Digital Criminology

Crime and Justice in Digital Society

Anastasia Powell, Gregory Stratton, Robin Cameron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138636743
• eBook ISBN: 9781351795050
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The infusion of digital technology into contemporary society has had significant effects for everyday life and for everyday crimes. Digital Criminology: Crime and Justice in Digital Society is the first interdisciplinary scholarly investigation extending beyond traditional topics of cybercrime, policing and the law to consider the implications of digital society for public engagement with crime and justice movements. This book seeks to connect the disparate fields of criminology, sociology, legal studies, politics, media and cultural studies in the study of crime and justice. Drawing together intersecting conceptual frameworks, Digital Criminology examines conceptual, legal, political and cultural framings of crime, formal justice responses and informal citizen-led justice movements in our increasingly connected global and digital society.

Building on case study examples from across Australia, Canada, Europe, China, the UK and the United States, Digital Criminology explores key questions including: What are the implications of an increasingly digital society for crime and justice? What effects will emergent technologies have for how we respond to crime and participate in crime debates? What will be the foundational shifts in criminological research and frameworks for understanding crime and justice in this technologically mediated context? What does it mean to be a 'just' digital citizen? How will digital communications and social networks enable new forms of justice and justice movements? Ultimately, the book advances the case for an emerging digital criminology: extending the practical and conceptual analyses of 'cyber' or 'e' crime beyond a focus foremost on the novelty, pathology and illegality of technology-enabled crimes, to understandings of online crime as inherently social.

Twitter: @DigiCrimRMIT ?

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INTRODUCTION

Criminology and the Digital Society

Introduction

On Friday 20 January 2017, Donald John Trump was inaugurated President of the United States. While his first year in office has been marred by controversy, the 2016 election also highlighted the ubiquity of digital technologies within contemporary society. Indeed, both the Trump and Clinton campaigns not only navigated the political trail by harnessing digital platforms such as Twitter to convey their messages, but were also hampered through various digital disruptions despite careful management by campaign organisers. Take, for example, a selection of key issues raised throughout the Trump and Clinton campaigns: accusations of Russian hacking that resulted in a WikiLeaks release of Democratic National Committee and John Podesta emails (Healy, Sanger, & Haberman, 2016; Perlroth & Shear, 2016; Sanger & Shane, 2016); the consequential FBI investigation into Clinton’s use of private servers (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2016; Jacobs, Siddiqui, & Ackerman, 2016); photos that were taken in the polling booth as a potential Federal crime (Crockett, 2016); the ‘doxing’ by Trump of Senator Lindsey Graham by releasing his personal contact information without consent (Gass & Lerner, 2015); the appearance of ‘fake news’ and claims of a ‘post-truth’ world (Hogan, 2016; Howard, 2017; Subramanian, 2017); and the rise of social media as the foremost agenda-setting source in politics that had previously been dominated by print, radio and television news media (Enli, 2017; Johnson, 2016; Ott, 2017).

Yet Trump’s prolific use of Twitter, in particular, has emerged as both highly controversial and highly influential since the election result. Scholars from across politics, sociology and cultural studies, as well as media and communications, are already examining various aspects of Trump’s social media discourse and citizen engagements with it (Enli, 2017; Johnson, 2016; Ott, 2017). While some have noted that Trump’s ‘amateur’ style may have been read culturally as more ‘authentic’ than traditional political discourse and thus added to his popularity (Enli, 2017), others have criticised the Trump campaign for inciting fear and hatred of ‘the other’ in its messaging (Ott, 2017; Speed & Mannion, 2017). Texas Tech University Professor of Communications Brian Ott (2017, p. 65), for example, has argued that the ‘Age of Twitter virtually guaranteed the rise of Trump’, adding that, ‘public discourse simply cannot descend into the politics of division and degradation on a daily basis without significant consequence’. Ott’s analysis is remarkable for its pessimistic view of social media, which he describes as a toxic ‘contagion’, noting that ‘Tweets do more than merely reflect sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia; they spread those ideologies like a social cancer’ (p. 64). Yet his pessimism about the impacts of social media are not unfounded, with a Pew Internet Survey reporting that one in five US social media users changed their minds about a political issue or a candidate for office because of something they read on social media (Duggan & Smith, 2016). Moreover, the mainstream news media’s increasing treatment of Twitter itself as a source of news and information has arguably cemented Twitter’s agenda-setting function in which opinion and ‘alternative facts’ are circulated and recirculated as both factual and newsworthy (Ott, 2017; Speed & Mannion, 2017).

Across the Atlantic, and the UK vote to leave the European Union (referred to as ‘Brexit’, a portmanteau of ‘Britain’ and ‘exit’) in June 2016 has likewise raised questions about the influence of ‘fake news’, social media ‘echo chambers’ (Colleoni, Rozza, & Arvidsson, 2014; McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001) and the populist politics of fear and hate in a post-truth world (Lockie, 2017; Peters, 2017; Speed & Mannion, 2017).¹ As Diyana Dobreva and Martin Innes (2016) identify, the ‘leave’ campaign made many inaccurate claims about the damage that immigration and open borders had caused in Britain: appealing to emotions of fear of foreign ‘invaders’ and towards a conservative nationalism. Again, such rhetoric is not without social consequences: according to statistics released by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), reported hate crimes increased by 57% following the Brexit vote, a trend some argued was exacerbated by social media discourse (Debrova & Innes, 2016). Yet in a post-truth world, as suggested by Ewen Speed and Russell Mannion (2017, p. 250), swift policy reforms can be made based on the ‘personal whims and prejudices’ of a charismatic leader and at the expense of a secure evidence base, appealing instead to ‘a populism built on “walls” and fear of the “other”’. Though politicians have, before now, certainly been documented as spin-doctoring the facts to suit a political agenda, ‘the post-truth politician manufactures his or her own facts … [with] an authoritarian impulse that promises to be both reckless and destructive — an impulse all too comfortable with the deployment of propaganda, vilification and intimidation’ (Lockie, 2017, p. 1).

Though social media discourse cannot be understood as the cause of hate-based populism, neither are such digital platforms free of influence in co-producing and amplifying cultures and practices of bigotry, racism and misogyny. At the same time, the post-truth turn of populist politics may result from growing social exclusion and from a cultural backlash in which some groups within the community resent the multiculturalism and perceived displacement of traditional social values by successive waves of progressive social and cultural change (Inglehart & Norris, 2016; Speed & Mannion, 2017). The post-truth turn is also described as a reaction against, and rejection of, ‘evidence-based’ politics and the ‘elitist experts’ who espouse them (Lockie, 2017). Take, for instance, the notorious rebuke by Michael Gove, the UK’s justice secretary, on Sky News when discussing the role of expert advice in the Brexit decision (Gilman, 2016): ‘I think people in this country have had enough of experts’.

As sociologist Stewart Lockie (2017, p. 2) argues, ‘usage of the term “post-truth” may well be novel, but there is nothing novel about the authoritarian impulse implicit in such open contempt for truthfulness … Propaganda has long been a favoured tool among demagogues and colonialists — misleading information and dehumanizing rhetoric the legitimating force behind dispossession, repression, coercion and violence’. Indeed, criminologists too have long identified and problematised both the turn towards ‘populist punitiveness’ (Bottoms, 1995; Simon, 2007) and the claims that ‘almost nothing works’ in response to criminal offending, thus calling into question the role of the criminological ‘expert’ (Martinson, 1974). Criminologists have also long recognised the ‘affective versus effective’ tensions within law and criminal justice policy (Freiberg, 2001) in which political appeals to emotion and values often carry greater weight than evidence-based policy design. Each of these threads in criminological thinking and analysis bears distinct parallels to the contemporary populist, post-truth political context. Certainly, criminologists should be concerned about the potential for social media discourses to interact with and amplify populist politics in ways that may shape and influence not just politics generally but law and criminal justice policy in particular (Aas, 2013; Milivojevic & McGovern, 2014; Powell, 2014).

Of course, the ways in which digital technologies are enmeshed with the social, structural and cultural practices of law, crime and justice are many and varied — extending well beyond the politics of social media. For example, the ‘perpetual contact’ (Katz & Akhaus, 2002) that is facilitated by digital devices can be linked to the perpetration of crime, such as robberies and assaults facilitated by virtual ‘lures’ in the augmented reality game Pokemon Go (Criddle, 2016). At the same time, the constant connectivity via internet-enabled wearable devices (‘wearables’), as well as via social media, has contributed to the investigation of crimes. While police are increasingly employing ‘open source intelligence-gathering’ via social media and other publicly accessible data sources, everyday citizens are also following crime ‘in real time’ and seeking to actively contribute to ongoing criminal investigations. Meanwhile, the role of imagery in the perpetration, aftermath and cultures of criminality has shifted noticeably in the digital age: from photographs of crime victims being posted on social media (Ford, 2016); to blackmail and extortion of victims via threats to release humiliating or nude photographs and/or video (Henry, Powell, & Flynn, 2017); to streaming crimes including murder and rape for a public audience in real time via Facebook Live (Sulleyman, 2017). These are just some examples that illustrate the role of digital technologies in a wide range of offending and victimisation. Of equal concern are broader issues of persistent social and digital inequalities as they relate to crime and justice.

From a criminological perspective, the ways in which social media and other digital technologies permeated the Trump election, the Brexit vote and continue to pervade a variety of emerging harms and injustices in our global, digital world, further expose underlying substantive issues of power inequality, racism, bullying, misogyny, surveillance, digital privacy and digital security. Although criminology currently offers tools to explore some aspects of criminality in the digital age, such as cybercrime, cyber-terrorism and cyber-warfare, its tools are limited in their focus on the internet or ‘cyberspace’ as a distinct driver of criminality. Yet the examples discussed in this chapter, and indeed throughout this book, demonstrate the centrality of digital technologies in modern political and social life, such that it is increasingly impractical to isolate the practices and impacts of the ‘digital’ from ‘society’ and vice versa. It is here that criminology has arguably yet to fully engage.

In this book, we seek to reinvigorate and extend criminological analysis of digital technologies and their role not only in the commission of crimes but in the emergence of unfamiliar and/or extended harms, cultures of inequality and hate, as well as issues of justice, citizen participation and crime policy activism. To do so, we argue that criminology must engage more thoroughly with interdisciplinary perspectives from across science and technology, politics and cultural studies, as well as media and communications, in seeking to understand and respond to crime, justice and injustice in digital society.

What is Digital Society?

Unsurprisingly, the transformative impact of digital information and communication technologies in society has become a focus of interdisciplinary study. Unlike earlier conceptualisations of cyberspace (as compared with ‘real’, ‘terrestrial’ or ‘meat’ space) as a distinct sphere of experience, the concept of digital society refers to the integrated whole represented by digital technologies and society — a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. In order to avoid the limitations and distracting vagueness of previous emphasis on the digital, we advocate Heather Horst and Daniel Miller’s (2013, p. 5) proposal that, rather than distinguish between digital and analogue behaviours (see Grabosky and Smith, 2001), ‘digital’ can refer to anything and everything that can be developed through, or reduced to, the binary, that is the 1s and 0s of data. By avoiding any fixed characteristic of the nature of the digital, we are able to adopt a ‘heterogeneous understanding of the digital’, which emphasises the various ways in which it can be mobilised and deployed, even lived (Ruppert, Law, & Savage, 2013, p. 40). This use of ‘digital’ encapsulates the capacities of new technologies to produce emergent social relations and doings, rather than suggesting that it replaces or exists outside of human interaction (Ruppert et al., 2013). ‘Digital’, in this framework, does not refer only to computers, nor is it limited to code. Rather, it allows for expanded understandings and acknowledgements of the intersections between technologies and the social. In short, it recognises the potential for a digital society.

An understanding of the mutual and reciprocal shaping of technology and society is core to the concept of digital society as we employ it throughout this book. We do not view digital technologies as mere tools of human action and interaction, nor as deterministic of human action and interaction; we seek to conceptualise the technosocial nature of contemporary social and political life. So the ‘digital society’ becomes a shorthand for the fundamental nature of the technological, structural and social changes in the contemporary society in which we live; while ‘technosociality’ captures the processes, cultures and practices that characterise our day-to-day lives. Drawing in part on broader studies of technology and society (STS), and in part on the sub-field of digital sociology, we identify the dual concepts of digital society and technosociality as fundamental to — and indeed a launching pad for — emerging criminological theory, research and policy development that extend beyond the cybercriminologies of the past.

The concepts of digital society and technosociality both offer insights into technologically-mediated sociality, which has been underexamined within criminology. These concepts are not in themselves new, but rather signal a range of explanations of the mutual relationship between technology and society that have been offered through interdisciplinary concepts, such as: the network society (Castells, 1996, 2010, 2012), information and knowledge society (Hassan, 2008; Stehr, 1994; Webster, 1995), information age (Lash, 2002), cyberculture (Lévy, 2001) and cybersociety (Jones, 1995). Such concepts seek to understand the rapid transformative effect of information, communication and digital technologies on social and political life.

Manuel Castells’ highly influential concept of the network society, for ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 At the Crossroad
• 3 A Global Context
• 4 Crime in Real Time
• 5 Liminal Images
• 6 Networked Hate
• 7 Informal Justice
• 8 More than a Hashtag
• 9 Conclusion
• Index