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ANTISOCIAL
MEDIA
Crime-watching in
the Internet Age
Mark Wood
Series editors
Michelle Brown
Department of Sociology
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN, USA
Eamonn Carrabine
Department of Sociology
University of Essex
Colchester, UK
This series aims to publish high quality interdisciplinary scholarship for
research into crime, media and culture. As images of crime, harm and
punishment proliferate across new and old media there is a growing rec-
ognition that criminology needs to rethink its relations with the ascen-
dant power of spectacle. This international book series aims to break
down the often rigid and increasingly hardened boundaries of main-
stream criminology, media and communication studies, and cultural
studies. In a late modern world where reality TV takes viewers into cop
cars and carceral spaces, game shows routinely feature shame and suffer-
ing, teenagers post ‘happy slapping’ videos on YouTube, both cyber bul-
lying and ‘justice for’ campaigns are mainstays of social media, and
insurrectionist groups compile footage of suicide bomb attacks for circu-
lation on the Internet, it is clear that images of crime and control play a
powerful role in shaping social practices. It is vital then that we become
versed in the diverse ways that crime and punishment are represented in
an era of global interconnectedness, not least since the very reach of
global media networks is now unparalleled.
Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture emerges from a call to
rethink the manner in which images are reshaping the world and crimi-
nology as a project. The mobility, malleability, banality, speed, and scale
of images and their distribution demand that we engage both old and
new theories and methods and pursue a refinement of concepts and tools,
as well as innovative new ones, to tackle questions of crime, harm, cul-
ture, and control. Keywords like image, iconography, information flows,
the counter-visual, and ‘social’ media, as well as the continuing relevance
of the markers, signs, and inscriptions of gender, race, sexuality, and class
in cultural contests mark the contours of the crime, media and culture
nexus.
Antisocial Media
Crime-watching in the Internet Age
Mark A. Wood
Criminology
University of Melbourne
Parkville, VIC, Australia
Throughout writing the doctoral thesis that formed the basis of this book,
I was lucky enough to be supported by a range of incredible friends, men-
tors and colleagues. Though many friends and mentors left an indelible
mark on this book, I’d like to single out several in particular. Like the
dissertation before it, this book wouldn’t have been completed without
their support, guidance and friendship. Firstly, my PhD supervisors
Alison Young and Natalia Hanley, thank you for continually supporting
my research, and for your patience and insight. I really couldn’t have
wished for two better supervisors, and as I’ve began supervising my own
Honours and PhD students, I often find myself asking, ‘what would
Natalia and Alison do?’
Whilst completing this book, I was hired at my old alma mater, the
University of Melbourne, as a lecturer. Though my old teachers became
my colleagues, their continuing mentorship remained vital in navigating
my entry into academia. In particular, I’d like to thank Fiona Haines,
Dave McDonald, Nesam McMillan, Julie Evans, Diana Johns, Jennifer
Balint, and Stuart Ross, for helping me learn the ropes and for their excel-
lent advice on juggling teaching with writing, and keeping a healthy work–
life balance. You are the people that kindled my passion for criminology,
and I feel supremely lucky to now count you among my colleagues.
v
vi Acknowledgements
1 Introduction 1
3 Unpacking a Punch 53
4 Feeding Violence? 79
Bibliography 197
Index 233
vii
List of Figures
ix
List of Tables
xi
1
Introduction
An affray assails the urban streetscape: a violent fissure in the familiar that
captures the gaze of neighbouring eyes. In this moment of commotion, a
score of spectators are created. And as the street is awakened from the
mundane, the discord is recorded. A solitary onlooker reaches for their
smartphone, aims its camera towards the melee and presses record, etch-
ing images of the event into archive. The brawl culminates and fades from
the streetscape. Yet its image is retained—preserved in witness recollec-
tions and digital files. Through this video memento, its audience expands.
The smartphone is repurposed into a miniature cinema, passed from
friend to friend as more eyes are invited to pry at the violent scene. The
recording is then sent to other smartphones, its audience expanding by
the day. Finally, the recording migrates online. It is uploaded into social
media. From the uploader’s profile, the video is shared by others and
dispersed even further. Eventually, a copy comes to sit alongside other
scenes of violence as the footage finds its way into Facebook. Occupying
the screen with a variety of links to similar scenes of public disorder, the
event’s audience reaches its apogee. On this user-generated page, dedi-
cated to hosting footage of street fights and public bare-knuckle violence,
individuals dissect every minutiae of the event—denigrating, glorifying
and debating in the wake of their online spectatorship. The spectator is
Like radical and alternative media, fight pages and other forms of anti-
social media distribute content that is rarely, if ever, published by main-
stream media outlets. Yet whilst radical and alternative media are
politically motivated and have transformative aims (see Downing 2000),
antisocial media are not. Unlike these overtly political forms of media,
antisocial media narrowcast footage of transgression primarily for the
purposes of entertainment. They must therefore be contrasted with blogs,
YouTube channels and Facebook pages that, whilst promoting the com-
missioning of illicit acts, do so in the service of a political goal, which
may include the act in question’s decriminalization.
Given their transnational nature, defining antisocial media through a
legalistic definition invites problems. Crime is socially and historically
contingent. Acts that are criminalized in one state or jurisdiction are
often entirely legal in others, and, consequently, websites that might be
classified as antisocial media within one state would not be within
another. At least three approaches might be taken to address this issue: a
realist harm-based approach, a social constructivist approach or a critical
realist synthesis of the two. In the realist approach, antisocial media are
conceptualized as a real class of media defined not by their sympathetic
curation of criminalized acts but by their promotion of harmful acts.
That is, antisocial media are sites that not only curate footage of harm,
but author statements promoting similar acts of harm onto others. Such
an approach accords with other harm-focused criminological perspec-
tives, including Smith and Raymen’s (2016) deviant leisure perspective
and Hall and Winlow’s (2015) ultra-realist perspective. Arguably, it also
situates the concept of antisocial media not within criminology but zemi-
ology: the study of social harms (Hillyard et al. 2004). However, framing
antisocial media solely through the lens of such a harm-based approach
invites its own problems—if opened to include legal and culturally
accepted harms, where can we draw the line between antisocial media
and other online media? Whilst reserving use of the concept solely for
criminalized acts precludes its application to websites that promote harm-
ful acts that perhaps should be criminalized, it also stops the term becom-
ing too all-encompassing.
In the second, constructionist approach, antisocial media are not con-
ceptualized as a ‘real’ class of media that exist independent of the social
6 1 Introduction
likes. During this study, I encountered 104 fight pages that remained
online in March, 2016. Of these pages, 13 had between 250,000 and
499,999 likes, 7 had between 500,000 and 999,999 likes, and 4 had over
1 million likes (see Table A.1).
To investigate these domains, over the course of several years between
2013 and 2016, I followed five popular of them using my personal
Facebook profile: Crazy Street Fights, The Craziest Fights Ever, Just Fights
Videos, Real Crazy Fights and Only Street Fighting. Further, taking an
approach in line with reception studies, I surveyed 205 fight page users to
gain deeper insights into why they viewed bare-knuckle street violence,
how they experieced and read this violent footage, and how they under-
stood and/or enacted violence in their own lives. Drawing inspiration
from reception studies, digital sociology and digital anthropology, this
mixed methods approach to investigating these pages—which I detail in
Appendix A—enabled me to investigate not only fight page users beliefs
but also their behaviour in practice.
Pattanaik and Chatterjee 2008). What is most notable about the use of
the term in these studies is its polysemy and inexactness. Not only is there
no agreed upon definition of the term that these studies accord to, but
most do not provide their own definition, lending it a nebulous quality.
Notably, most uses of the term concern only one dimension of axis of
spectatorship relevant to the study at hand: for Hansen (1993) it relates
to historically constituted modes of spectating cinema, for Rose and
Friedman (1994) it relates specifically to gendered modes of spectator-
ship, for Friedman (2006) it relates to the contrast between active and
passive modes of spectating content, and for Oddey and White (2009),
the different mediums through which spectatorship occurs (theatre, tele-
vision, Internet, film, mobile phone, etc.).
Contrary to these studies, I want to suggest that all of these dimen-
sions are integral to spectatorship, and consequently, to unpacking the
nature and implications of fight page spectatorship. This project therefore
advances a polyvalent conceptualization of modalities of spectatorship: a
conceptualization that addresses not just a single dimension of spectator-
ship, but the intersection and interplay between every dimension of spec-
tatorship. The researcher who comes closest to adopting such a
multidimensional approach is Higson (2002). Crucially, Higson, who is
worth quoting here in full, states that a study of film culture must address,
between spectator and image avoids abstracting images from their social
moorings, which analysing images as objects risks doing. Finally, the term
encounter may be used to temper functional perspectives on media con-
tent, such as uses and gratifications theory, which presuppose audience
activeness. As not every spectatorial exchange is intentional, but is often
rather the result of what Peirce (1998, 182) would term ‘the brute com-
pulsion’ of experience, the notion of encounter is productive to conceptu-
alizing passive non-selective modes of coming across content.
To give primacy to the encounter, another analytical reframing is required,
from analysing the meaning of images to analysing how images work on
people (Young 2010; Carney 2010; Zaitch and de Leeuw 2010). Such an
approach is predicated upon the now familiar recognition that images carry
no inherent meaning in and of themselves. Rather, meaning is imparted on
images by viewers—interpretation supplants interpolation. As Carney
(2010, 31) notes, the photograph—and by extension the image more gen-
erally—‘presents more than it represents, produces more than it reproduces
and performs more than it signifies.’ In practice, these three notions—pre-
sentation, production and performance—are profoundly interlinked. What
is presented (and omitted) by an image generates the meanings, identities,
emotions and sensations it produces. Yet what is required is more than just
an inventory of the different elements present within an image or video: we
must also address how an image performs to/on spectators.
Asserting that images perform more than they signify is redolent of a
truism: that images function through evoking meanings, memories, emo-
tions and sensations. This truism is, however, disregarded within visual
studies that focus solely on signification. Concentrating on how images
perform overcomes the respective issues associated with two diametrically
opposed perspectives on images and subjectivity: the social determinism
of the dominant ideology perspective and the subjectiveness of the plu-
ralistic postmodern perspectives (Yar 2010). That is, a focus on perfor-
mance over signification equips images with the agency to effect audience
readings and experiences, without descending into determinism. Finally,
the term perform does not limit the power of images to the domain of
signification. This opens up investigations to attend to the affective
dimension of spectatorship: the visceral bodily responses registered by
connecting with images (Young 2010).
14 1 Introduction
Chapter Overview
The following four chapters each focus on a different dimension of anti-
social media: content, consumption, technological form and participa-
tion. In Chap. 2 I examine how fight pages, as a form of antisocial media,
have changed the terrain for distributing footage of public bare-knuckle
violence. Drawing primarily upon my experiences following five fight
pages, I provide an account of the content hosted on these pages, from
the clips of bare-knuckle brawls they curate, to the video descriptions
that enframe them. Through doing so, I show that the violent entertain-
ments hosted by pages were not only highly heterogeneous but also
curated in a manner that legitimated street fighting and street justice:
eye-for-an-eye retributive violence enacted in response to a wrong.
Turning to the consumption of such clips, in Chap. 5, I examine why,
how, and to what end individuals view footage of bare-knuckle street
violence. As I illustrate, participants’ reasons for viewing fight videos were
many and varied: entertainment, amusement, intrigue, righteous justice,
boredom alleviation, self-validation, self-defence learning and risk aware-
ness. Through analysing these different modes of spectating bare-knuckle
violence on fight pages, I show that, in order to understand why indi-
viduals use these pages, we must examine how they read, and affectively
respond to viewing specific forms of bare-knuckle street violence.
Shifting to the technological form of fight pages, in Chap. 6, I examine
how Facebook’s interactive and personalized algorithmic architecture
shapes fight page users’ encounters with footage of bare-knuckle violence.
Focusing on Facebook’s ‘Top Stories’ algorithm, which curates the con-
tent users receive in their News Feed interfaces, I examine how Facebook’s
technological unconscious has the potential to amplify and reinforce
fight page users’ attitudes towards crime and violence. Moreover, I exam-
ine how the rise of mobile media and a hyperconnected network society
impact on the way crime is consumed, and have the potential to generate
an ambient awareness of violence, where mediated violence becomes a
normal part of the fabric of an individual’s social media use.
Like any form of social media, antisocial media are participatory, offer-
ing individuals the ability to communicate with another and generate
content. Chapter 7 therefore examines how fight pages have generated
new participatory modes of spectating bare-knuckle violence, and in
Bibliography 17
doing so, have brokered agonistic publics where street justice and bare-
knuckle brawling are valorized. Drawing on a content analysis of close to
6000 user comments posted on Crazy Street Fights, The Craziest Fights
Ever, Just Fights Videos, Real Crazy Fights and Only Street Fighting, I exam-
ine why individuals commented on these pages, what they said when
they did so, and how Facebook’s architecture might generate new crimi-
nologically significant socialities where criminal acts are legitimated.
‘Computation,’ as David Berry (2015, 125) notes, ‘has moved from a
small range of activities to a qualitative shift in the way in which we engage
with knowledge and the world.’ Taking stock of this shift, in Chap. 8, I
therefore consider how social media generated new modes of crime-watch-
ing and changed the way we come to understand and culturally construct
crime. With the rise of the Internet and other digital environments, crimi-
nologists must cast a critical eye on software and its role in shaping cul-
tural understanding of crime. In concluding this book, I therefore explore
how digital criminology might encompass a critical criminology of soft-
ware dedicated to examining how the values inscribed into software influ-
ence the way we understand, perceive and respond to crime.
Notes
1. Though the terms ‘dark net’ and ‘deep web’ are often used interchange-
ably, such a conflation of these terms is inaccurate. The deep web refers to
content on the World Wide Web that is not indexed by search engines
(Barratt 2015), whilst the dark net refers to online networks that can only
be accessed via anonymizing software.
2. The clearnet refers to the unencrypted Internet where users can be identi-
fied by their IP addresses, whilst the surface web refers to the searchable
web (Barratt 2015).
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Another random document with
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II.
Joku aika sitten hän oli mennyt kihloihin Elli Löfbergin kanssa. Hän
oli nyt melkein valmis lääkäri, lähimmässä tulevaisuudessa hän
saattoi saada viran ja perustaa oman kodin. Hertta ei ollut nähnyt
häntä hänen kihloihin mentyään. Elli Löfberg oli Hertan
koulutovereita, joskin Herttaa useaa vuotta nuorempi. Hän oli vielä
täydellinen lapsi, pintapuolinen ja turhamainen, ilman mitään
vakavampia harrastuksia. Hammarin kihlaus oli sentähden suuresti
kummastuttanut Herttaa. Hammar, joka itse oli niin vakava, melkein
raskasmielinen, mitenkä hän oli voinut kiintyä tuohon pieneen
hupakkoon?
Antti astui salin yli Ellin huoneen ovelle. Hän kolkutti pari kertaa,
mutta kun vastausta ei kuulunut, astui hän sisään.
— Elli, jos minä pyytäisin että sinä minun tähteni luopuisit tuosta
mielihalustasi, niin tuntuisiko se kovin katkeralta?
— Kun puhut noin, Antti, niin voisin tehdä vaikka mitä sinun
tähtesi.
Mutta kun en näe sinua, niin kaikki pahat ajatukset heräävät
minussa.
Elli nyyhkytti. Antti antoi hänen itkeä. Hän siveli hänen vaaleita
kiharoitansa ja hänen valkoista otsaansa. Kuinka hieno hänen
hipiänsä oli ja kuinka punakat hänen huulensa. Antti tunsi
sydämensä värähtelevän. Mitenkä hän olikaan voinut voittaa Ellin
rakkauden, Ellin, joka oli niin hieno ja hento, joka oli kasvanut niin
aivan toisessa maaperässä kuin hän itse?
Ja hänen mieleensä johtui ensi kerta, jolloin hän Elliä oli sylissään
pidellyt. Mikä onnen huumaus oli silloin hänen olentonsa läpi käynyt.
Hän oli tullut niin arkana ja pelokkaana Ellin luo, niin kömpelösti hän
oli tunteensa sanoiksi pukenut, mutta sitten oli kaikki arkuus
kadonnut, ja hän oli nähnyt edessään vain Ellin loistavat silmät.
Siitä oli nyt puoli vuotta kulunut. Hän oli tänä aikana oppinut Elliä
tuntemaan, hän oli useasti saanut kokea, että hän oli hemmoteltu ja
oikullinen lapsi, mutta se ei ollut hänen rakkauttansa vähentänyt. Se
oli vain herättänyt hänessä halun suunnata hänen kehityksensä
oikeaan ja jaloon ja tukahduttaa lapsen heikkoudet, ennenkuin ne
olivat todellisiksi taipumuksiksi muuttuneet.
Hän sai kaikki muut puolellensa ja rouva Illman, joka ehdoitusta oli
vastustanut, koetti selittää, että hän oli aivan samaa mieltä kuin
rouva Taubekin, hän oli vain arvellut, että ehkä kaikki eivät
joulukiireiden vuoksi ehtisi ottaa niihin osaa. Hän puolestansa olisi
valmis työhön milloin hyvänsä.
— Mutta onhan täällä muitakin nuoria kuin neiti Ek, arveli joku. —
Voimmehan kysyä heiltäkin.
— Me tahdomme tanssia!
Antti saattoi hänet eteiseen. Hän tunsi äkkiä iloa ajatellessaan että
hän pian taas olisi tilaisuudessa tavata Herttaa. He voisivat uudistaa
entisen tuttavuutensa ja jatkaa yhdessäoloa aivan kuin ennenkin.
Hänellä oli mielestään niin paljon puhuttavaa Hertalle, niin paljon
kysyttävää ja hän tiesi niin varmaan saavuttavansa ymmärrystä.
IV.
Mies kääntyi ovea kohti, mutta loi vielä pitkän katseen rouva
Taubeen. Se oli niin rukoileva, ja samalla epäluuloinen. Rouva Taube
tunsi pistoksen sydämessään, olisiko hän ollut liian kova tuolle
miehelle, hän olisi ehkä todellakin ansainnut apua. Hän aikoi kutsua
hänet takaisin, antaa hänelle ruokaa, hän ehkä ei ollut syönyt koko
päivään, mutta mies vetäisi jo oven kiinni jälkeensä, ennenkuin
rouva Taube oli ennättänyt mitään tehdä.
Elsa oli aivan isäänsä. Yhä enenevällä huolella rouva Taube näki
tytön harrastusten kääntyvän kaikkeen ulkonaiseen. Ja hän näki
oman vaikutuksensa häviävän aivan mitättömiin, sillä silmittömässä
ihastuksessaan isä ei voinut tyttäreltä mitään kieltää.
Iltaa oli kappale kulunut, kun Hertta Ek astui salin ovelle. Hänen
silmänsä etsi emäntää, mutta kun hän ei häntä mistään keksinyt, niin
hän jäi arasti ovenpieleen seisomaan. Hän seisoi siinä silmät
maahan luotuina, omiin mietteihinsä vaipuneena. Hänen
yksinkertainen tumma pukunsa erosi niin jyrkästi koko hänen
ympäristöstänsä, samoin kuin hänen kasvojensa vakava ilme ei ollut
sopusoinnussa toisten ilosta hehkuvien kasvojen kanssa.
— Mitä teillä tänään oli esillä? kyseli Antti Hertalta. — Onko tullut
uusia tietoja hätämailta?