The Streets Don’t End at the Corner: Gakirah Barnes, Digital Violence, and the Search for Humanity
Desmond Patton31st Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor, University of PennsylvaniaGakirah Barnes, Digital Violence, and the Search for Humanity
The powerful story of what one teenager's digital life reveals about grief, gun violence, and the limits of social media
When seventeen-year-old Gakirah Barnes was gunned down in the streets of Chicago’s South Side, the media labeled her as the “gun-toting gang girl of Chicago.” But the digital trace she left behind told a far more complicated story.
Drawing on more than a decade of research, Desmond Upton Patton confronts Gakirah’s online world while wrestling with his own personal and professional biases about violence and Black youth. Through a deep dive into Gakirah’s X account, Patton works to understand her life while developing new, ethical, and groundbreaking methods to interpret social media data that emphasizes care and accountability, challenging the ways artificial intelligence and digital research can misread marginalized communities when stripped of human understanding. The Streets Don’t End at the Corner argues that any serious effort to address gun violence today must understand social media as a new neighborhood, one where conflict, loss, identity, and survival unfold in real time.
About Desmond Patton
Desmond Upton Patton is a social worker by training. At the SAFElab, social workers and local residents work alongside programmers to add context to social media messages so that algorithms interpret them correctly.
His research finding that expressions of loss predict aggressive comments on Twitter among gang-involved youth in Chicago, published in npj Digital Medicine, was cited in an amici curiae brief submitted to the United States Supreme Court in Elonis v. United States, which examined the interpretation of threats on social media. He created the Contextual Analysis of Social Media (CASM) approach to center culture, context and inclusion in machine learning, and has brought his qualitative analysis methods to companies including TikTok, Spotify and Microsoft while advising AI companies Kai.ai and Lifebrand.
Bring this book to your organization
Tell us about your event and we will be in touch right away.