

social importance of the written word (Lefebvre, 1991:286).

The Local Locals section illustrates the deceptive totality12 manufactured by the technologies of modernity of the self. The impression of sociability offered by the blog tricks the reader into believing that he or she has a real connection to the person or object represented in the text when in fact the relationship is constituted solely by symbols. The scroller believes him or herself to be a stroller. The satisfaction of feeling connected to members of the community whom one would rarely encounter in real

life is what makes the Local Locals section popular yet problematic.

Soon after its inaugural post, the Local Locals section offered an interview with a transgendered woman named Betty Wilson as a token “meet the neighbors” moment. Elicited outside the Associated Supermarket where Betty was panhandling, the interview reveals that Betty is HIV positive, has been in and out of jail, and is currently homeless. Not only is she a walker of the street but an inhabitant of it too. Wedged between a short post by Steve explaining that they weren’t going post anything of “relative consequence” for a few hours because his editor was at the dentist, a review of a neighborhood French restaurant that the Zagat Survey says costs an average of $40 per person, and a story about an upcoming tour of historic homes and mansions in Clinton Hill, the Betty Wilson interview represents the “gritty”13 in a stream of posts that reflect a largely bourgeois consciousness.

It is, perhaps, commendable that the Local gives voice to marginalized members of society like Betty. But the post is nothing more than a brief introduction that does not provide any sort of analysis or reflection on her representation (and its ethical implications); it simply pastes the text of the interview and moves on. Contained within the bounds of the computer screen, Betty becomes just another docile body like one of Steve’s caterpillars. That Betty and the caterpillars get equal, if not disproportionate (in favor of the caterpillars) coverage gives the blog the feeling of an online nature hike of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, introducing one to – but passing quickly by – the various flora and fauna of the neighborhood.

In the comments section of Betty’s interview, members of the community wrote things like “Beautiful soul” and “These are the best postings on the Local. Love meeting my neighbors:” laudatory notes that do not simply applaud the blog for including the interview but reflect the self-congratulation of the scrollers who feel that they

12 Buck-Morss uses this phrase to describe Benjamin’s sentiments about the semiotic liberties that were often taken in the captions of images in Arcade panoramas: “Not the medium of representation, not merely the concreteness of the image or the montage form is crucial, but whether the construction makes visible the gap between sign and referent, or fuses them in

a deceptive totality so that the caption merely duplicates the semiotic content of the image instead of setting it into question” (1991:67-68).

13 For Zukin’s discussion of gritty, see Chapter 1 of Naked City, “How Brooklyn Became Cool.”

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have done a good thing by reading about a marginal member of the neighborhood. In this way, the Local exercises modernity of the self that turns its readers into voyeurs and flâneurs, privy to Otherness but separated from it. Samuels discusses the voyeuristic nature of automodern technologies:

… in this technological context, all encounters with others

become visually boxed into the confines of the screen:

here, the frame of the screen serves as a mental container

for Otherness. Like a cage at a zoo or a picture frame at

a museum, the structure of the framed screen provides a

strong sense of limits and borders (2008:232).

The technology of the blog enables, even encourages, this type of looking. Benjamin’s flâneur engages in similar acts of looking. Before his banishment from the street (by the automobile and other forms of transportation), the bourgeois flâneur wandered and observed city life. Now, the flâneur is not a wanderer of the street but a user of communications media and, often, a journalist (Buck-Morss, 1991).

Benjamin examines the early connection between the

perceptive style of flânerie and that of journalism. If mass

newspapers demanded an urban readership (and still do),

more current forms of mass media loosen the flâneur’s

essential connection to the city. It was Adorno who pointed

out the station-switching behavior of the radio listener as

a kind of aural flânerie. In our time, television provides it in

optical, nonambulatory form (1991:345).

The Internet and the blog in particular act to further sharpen and extend the vision of the optical and nonambulatory flâneur. The role of the journalist to inscribe his or her flâneuristic observations is not unlike the role of the ethnographer, whose charge to thickly describe is accompanied by the fear of creating taxidermic, objectified subjects. The Local blog, however, does not outwardly acknowledge the ethical difficulties brought about by these types of representations. Rather, it allows for the autonomous scroller to interpret and imagine at his or her leisure.

Reproducing and reconfiguring embodied social ties on a blog in which those ties are merely symbolic makes the Local a jumping off point for fantasy and projection. The world of the Local is whatever the scroller makes of it. In his differentiation of the social functions and outcomes of alternate forms of space, Lefebvre designates abstract space as the most malleable and open to imagination.

Perhaps it would be true to say that the place of social

space as a whole has been usurped by a part of that space

endowed with an illusory special status – namely, the part

which is concerned with writing and imagery, underpinned

by the written text (journalism, literature) and broadcast

by the media; a part, in short, that amounts to abstraction

wielding awesome reductionistic force vis-à-vis ‘lived’

experience (1991:52).

Renderings of space that are merely symbolic abstractions cannot hope to reflect real life as it is. On the contrary, they collapse real life into parts that can never constitute or even represent a whole. This botched synecdoche leaves one stranded among disconnected symbols that belie their referents, creating alternate worlds contingent on alternate webs of significance spun by their scrollers. In Walter Benjamin’s famous Paris arcades, the attraction of the panorama allowed spectators to view montages of images and scenes of different places and things. For Benjamin, the panorama represented the phantasmagorical nature of the arcades, or ‘worlds in miniature,’ which, like the Local, provided those who viewed them with opportunities to fantasize about and feel connected to some form of higher social power, “the unconscious of the dreaming collective” (Buck-Morss 1991:39).

The Local, like the arcades, expresses the hopes and dreams of the particular subset of society that has the means to access it. The act of scrolling (the blog or the panorama) is private, yet the experience is public because in doing so one is aware that others are doing – and viewing – the same things, like viewers of the panoramas gazing through the peephole (Buck-Morss, 1991:n396 #36). While the producers of the blog claim to acknowledge the Local’s inability to include the whole community, the site reveals, in its panoramic reproduction (and selective omission) of disparate and disconnected parts of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, its dreams of totality. The readers of and contributors to the Local are complicit in this project of imagination because the blog affirms their way of life, absolves their presence in the neighborhood, and applauds a faux-inclusivity of neighbors who are in fact quite excluded from and marginal to the spaces their arrival has helped to privatize.

Conclusion

Emblems of change take multiple forms, from the totalizing, paralyzing fear of being priced out of the neighborhood to the proliferation of cafes, the lack of broken glass in the park or the downcast eyes of folks passing on the sidewalk. Lincoln, a retiree who wore a baseball cap and tucked his collared shirt into his khakis, has lived in Fort Greene for thirty years. He articulated the change in terms of cars and the new sociability they engender in banishing pedestrians from the street, an observation not unlike that of Benjamin when he said that the automobile extinguished the aura of Paris and confined its flânerie (Buck-Morss, 1991):

LZP: How do you feel about this neighborhood?

Lincoln: It’s changing. It’s evolved and there’s too many

people. It’s not as social as it was before.

LZP: How do the changes affect you in your day-to-day life?

Lincoln: It puts more stress on you because it’s more people,

more cars, it’s like everything… it’s all crashing. When you’re

young you don’t see it and when you’re older, you see it. You

don’t let it bother you, but you see things differently. Twenty

years ago you didn’t have so many cars, now you got so

many cars you can’t walk across the street.

The spatial and social reconfiguration of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill at the hands of gentrification makes the neighborhood more and more like the Local blog. The banishment of residents from public spaces, the cleansing of personalities and distancing of Otherness render real space like the two-dimensional space of the Local. The fenced-in territory of Habana Outpost characterizes the scroller’s experience of online space; indeed, one can see Habana Outpost as a site for the real world scroller: a lurker who takes part in the sociability of the neighborhood, but from a distance. The lurker is the navigator par excellence of the Outposts and other private spaces in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill.My reading of the Local blog attempts to reveal what the medium can capture vis-à-vis representations of the local and, more importantly, what is fundamentally uncapturable. The charge of ethnography (or ethblography) is to create a text that captures something in the world while acknowledging that one cannot capture everything; the obvious comparison between the work of the ethnographer and that of the journalist/blogger makes the challenge that much more delicate. As anthropologists, we are all strollers and, increasingly, scrollers. Recognition of the qualitative differences

between the two must necessarily accompany any ethblography. I hope that this article demonstrates the myriad ways in which the stroller and the scroller are methodologically, epistemologically, ontologically and technologically fused – or fusing – in the contemporary era.

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