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, etching images of the event into archive. The brawl culminates and fades from the streetscape. Yet its image is retainedâpreserved in witness recollections 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 uploaderâs 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 eventâs audience reaches its apogee. On this user-generated page, dedicated to hosting footage of street fights and public bare-knuckle violence, individuals dissect every minutiae of the eventâdenigrating, glorifying and debating in the wake of their online spectatorship. The spectator is recast as commentator and adjudicator, their rulings and commentary typed out and posted beneath the footage to be subsumed by future viewers into the eventâs mise-en-scène. Veneration, glorification and diatribe coincide in the collection of spectator responses to the video as individuals map their attitudes to vi olence. When the affray has played out, the viewer browses the siteâs content, wanders their cursor across the screen and selects a second fight to view, construe and respond to.
In the early twenty-first century, the street fight met the information superhighway. Driven by two vehicles, the camera phone and the Internet, footage of street fights and public hand-to-hand violence entered a fresh phase of production and distribution. Through the lens of the increasingly ubiquitous camera phone, the spectacle of public violence has been witnessed and captured at an unprecedented rate. Where spectatorship of public violence was once confined to the immediate bystander, and then later to the national audiences of televisual programming, now the str eet fight has been opened to the transnational free-for-all of the Internet, and with it, a legion of social media users. For in this era of increasing media convergence, all roads lead to Facebook, and many bear traffic in search of new avenues for viewing transgression. In an age of social media, Facebook stands as not only one of the worldâs most popular and well-frequented web domains, but also one of its foremost sites of violence, home to a multitude of user-uploaded fight clips, re-shared videos of transgression, and the primary subject of this book: fight p ages. Emerging out of Facebookâs âfanâ pages feature, which enables users to follow and connect around a shared interest, cause or brand, fight pages are user-generated pages that aggre gate, narrowcast and archive amateur recordings of street fights and other forms of public violence. If, to reinvent a worn-out phrase, the Internet can be thought to play host to a web of violence, with each hyperlink a thread connecting users to footage of violent events, then fight pages are where this web is at its most dense. They offer to their users, who subscribe through âlikingâ the page, a repository of transgression that far surpasses any other that has preceded them in the sheer quantity of content they make available.
This book is about the impact social media have had on the way we consume, view, distribute and curate footage of crime and violence. In it, I argue that fight pages represent an example of an emergent online phenomenon that might be termed a ntisocial media: participatory websites dedicated to hosting and sympathetically curating footage of transgression. In studies of media e ffects, the notion of antisocial media is occasionally used to refer to content that is deemed antisocial (Dill 2009; Shaw et al. 2015), often by way of contrasting it with prosocial media (see Fischer et al. 2011; Kundanis 2004; Greitemeyer 2010). The term is also regularly used, albeit as no more than a punning title, by journalists reporting on the potential for social media to promote unsociability (see OâConnell 2014). It has been used to open articles covering topics as diverse as the use of Facebook for threatening and intimidating others with violence (Birke 2010); the rate of racist messages posted on Twitter (Hoenig 2014); the Obama 2012 campaignâs use of social media (Parker 2012); social media monitoring, data retention, and geotracking (Plant 2012); a filmed attack on a teenager uploaded to social media (Times of Trenton Editorial Board 2015); online responses to terrorism in the wake of the attacks on Paris and Beirut (Adolphie 2015); the on-air murder of a news reporter and her cameraman by a disgruntled former colleague (Spector 2015) and an infamous YouTube channel dedicated to footage of horrifying caught on camera pranks (Duncan 2015). Antisocial media, then, has been used by journalists a s something of a catchall for socially harmful or destructive uses of social media.
My conceptualization of antisocial media is much narrower. It departs both from the notion of antisocial media as media content that promotes antisocial behaviour and the notion of antisocial media as antisocial uses of social media. Instead, I conceptualize antisocial media as a class of media, and specifically, a class of media that is intrinsically tied to the rise of participatory social media. Through examining fight pages, this book develops the notion of antisocial media beyond a clever play on words to describe a class of media that has received little attention from researchers. As I demonstrate through tracing the content, consumption and m edia ecology of fight pages, the rise of antisocial media represents a key shift in the conditions for distributing, encountering and spectating footage of criminalized acts.
Antisocial media can, therefore, be distinguished from online deviance undertaken either individually or by pre-established offline networks. Though social media provides a platform for individuals to engage in antisocial behaviours such as cyberbullying, such individually undertaken acts are not what I propose the term antisocial media to refer to. Rather, by my definition the term refers solely to participatory pages dedicated to promoting and/or undertaking antisocial behaviours. To qualify as antisocial media there must, in short, be a clearly demarcated site of antisocialism, rather than decentralized antisocial behaviour emanating from an individual or collective. Further, whilst antisocial media are participatory in providing their users affordances for responding to the footage they view, they are frequently underpinned by a distributorâaudience structure, with a page a dmi nistrator distributing transgressive material to a pageâs frequenters. This therefore distinguishes antisocial media from online social networks that intermittently share footage of antisocial acts online. It also marks perhaps the main commonality between antisocial media and broadcast media : their shared one-to-many model of distribution.
Antisocial media can also be distinguished from online domains inhabiting the so-called netherworld or underground of the Internet. Much has been written on transgressive material within the so-called digital underground: the vast assortment of unsearchable deep web pages, and peer-to-peer dark net communities that afford users anonymity (see Bartlett 2015).1 Antisocial media can, however, be distinguished from these dark net peer-to-peer communities and deep web domains in two significant ways. First, they differ in their levels of visibility. Whereas dark net and deep web sites are mostly invisible, hidden in the unsearchable recesses of the Internet or in anonymous peer-to-peer Tor networks, antisocial media are located in the surface web and are consequently highly visible, searchable and traceable. Further, whilst many antisocial media allow users to employ pseudonyms, and therefore allow their users to be anonymous to one another, they remain unencrypted domains. Consequently, their users can be traced, as can their creators, administrators and moderators. Antisocial media can be understood as the âclearnetâ or âsurface webâ2 counterpart of transgressive dark web domains, where anonymity is optional. Owing to these, and other factors that will be examined in this book, antisocial media support very different forms of sociability to dark net and deep web domains.
Like radical and alternative media , fight pages and other forms of antisoc ial media distribute content that is rarely, if ever, published by mainstream 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 commissioning of illicit acts, do so in the service of a political goal, which may include the act in questionâs 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 perspectives, including Smith and Raymenâs (2016) deviant leisure perspective and Hall a...