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Crime, media and the will-to-representation: Reconsidering relationships in the new media age

Crime, media and the will-to-representation: Reconsidering relationships in the new media age This paper considers the ways in which the rise of new media might challenge commonplace criminological assumptions about the crime–media interface. Established debates around crime and media have long been based upon a fairly clear demarcation between production and consumption, between object and audience – the media generates and transmits representations of crime, and audiences engage with them. However, one of the most noticeable changes occurring in the wake of the development of new media is the proliferation of self-organised production by ‘ordinary people’ – everything ranging from self-authored web pages and ‘blogs’, to self-produced video created using hand-held camcorders, camera-phones and ‘webcams’. Today we see the spectacle of people performing acts of crime and deviance in order to record them, send them and upload them to the Internet. This kind of ‘will to representation’ may be seen in itself as a new kind of causal inducement to law- and rule-breaking behaviour. It may be that, in the new media age, the terms of criminological questioning need to be sometimes reversed: instead of asking whether ‘media’ instigates crime or fear of crime, we must ask how the very possibility of mediating oneself to an audience through self-representation might be bound up with the genesis of criminal behaviour. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal SAGE

Crime, media and the will-to-representation: Reconsidering relationships in the new media age

Yar, Majid
Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal , Volume 8 (3): 16 – Dec 1, 2012
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References (103)

Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2012
ISSN
1741-6590
eISSN
1741-6604
DOI
10.1177/1741659012443227
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This paper considers the ways in which the rise of new media might challenge commonplace criminological assumptions about the crime–media interface. Established debates around crime and media have long been based upon a fairly clear demarcation between production and consumption, between object and audience – the media generates and transmits representations of crime, and audiences engage with them. However, one of the most noticeable changes occurring in the wake of the development of new media is the proliferation of self-organised production by ‘ordinary people’ – everything ranging from self-authored web pages and ‘blogs’, to self-produced video created using hand-held camcorders, camera-phones and ‘webcams’. Today we see the spectacle of people performing acts of crime and deviance in order to record them, send them and upload them to the Internet. This kind of ‘will to representation’ may be seen in itself as a new kind of causal inducement to law- and rule-breaking behaviour. It may be that, in the new media age, the terms of criminological questioning need to be sometimes reversed: instead of asking whether ‘media’ instigates crime or fear of crime, we must ask how the very possibility of mediating oneself to an audience through self-representation might be bound up with the genesis of criminal behaviour.

Journal

Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal – SAGE

Published: Dec 1, 2012

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