In the summer of 2011, I watched as multiple residents of Decatur, Ga., duked it out over the city’s spatial boundaries in cyberspace. The exchanges spurred me to explore the city’s media ecosystem and how its residents and government officials create and reinforce Decatur’s identity online in the news and in social media. The city’s privileged white residents displayed considerable angst when reporters lumped the great expanse of unincorporated DeKalb County, which shares Zip Codes with the incorporated city of Decatur, into a singular monolithic “Decatur.” One now-defunct account admonished a prolific Decatur tweeter by writing, “[Decatur] is much more than 4 lily white blocks.”
I mothballed the posts that I wrote about Decatur’s online identity when I pulled the plug on the short-lived local news site that I created. As I write about the ways Decatur residents weaponize cyberspace and engage in online redlining, I am revisiting a lot of this material from 2011.
The 2011 posts included video clips from interviews done with municipal officials and residents with big online footprints. Here are a couple of the videos originally published at Dateline:Decatur in the summer of 2011. In them, a resident describes the physical and virtual Decaturs.
