Digital Cornerville

William Foote Whyte referred to Cornerville in a founding document of sociological ethnography as a Street Corner Society, where, contrary to the urban diagnoses of classical European sociology, an ethnically organized community based on personal acquaintance asserted itself amidst the anonymous urban society. Almost a century later, Michael Liegl's ethnography investigates the forms of community building under conditions of increased urbanity: in the avant-garde, laptop-pervasive music scene of New York. It finds a community that is no longer ethnically but rather technically and musically integrated, where the longing for closeness and personal acquaintance remains, but the social forms have radically changed: the Street Corner Society has transformed into a Post-Internet Society. Cornerville, thus.