Majid Yar

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.

Applying Routine Activity Theory to Cybercrime: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis

ABSTRACT The central question of this article is whether routine activity theory (RAT) can be used as an analytical framework to study cybercrimes. Both a theoretical analysis and an analysis of empirical studies have thus far failed to provide a clear answer. The multivariate analysis presented in this article tries to avoid some of the limitations of other RAT-based studies. Based on a large sample (N = 9,161), the effects of value, visibility, accessibility, and guardianship on victimization of six cybercrimes have been studied. Analysis shows some RAT elements are more applicable than others. Visibility clearly plays a role within cybercrime victimization. Accessibility and personal capable guardianship show varying results. Value and technical capable guardianship show almost no effects on cybercrime victimization.

’Con me if you can’ Exploring crime in the American cinematic imagination

This article deals with current re-dramatizations of crime and popular criminologies. It analyses key elements of the popular criminological imaginaries underpinning a recent and highly successful film—Catch Me If You Can—in order to tease out the discursive, mythical and fabulist techniques by which it communicates particular imaginations of crime. Additionally, the article offers some conceptual and analytical anchors for interpreting filmwork so that other popular representations might be more easily situated within criminological analysis. We argue that popular media portrayals of crime are highly effective in sustaining particular conceptions of the interaction between crime and wider social conditions, and we explore four layers of discursive work through which this film communicates the causes and consequences of criminal behaviour

Breaking Bad, Making Good: Notes on a Televisual Tourist Industry

Abstract This article explores emerging intersections between the consumption of mediated popular culture and the real and imagined topographies within which those representations are framed. Through an examination of the ‘televisual tourism’ centred around the successful TV series Breaking Bad, we scrutinise the multiple modes of sensorial and embodied travel experience enjoyed by fans of the show as they consume their way around the show’s sites, scenes and tastes in the city of Albuquerque. This exploitation of media textuality through fan tourism is, we suggest, centred upon a carefully managed commodification of crime, criminality and transgression.

The policing of Internet sex offences: pluralised governance versus hierarchies of standing

This article considers the dominant structure and patterns of policing as related to Internet-based sex offences. It is argued that the policing of Internet sex offences occupies an anomalous position, as compared to other forms of online offending. One the one hand, the policing of Internet sex offences partakes of a wider trend towards the dispersed and pluralised governance of crime, a trend that is in many ways typified by responses to Internet crime. One the other hand, Internet sex offences are policed in ways at odds with responses to other forms of online offending – most especially in the extent of time, attention and resources directed to such offences by state-centred agencies. The state-centric response to such offences can be understood by appreciating their position within a ‘hierarchy of standing’ amongst and between Internet crimes. ‘Hierarchies of standing’ define offences differently according to their perceived seriousness and urgency, drawing upon collective judgements about the vulnerability of victims, the dangerousness of offenders, levels of risk and extent of harm caused. Public, political, media and expert assessments of sex offences serve to place them at the apex of the ‘hierarchy of standing’, and as such drive expectations that they will be subject to urgent and concerted action by state agencies, rather than being delegated to the responsibility of non-state actors.

Consuming the illegal Situating piracy in everyday experience

Considerations of media consumption typically focus upon the relationships fostered via economic exchange for the purposes of receiving a service, such as a licence fee, a subscription fee, or some other single-use cost. However, the growth of alternative electronic distribution channels enabled via the Internet have presented a number of challenges and opportunities for all involved, be the media organisations, artists, or consumers. Digitisation of media content, coupled with increased connectivity between individuals, has acted as a fertile breeding ground for the emergence of unofficial distribution of media and its subsequent consumption. The increasing affordability of technology that allows users to alter, modify, remix, or create their own content before sharing that across the network poses a range of problems to those groups who seek to control how content is accessed, distributed, and appropriated, especially if their ownership rights have been compromised in some manner. Anxieties of this type were manifested in several high-profile legal battles between the recorded music industry and music consumers in the United States (e.g. Virgin/Capitol v. Thomas, Sony BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum), after individuals were caught sharing music files across peer-to-peer networks. Many subsequent discussions of illicit media consumption tended to concern themselves with economic predictions regarding the future livelihood of the content industries. Much has been made of the potential threat posed by networked digital distribution to the established interests and business practices of the culture industries. Lobbying on behalf of the content industries by powerful groups with deep pockets – such as the Motion Pictures Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), and so on – has produced a particularly skewed picture of the ‘problem’. This often features huge numbers, whether they are speculative estimates about the damage caused by piracy cannibalising sales or the estimated damages expected from a successful court ruling. Indeed, in March 2011, it was estimated that the peer-to-peer network Limewire owed the RIAA

Situating the Apocalypse, Crime and Problem of Social Order

This chapter maps the theoretical and conceptual framework of the study, taking as its focus two key themes that organise the book as a whole. Firstly, it explores the meanings of the apocalyptic, situating these within the cultural history of the West. Tracing apocalyptic thinking from its religious roots in Christian and Judaic theology, it follows the evolution of such ideas into the supposedly secular era of modernity. Central here is the fundamental ambiguity of the apocalyptic — it can be both negative, marking the wholesale destruction of the world as we know it, but also positive, a mechanism of renewal and redemption. Secondly, it seeks to connect contemporary discourses on crime and disorder to apocalyptic thinking through their shared preoccupation with the problems of evil and suffering. It concludes by setting out the book’s approach to textual sampling and analysis, the basis for the exploration of post-apocalyptic fictions in the chapters that follow.

Law and Disorder in the Post-Apocalyptic Landscape: Social Breakdown, Sovereign Power and the State of Emergency

This chapter explores the ‘crisis of law and order’ that underpins popular representations of the post-apocalyptic world. This world is one in which a regressive atavism takes hold as the institutions of law collapse. This imaginary depicts the fragility of order and the imminent threat of its breakdown, echoing perceptions of a disordered world of random violence, riots, revolutions and terrorism. In post-apocalyptic fictions, this crisis of law and order gives way to a ‘state of emergency’, an assertion of sovereign power which permanently suspends citizens’ rights and any limitations on the exercise of power, all in the name of restoring order. Mirroring current fears about the exercise of sovereign power in the ‘war on terror’, the post-apocalyptic world is one in which dictatorship replaces democracy, law issues from the arbitrary decisions of dictatorial authority, and extra-judicial punishment and execution become the terrifying norm.

Crime, Disaster and the Crisis of the Gender Order

This chapter explores the theme of gender, sex and crime in the post-apocalyptic genre. It is notable that across many films, TV shows and novels, the breakdown of law and order in the wake of catastrophe is represented through the ubiquitous threat of rape and sexual violence. These texts depict atavistic male desire as an ever-present threat that is only held at bay by law and order — in their absence, it resurfaces and brutally subjects women, returning them to the status of chattel or objects. A second strand in post-apocalyptic culture articulates patriarchal fears of feminism and women’s liberation from the traditional, patriarchal gender order. Such texts imagine a post-crisis world in which men have been reduced to subservience and brutalisation by a female-dominated society that relies on ‘unnatural’ means of reproduction such as artificial insemination to sustain itself. These fictions communicate a complex and contradictory vision of patriarchal power as both a threat to, and something threatened by, social change.

The Utopian Apocalypse: Crime, Justice and Redemption

This chapter explores the ambiguous, double-sided character of the apocalyptic imaginary of crime, seeing it as welcome destruction of a flawed and failing social order that cannot secure justice. Rather than envisaging disaster as the realisation of a dystopian future of violence and predation, the ‘end of world’ serves as the gateway to creating a more moral society, one in which law satisfies victims’ need to punish offenders and see exemplary justice delivered. Drawing upon the original messianic roots of apocalyptic discourse, popular fictions express yearnings for a heroic carrier of frustrated hopes that the wicked will be brought to account for their crimes and the just will be rewarded with redemption.