Digital Criminology by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138636736
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

The Banality of the Criminal Selfie

Following the social functions of personal photography discussed above (van House, 2011; van House, Davis, Ames, Finn, & Viswanathan, 2005), we suggest that criminology must not overlook the far more banal roles of self- and life-imagery in the day-to-day. For example, Science and technology scholar Nancy van House identifies key social motivations for photo taking and sharing practices, including: personal and group memory, relationship creating and maintenance and self-representation. Each of these motivations carries particular significance for the issues discussed here. One might extrapolate, for instance, that photos of a shared crime might be motivated by shared group memory or ‘memorialisation’ of the event, in a similar way to other shared experiences that become reference points in peer group memory. Such imagery might also serve to build trust within the group: if the images are taken and shared among a group, they may imply that no one who was present at the time of the offence will report to police, since the images may implicate everyone. These are only speculations, though they have some resonance in the visual communication literature regarding the function of social image taking and sharing generally. Indeed, for van House (2011), self-representation through making, showing, viewing and talking about images forms part of how we enact ourselves and contributes to the construction of social norms. Such motivations might also be extrapolated to the motivations of offenders who photograph and/or video their crimes. Photography is not merely an act of documenting and representing an experience, scene or event; it is itself an act of social and cultural production (Carney, 2010). Though early photography required perhaps greater, or more deliberative, curation and construction, the function of photography as a medium of communication and meaning-making is by no means lessened in digital society. Rather, it is an embedded feature of everyday life through which norms, values and practices are both produced and reproduced — as much for crime and injustice as for any other feature of society. Though familiar criminal motivations may underlie the new trend of taking and sharing images of crime, at the same time, it is difficult to ignore the banality of image-taking and sharing as a social and communicative practice of everyday life in general — one that is simply extended to everyday crimes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.