Media/Crime/Millennium: Where Are We Now? A Reflective Review of Research and Theory Directions in...

Media ⁄ Crime ⁄ Millennium: Where Are We Now? AReflective Review of Research and Theory Directions inthe 21st Century

Sheila Brown*University of Plymouth

Abstract

This paper aims to provide a reflective – and selective – review of key developments in mediaand crime research and theory from the vantage point of the new century. Writing primarily as acriminologist, though with a background in sociological theory and research, information studies,and cultural analysis, I will seek to identify some of the turning points and questions that emergefrom what is a recently rejuvenated and expanding field. For the last decade media ⁄ crime researchhas been able to draw on an exciting array of multi-disciplinary sources of inspiration in a waythat has not happened before, and suggests new – intellectually complex – challenges for futurework.

Introduction

The discussion below charts a research and theory trajectory from ‘media and crime’ tomedia ⁄ crime. Its focus is on the growing interlinkages between ‘criminology’ and anarray of other fields loosely grouped into media studies, sociology, communications,information technologies ⁄ information studies and cultural studies. The significance of thistrajectory is twofold. Firstly it is concerned with the epistemological ‘separation ofspheres’ in the production of theory and research into ‘media ⁄ culture’ and ‘crime andcontrol’; and secondly it is a more ontologically oriented statement about the elision ofmedia and crime. It is undeniable that contemporary forms of sociality are multiply medi-ated: that is to say, most production and communication of meaning and action occurs inan environment that is as much virtually ⁄vicariously, as it is existentially ⁄ directly experi-enced (or rather that there is no discernible difference, since media experience is realexperience); and that the life world for most people, even in economically poor popula-tions, is technologically dense, networked and ubiquitously dispersed in telecommunica-tions.

From this perspective, it should be equally obvious that any understanding of the phe-nomena of ‘crime’ must attempt to comprehend this fact of the mediatization of life(Brown 2003a,b), and this in turn implies a close relationship between the understandingsof cultural analysis, social theory, criminology and media studies. However, cross-disci-plinarity has been limited. Whilst media and cultural studies scholars have not been verywell equipped to tackle issues specific to understanding substantive crime events andcomplex changes in the landscapes of crime, law and crime control policy, criminologistshave often had a tenuous purchase on the theoretical analyses of cultural and media stud-ies. There are historical reasons for this that will be briefly discussed, and it will be sug-gested that finally there is some evidence that criminology is gaining back some of its

Sociology Compass 5/6 (2011): 413–425, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00375.x

ª 2011 The AuthorSociology Compass ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

earlier sociological and cultural sensibilities. This is a long overdue development, andalthough currently criminology still remains only narrowly engaged with the media ⁄ crimenexus (Brown 2003a,b; Greer 2010) there is now cross-disciplinary communication. Itremains to be seen how the ontological challenges of the 21st century will be respondedto, as what is defined as and responded to as crime, increasingly is bound up in virtualcommunications technologies and the mediatized production of sociality.

Producing theory about media and crime: separate spheres and the politics ofknowledge?

Media and crime reflects the way in which research and publication on the two sphereshas historically proceeded in different academic locations (Brown 2003a,b). ‘Sociological’criminologists from ‘New Deviancy’ schools of media constructionism (Cohen 1972;Cohen and Young 1973) and then the seminal work of the Marxist influenced Centre forContemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the 1970s (Hall et al.1978; Hall and Jefferson 1976), recognised the contributions of cultural theory, interac-tionism, Marxist sociology and media studies to understanding the praxis of crime andcontrol (Brown 2003a,b; Redhead 1995). However flawed the ‘hegemonic ideology’perspectives of the crime–media relationship adopted in Policing the Crisis (Brown2003a,b; for a recent reassessment of Policing the Crisis see McLaughlin 2008), it did atleast offer the potential for acknowledging porosity in the borders between crime and itsrepresentations.

Criminology in the 1980s by contrast moved away from sociology, cultural theory andMarxism. In keeping with the authoritarian monetarist politics (and research funding con-straints) of the era, it was top-heavy with policy oriented ‘realism’, short termism, and‘administrative criminology’ (Jefferson and Shapland 1994). The 1980s ‘realist blight’ leftconstructionist perspectives stranded. They received little help from the former NewDeviancy stalwarts, as socialism fragmented, critical criminology dwindled, and ‘left real-ism’ loudly and specifically targeted the Marxist critiques of crime and media with disin-genuous accusations of ‘idealism’ (Lea and Young 1984; Matthews and Young 1986) andsought out policy funding for researching the ‘realities’ of crime in working class areas.

Meanwhile cultural studies expanded during the decade by decentring differently. Fem-inist scholarship likewise proceeded productively but often separately from criminology,mostly uninterested by its ‘malestream’ paradigms (Radford and Russell 1992) andexcluded by its male dominance (Smart 1977). Both cultural studies and feminist studiesemphasised the dispersal of identities and groups in late modernity, affirming difference,offering a widespread critique of the production of the Other; and re-stating the declineof the Marxist meta-narrative as enabling a more subtle appreciation of difference (During1993, Nicholson 1990): for obvious reasons this had little common ground with anincreasingly empiricist criminology that appeared merely to have run away from theory.

This considerable output of theory and research across a range of fields later to be cen-tral to understanding media ⁄ crime thus largely bypassed criminologists during the 1980s(Tierney 2010). In North America, with strong traditions of sociological constructivismin criminology, and a greater appreciation of the importance of media communications,the analysis of ‘mass media’ and ‘criminal construction’ at least retained its researchstrength. For example, in the justly acclaimed work of Ericson, Baranek and Chan(1987), the ‘mass media’ are seen as crucial to the creation of social coherence aroundmeanings of crime, law and deviance. Nevertheless these remained (and still largelyremain) committed to a separation of fact and value in their analysis of crime and media

414 Media ⁄ Crime ⁄ Millennium Review of Research

ª 2011 The Author Sociology Compass 5/6 (2011): 413–425, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00375.xSociology Compass ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

communications, leaving little room for the kind of complexities opened up by culturalstudies and feminisms.

Theory revived and remodelled: media representations of crime and latemodern ‘cultures’ of control

If the 1970s provided the social and economic backdrop to the demise of Marxist criticalcriminologies of media and crime, it was the informatics revolution of the 1980s alon-gside the emergence of post-socialist neo-liberalisms that were to later inform criminolo-gical orientations toward media communications. Outside criminology these were theorisedfrom the 1980s into the early 1990s in terms of individual identities and global communica-tions (Giddens 1991; Giddens 1999; Morley and Robins 1995), governance (Foucault1991) globalisation and (g)localisation (Featherstone et al. 1995) and risk (Beck 1992; Doug-las 1992). Interpretations of globalisation, post-socialism, post-colonialism and risk, foundexpression also in important theorisations of exclusion and blaming that featured widely incultural-geographical and sociological analyses of capitalist urbanised societies (Sibley 1995).Critiques of exclusion and community emerged across disciplinary boundaries, for examplein the 1990s debates around the new rightist ideology of the ‘underclass’ (Murray 1990).The disciplinary criss-crossing of these meta themes of late modern critique – appearing indifferent forms for example in sociology, cultural studies, geography, economics, social pol-icy, history, law, international relations and politics – were to produce a plethora of livelydebates central to criminological concerns.

Stirring from its administrative slumber, criminologists engaged with the late modernitydebate during the 1990s (and it is no coincidence that a key journal for theoretical debatefinally came in 1997 with Sage’ launch of Theoretical Criminology) and came to operate amore complex and multi-layered set of concerns than hitherto found in the ‘radical ⁄ criti-cal’, ‘administrative’, ‘positivist’ and ‘constructionist’ dualisms (Brown 2006a,b). Crimeand crime control were re-examined from the perspective of identities, fear, ‘masculini-ties’, social exclusion, urban de ⁄ regeneration, governance, and later became orientedtowards what Garland terms the growth of a ‘culture of control’ ( Garland 2000, 2001) ina politics where crime, risk and justice are inextricably intertwined (Stenson and Sullivan2001).

Theorising late modernity, key criminologists realised that in drawing on Giddens,Beck and Foucault, a more sophisticated grasp of culture would be required. Hence Gar-land noted that ‘contemporary responses to crime’ could only be understood with refer-ence to culturally transformative forces (Garland 2001, 2). Crime control policy responseshe argues, were increasingly characterised by emotional and expressive dimensions, thedecline of the rehabilitative ideal, the reinvigoration of victim discourses and a privilegingof politicised populism (Garland 2001). By the turn of the century criminologists wereincreasingly situating these concerns in ‘contemporary landscapes of crime, order andcontrol’, constituted through modes of ‘governance, risk and globalisation’ (Loader andSparks 2004, 83).

It is really at this point that media once more became a focus of criminological theoryagendas; for a general supposition running through the above work was that ‘the media’(usually anachronistically still referred to as ‘the mass media’ by criminologists) are centralin the production of the culture of control generally, and fuel it specifically along certainkey dimensions: in early accounts this included morality architectures (Sparks 1992); fearof crime, vindictiveness (Young 1999, 2007), popular punitiveness (Hough 2003; Reineret al. 2001), public acquiescence in control creep (Innes 2001) and ‘moral renewal’

Media ⁄ Crime ⁄ Millennium Review of Research 415


(Scraton 2002).In terms of the mediated governance of the State, news media inparticular are framed as purveyors of demonization, responsibilization, riskiness (and riskaversion), surveillance and exceptionalism.

Applying these ideas to a globalised mediation of risk and blame under conditions ofperpetual crises of governmental legitimacy in neo-liberal economies (over fiscal vacill-ation, criminogenesis, environmental uncertainty, costly and deathly military conflict,spiralling health care demands), a basis for an analysis of media-cultured criminalizationdeveloped. Central to late modern exclusionary processes, a rise of media propelled vin-dictiveness, it was argued, mobilised ‘community’ as a symbolically deployed ‘expelling’force against marginal populations (Young 1999). ‘The crisis’, or the ‘vertigo’ of latemodernity (Young 2007) is produced in the mediations of global TV networks, the inter-net, and the broader cultural media of celebrity, melodrama and minidrama (soaps, Holly-wood movies, reality TV) and moral entrepreneurialism (telethons, aid appeals, crimeappeals, name and shame campaigns, docudramas). The media are implicated at everylevel – ideologically, performatively, promotionally.

A key feature of neo-liberal governance is to govern through crime (Feeley and Simon1992) and mainstream news media forms are centred in that process. As purveyors of‘imaginaries’ – news media being the discursive intermediaries between direct existentialstates and the world ‘out there’ – strategies of governance rely on distributed representa-tions of crime and control in order to define ‘threats’ and secure legitimation for theirneutralisation by government actions. This accounts for the cultural prevalence and dis-persion of ‘war on’ metaphors, processes of mediatized othering often quite cynically pro-duced as promotional products (‘campaigns’, ‘initiatives’) through the media. Throughmedia news discourses, crime is presented as a risk and securitization against the Other asa primary goal of effective governance (Zedner 2003); whilst media forms from TVadvertising to ‘reality TV’, soaps to online campaigns produce metaphorical echoes acrossdifferent domains of ‘threat’ and ‘risk’ – health, the economy, crime and environment arenot ‘the same’ but they readily lend themselves to intertextualities that place representa-tions about danger on a register of commensuracy. The creation of a cycle of anxiety andreassurance becomes core business for media companies and related industries (Brown2003a,b).

Late modern criminologies are concerned with the mutual construction of media andcrime through public and political imaginaries (for an early and outstanding example seeSparks 1992). One might see this as post-structuration theory criminology, given thewide ranging influence of Giddens’ work in the social sciences (Giddens 1984) here –developed through a prism of governmentality theory (O’Malley 1998; Rose 2000), risktheory and a certain ‘cultural sensitivity’ as to how structures of control are facilitated andreproduced (Garland 2001). In the case of youth crime for example, ‘legislative, policyand political discourses, as well as media representation, are an inherent part of the sym-bolic landscape through which … what counts as [youth] crime are produced’ (Brown2009, 17). The complexity of this symbolic landscape works itself through in narratives,representations and interactions in multiple arenas of mediatized everyday life of youthcrime, ‘gangs’, gun and knife crime, public displays of behaviour and ‘attitude’, dress, andso on, producing a ‘climate’ which politicians in their intricate dance with the newsmedia, both help create and in turn are forced to respond to (Brown 2009). In Garland’sconceptual schema, this resonates with the point that the criminal categories of ‘officialcriminology’ ‘constitute their criminal objects in the very act of comprehending them’(Garland 2001, 25) so that criminology is itself (and ‘official’ or state-sponsored criminol-ogy in particular) imbricated with the production of ‘real’ criminals.



Mediatized politics is thus part and parcel of the late modern criminological analysis(Downes and Morgan 2002). Media populism is assumed to be a malign force drivingpunitiveness and sidestepping due process. Criminologists researching public opinion –especially the apparent gap between public imaginings of what goes on in the criminaljustice system and what actually happens (Hough and Roberts 1998) – have argued thatpublic mediations of the criminal justice system (fictional, ‘factual’ or factional) structureindividuals’ attitudinal orientations toward criminal justice matters such as the effective-ness of the police or sentencing by the courts (Gillespie and McLaughlin 2002; Hough2003; Janner 2002). Other researchers see ‘public opinion’ as being a simulationconstructed through ‘mediated proxies’ such as opinion polls, self selected reader ⁄viewer ⁄ listener polls and media voting mechanisms (Green 2006, 135).

Meanwhile, none of these discussions has really engaged with some key features of ‘thepublic’. They do not take full account for example of the online world (Allan 2006),whether in terms of ‘news’, social networking, or the implosion of the production andconsumption of media knowledge that is cyberculture (Brown 2003a,b), or the constantconnections of the never-sleeping communicative circuitaries of the ‘internet galaxy’(Castells 1996). As new generation mobile communications and online access supersedepress and television, ‘the public’ is reconstituted away from its role as audience and ‘opin-ion’ is treated as a free floating, measurable entity.

Following from the notion of the circulation of powerful public imaginaries, the nextdimension within the late modern ‘landscape’ is of course the globalisation of crime.Perhaps surprisingly, although this is the most obvious point at which media and crimemerge, it is relatively recently that media globalisation of culture has become a field ofattention for criminologists. If the ‘minimal state of neo-liberalism’ is hollowed outunder these conditions (Loader and Sparks 2004, 95), then global media would logicallybe centre stage in the theorisation of distributive networks of both crime and controlin the sense described by Castells (1996). This points to the diffusion of exclusionarycrime discourses through networked representations of crime events; to distributed glo-bal modes of crime control, surveillance and securitization (Jones 2007); and to themediatization of criminal activity, the sociotechnical networks and electronic ‘leaky’transborder flows of ‘crime’. These can be clearly seen around massively mediatedcrime events such as the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in 2001(Brown 2003a,b) and the events of the second Gulf War (Brown 2003a); and aroundglobally performed legal justice such as the trials of OJ Simpson and Rodney King(Barak 1996; Hunt 1999).

The diffusion of crime discourses globally relates closely to the debates concerning riskand governance. ‘Communicating the terrorist risk’ (Mythen and Walklate 2006), forexample, can be framed around Beck’s (1992) presentation of ‘risk society’ through botha generalised proliferation of risks and dangers (‘the war against terror’) and through thenodal points of governmentality such as responsibilisation strategies (Mythen and Walklate2006). In the UK at least, this process may be interpreted as a twin track discursivemobilisation of dispersed governance compatible with Garland’s (2000, 2001) analysis ofstate tactics of persuasion and encouragement towards citizenship. Hence individuals areurged to take responsibility, be alert (victimisation avoidance) and make good choices inresponse to a media managed promotion of the terrorist risk in the late modern cultureof control. In the case of the ‘war on terror’, the UK governmental anti-terrorism strat-egy urges the involvement of communities in ‘prevent, prepare, protect and pursue’(http://security.homeoffice.gov.uk/counter-terrorism-strategy/). Linking this back to thediscussion of public opinion and punitiveness, even a cursory examination of the news



media relationships surrounding ‘global crime’ such as terrorism confirms the inseparablenexus of media ⁄ crime (Ross 2007).

Media age? Representation and beyond in media ⁄crime

Unlike sociology and cultural studies, criminology experienced a time-delayed influenceof the major social transitions from the 1970s onwards that collectively may be concep-tualised as the ‘close of the mechanical age’ (Stone 1996). As noted earlier in this discus-sion, the intellectual growth of cultural studies and feminism in the 1980s largelybypassed criminology, as did the debates around post-modernity. Even though Foucault’sDiscipline and Punish (in the English translation) and the influence of revisionism becamefelt in penal theory in the 1990s, the wider implications of post-structuralism had a pat-chy history in relation to criminology, and had virtually no impact on media ⁄ crime theo-rising until the end of the century.

Yet both post-structuralism and post-modernism in the European sense have pro-duced a variety of valuable crime ⁄media analyses. They enable a subtler grasp of thefield of communications media and how they relate to crime ‘realities’ that is not avail-able if we continue to think of ‘crime’ and ‘media’ as separable entities. They also gofurther than late modern ‘structurational’ or ‘soft’ structural criminology (Garland 2001)and the later criminological constructivisms (Barak 1996; Surette 1998). Both post-mod-ern and post-structural perspectives suggest there is no ontological distinction to be madebetween [crime] events and media forms (Baudrillard 1995; Butler 1999; Genosko 1999;Merrin 2005). A representation denotes a negotiable and uncertain relationship betweenmedia form and audience (Nightingale and Ross 2003) and between sign and signified.It does not presuppose a stable relationship between an event and its representation(Fiske 1996) and in some accounts that ‘relationship’ does not exist: media and realityare flattened. Post-structuralism holds that power and meaning derive from the proper-ties of texts; an unmediated ‘reality’ is not accessible in media saturated societies,(Brown 2006a) so the question for the post-structuralists becomes one of the relation-ship of representations to other representations, and the constellations of power effectsthat the representations constitute. Representations are not then ‘distorted’ views ofreality, the ‘cooked’ to the ‘raw’ (Nichols 1994). In post-modern thought the endlessproliferation and circulation of representations is part of the seamless flow of ‘hyperreality’(Baudrillard 1983, Young 2007).

Crime ⁄media analysis in post-structural form becomes a practice of social semiotics(Valverde 2006; Young 1996, 2007). This requires a multiplexed approach to media‘texts’; since representations are relational they are constituted by genre or technical form,as much as they are by imagic or linguistic ‘content’ (or rather these facets cannot bedivorced). This is clearly seen in any contrast of form ⁄ content ⁄genre, such as murder inthe detective novel, the online news site, the blog, and the artwork at the Tate Modern,all of which may ostensibly have the same subject ⁄ object ‘in reality’ (Brown 2003a,b).Simply comparing their ‘content’ representations in relation to ostensive reality would befutile (Greer 2010; Valverde 2006).

In this way post-structural analyses provide readings of crime ⁄media across a multiplicityof forms and formations. Alison Young can thus address the semiotics of the body in theforensic novel, the CCTV images of James Bulger, and the aftermath and cinematicimages of 9 ⁄ 11, within broadly comparable analytic frames (Young 1996, 2007); Valverdeextends her analysis across images in Hitchcock to crime scene photographs (Valverde2006); other researchers confront the ‘facts’ of forensic identification (DNA print outs,



facial recognition) as representational media ‘in wider power-knowledge relations thatfabricate criminal individuals’ (Pavlich 2009). Through the DNA bar code, even the ulti-mate in individuality is but an imagic marker. These perspectives thus require a flexibilityof imagination as to the proper concerns of research into media ⁄ crime. They move awayfrom social production of dominant representations based on power, towards the produc-tive power of the representational field, which is the social.

A central and rather difficult sequence in the performance and the reading ofpost-structural analysis is its lack of concern with notions of observable, empirical truth:post-structuralists are concerned with the ‘other side of reason’ (Boyne 1990). In relationto victimology in particular, this leaves post-structuralism and post-modernism open toaccusations of ‘voodoo semiotics’ (Nichols 1994), as if social documentary were dead andreality ⁄ real-time TV streaming is all that remains, endlessly looping, leaving everythingopen to the suggestion that it ‘is not taking place, will not take place and did not takeplace’, to paraphrase Baudrillard’s scandalous essays on the first Gulf War (Baudrillard1995; Brown 2003a). Increasingly events such as the bombing of the London Under-ground in 2005, videoed by co-victims on mobile telephones, relayed back through TVbroadcasting and streamed over the internet, preceded the YouTube takeover of reality,where everything is realtime, timeless and nothing is real (or everything is real). This isechoed in Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition (Gibson 2003) where, after the nodal pointof 9 ⁄11, endless media promotion is the only driver of history, there is no reality orfuture because ‘there is insufficient now to stand on’ (Gibson 2003, 57). 9 ⁄11 itself is readas a turning point in promotion, a simultaneous realisation and derealisation in which theWest’s own ‘bomb informatique’ is fused with the explosive impact itself. Read carelessly,this kind of media theory can certainly end up seeming as if the sufferings of crime vic-tims, the recipients of injustice, the tortured and the imprisoned, do not matter. Yet thisneed not be ‘anti-victim’: trauma and harm may be treated symmetrically in virtual andin ‘real’ world senses (Brown 2003a,b; Young 2007) and there is no reason to supposethat mediatized experiences have less impact on well being.

Criminology has often not helped matters with its approach to media communications.To take an example from the highly theoretically sophisticated oeuvre of David Garland,TV crime shows are characterised as ‘coaching’ us to ‘think of criminals as more numer-ous, more threatening and more dangerous than they typically are’ (Garland 2000, 363),and it is argued that the ‘mass media has tapped into, …dramatized and reinforced, a newpublic experience…and…has institutionalized that experience’ (Garland 2000, 363). Thisnotion of ‘the mass media’, which became problematic in the 1990s quicker than onecould utter the word ‘blog’, stands out in the work of one the best theorists incriminology. The problem with attempting to retain the ‘media’ as a separate sphere incriminological analysis is clear with hindsight. Indeed Garland himself has since recognisedthe need for subtle critiques of binary approaches to media, crime and culture in areconsideration of the ‘post Cohen’ (Cohen 1972) applications of the moral panic concept(Garland 2008).

Boundary crossings in crime ⁄media: imaginaries of the new century

The challenge for the 21st century, a century if anything ‘of’ the media, is to tease themost promising threads out of this tangle, and follow them in ways that can grasp themultiple significances of the media ⁄ crime nexus. It is now impossible to separate under-standings of crime and control from understanding of mediatization, representation andthe ways in which media technologies inhere in everyday life (Brown 2003a,b): media



and crime are part of a conceptually indivisible dyad. In this dyadic movement, media ⁄crime now denotes something more than the traditional study of dualisms: that is, ofmedia ‘representations’ of crime events implying some kind of distorting mirror held upto ‘reality’ and an image refracted back into ‘society’.

Rapid developments in information and communications technologies and informaticshave heralded an explosion of interest in media technologies as cultural habitus (Feather-stone and Burrows 1995; Haraway 1991, 1997; Hine 2000; Poster 2001; Stone 1996).This has produced a focusing of attention on virtual crime and control practices, drawingon cyborg and post-human studies, surveillance studies, and many other potential ‘new’fields of criminological and cultural studies interest (Bogard 1996; Brown 2003a,b,2006a,b; Jewkes 2004, 2007; Jewkes and Yar 2010; Lyon 2001; McCahill 2002; Norrisand Armstrong 1999).

Leaky, or even dissolving, boundaries and borders – boundaries of discipline, bound-aries of real and representation, borders of fiction, fantasy and transformation, of bodyand virtuality, explicit display and code, were almost definitive of the ‘late modern’epoch. Social change in the late 20th century simultaneously (and to some extent symbi-otically) transformed media cultures, communications technologies and the cultures ofcontrol that frame crime (Brown 2006a,b). As we have already seen, in the process ofthat transformation, both ‘media’ and ‘crime’ have acquired new and different signifi-cances. This in turn has had a broad effect on the kinds of research and theorising thattakes place under the rubric of crime and media (Brown 2003a,b, 2006a,b; Cottle 2006;Mason 2003; Greer 2010; Valverde 2006; Hunt 1999).

In addition to this it can be noted that there has been some coalescing of a number ofstrands of research and analysis in the last decade around the notion of a ‘new’ culturalcriminology (Ferrell 1999). This ‘re-claiming’ of the cultural criminology soubriquet by asmall group of prominent male American and English criminologists (it was ever thus)has highlighted some aspects of the media crime question quite usefully, especially theexpressive dimensions of the ‘post-modern turn’(Ferrell 1999; Ferrell et al. 2004, 2008;Hayward and Young 2007). Thus cultural criminology is the most ‘media friendly’ faceof current mainstream criminology, certainly in the 21st century ‘media ⁄ crime’ sense dis-cussed in this paper. This is exemplified with the launch (in 2005) of the journal CrimeMedia Culture by Sage, purposively attracting through its Editorial policy a wide range oftheoretical approaches and formats of media ⁄ crime analysis. Against a traditional ortho-doxy of media and crime, the prioritising of media ⁄ crime has to be welcomed (Greer2010).

Conclusion: media ⁄crime ⁄millennium

However, future directions suggest even more challenges, and they are likely to proveintellectually complex. Lash has demanded a ‘new theory of the sign’ (Lash 2002) inour framing of the social that would inevitably reposition ‘the media’ in a flattenedworld of the immanence of signs and things. If we were to even halfway meet thesekinds of revised ontological projects, then we would certainly have to re-craft our cate-gories of media and of crime beyond even post-modern agendas and certainly beyondthe general focus of cultural criminology, towards a number of specific streams of analy-sis embracing the techno-social and the political. Interesting new contributions are aris-ing from areas such as media studies, suggesting complex interactions betweenmaterialist, culturalist and ‘post’ (modern, structural) approaches to representation thathave a clear relevance for criminologists (see for example Miller 2008). Featherstone



(2007) has gone so far as to suggest a necessary ‘media ontology’ in comprehendingcontemporary social phenomena.

This goes further than Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism that the ‘medium is the message’(McLuhan 1987) and Baudrillard’s audacity (Genosko 1999) that highlighted the imma-nence of media communications, everyday life and the alleged disappearance of the ‘real’into the compressed post-modern spaces of media culture. One could see how post-modern implosion rendered the world not real, but hyperreal: yet at the same time theundeniably technosocial form of contemporary life requires a theorization of things aswell as images (Latour 1993; Michael 2000). Moreover, it is important to rememberthat, in the context of global conflicts, ‘permanent’ war, and arguably escalating levels ofpoverty and social division, the so-called death of reality has far from removed the realityof death. Indeed Baudrillard’s work is often misunderstood in this respect (for a spiritedand scholarly defence of Baudrillard see Patton 1995).

It was the technological globalisation of culture and its attendant debates surroundingthe exponential growth not only of electronic communications and telecommunicationstechnologies but also biotechnologies that prompted Lash to finally declare that forms oflife were now ‘technological’ (Lash 2002) and Fukuyama to proclaim upon ‘our post-human future’ (Fukuyama 2002). Latour (1993) had long been arguing that the separationof forms of life into natural and social, human and technological, had always been a falsedichotomy promoted by the illusions of modern culture: we had, he declared, ‘neverbeen modern’. Such debates have been occurring in science and technology studiesresearch for some time [for example in the now well-known work of Callon (1986,2005); Gane (2006); Haraway (1991, 1997); Latour (1993, 2007); Law (1991, 2004); Lawand Mol (2002); Stone (1996); Waldby (2000)].

It was principally the space and places of the cyber that produced the imaginaries ofthe post-human, where the boundaries between media and human identity surely dis-solved (Gane 2006; Haraway 1997; Michael 2000; Stone 1996). Somewhere betweenGoogle Earth and Second Life, media and life became indivisible, along with the bound-aries between technology and nature, people and machines, and genes and code (Haraway1997).The ‘network society’ was only one part of the bigger media and informatics trans-lations, producing what Haraway has called the need for a different kind of ‘worlding’(Gane 2006), a symmetrical mobilisation of human and non-human through the produc-tion of both as information (Brown 2006a,b; Franco Aas 2006). There is the digital ‘revo-lution’ on the one hand and the bioinformatics ‘revolution’ on the other (Thacker 2005);the translating of both culture and matter into pure data (Lash 2002).

As the hybridisation of nodal governance proceeds (Wood and Shearing 2007), med-ia ⁄ crime becomes part of the landscape of that governance; for nodal governance dependsupon overlapping, interacting spheres or nodes of ‘imaginings’ and ‘mentalities’ of securi-tisation demanding governmental and policing responses (Wood and Shearing 2007, 35).Media communications can thus be conceptualised as a dispersal of these imaginingsthough perpetual contact (Katz and Aakhus 2002). This in turn requires a criminologythat attends to media communications in the widest sense. As well as the internet gener-ally (Allan 2006) mobile communications and wireless LANS exemplify this tendency(Katz and Aakhus 2002), as does the seemingly endless expansion of surveillance media(Haggerty and Ericson 2000). Since both politics and crime become part of the constantstreaming of media events (Allan 2006), they are also woven into the fabric of mediacommunications at every level.

This emergence of technology as an active participant in sociality at the ‘close of themechanical age’ (Stone 1996) saw the phenomenon of ‘the media’ swept aside in its old



sense. This has produced a society which is both hyper-mediated in the post-modernmeaning, and which is cybernetic, in that media technologies and subjectivities becomemutually constitutive. Media are cultures, technologies and networks. Crime and justiceare fashioned in this habitus, raising provocative new challenges for scholars with aninterest in questions of crime, order and control. As Haraway suggests (Gane with Har-away 2006), this requires both a great deal of category work and a different kind of‘worlding’: it will be interesting to see where the challenge is met.

Short Biography

Sheila Brown is a criminologist at Plymouth Law School, University of Plymouth, UK.She has researched and published across various disciplinary boundaries in culture, crimeand media, cybercrime, virtuality and the criminology of youth for a number of years.Her books include Crime and Law in Media Culture (Open University Press 2003); she hasrecently contributed to edited collections on internet crime and youth crime and is cur-rently writing a book on science, technology and crime based on her research into mur-der inquiries and their mediations.

Note

* Correspondence address: Sheila Brown, University of Plymouth, Plymouth Law School, 20 Portland Villas,Plymouth PL4 8AA, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

References

Allan, Stuart. 2006. Online News: Journalism and the Internet. Maidenhead: Open University Press.Barak, Gregg. 1996. Representing O.J.: Murder, Criminal Justice and Mass Culture. Guilderland, NY: Harrow and

Heston.Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. New York, NY: Semiotexte.Baudrillard, Jean. 1995. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Sydney: Power Publications.Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.Bogard, William. 1996. The Simulation of Surveillance: Hyper-Control in Telematic Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.Boyne, Roy. 1990. Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason. London: Unwin Hyman.Brown, S. 2003a. Crime and Law in Media Culture. Buckingham: Open University Press.Brown, Sheila. 2003b. ‘From the ‘Death of the Real’ to the Reality of Death: How Did the Gulf War Take Place?’

Journal for Crime, Conflict and the Media 1(1): 50–68.Brown, Sheila. 2006a. ‘The Criminology of Hybrids: Rethinking Crime and Law in Technosocial Networks.’ The-

oretical Criminology 10(2): 223–44.Brown, Sheila. 2006b. ‘Virtual Criminology.’ Pp. 456–458 in The Sage Dictionary of Criminology, edited by Eugene

McLaughlin and John Muncie. London: Sage.Brown, Sheila. 2009. ‘The Changing Landscape of Youth and Youth Crime.’ Pp. 17–37 in Youth Offending and

Youth Justice, edited by Monica Barry and Fergus O’Neill. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.Butler, Rex. 1999. Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real. London: Sage.Callon, Michel. 1986. ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fisher-

men of St Brieuc Bay.’ Pp. 196–233 in Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? edited by JohnLaw. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Callon, Michel. 2005. ‘Why Virtualism Paves the Way to Political Impotence.’ Economic Sociology 6(2): 3–20.Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.Cohen, Stanley. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: MacGibbon and

Kee.Cohen, Stanley and Jock Young. 1973. The Manufacture of News: Social Problems, Deviance and the Mass Media. Lon-

don: Constable.Cottle, Simon. 2006. Mediatized Conflict: Developments in Media and Conflict Studies. Maidenhead: Open University

Press.



Douglas, Mary. 1992. Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. London: Routledge.Downes, David and Rod Morgan. 2002. ‘The Skeletons in the Cupboard: The Politics of Law and Order at the

Turn of the Millennium.’ Pp. 286–321 in The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, edited by Mike Maguire, RodMorgan and Robert Reiner. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

During, Simon. 1993. The Cultural Studies Reader. London, New York: Routledge.Erikson, Richard V., Patricia M. Baranek and Janet B. L. Chan. 1987. Visualizing Deviance: A Study of News Organi-

zation. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.Featherstone, Mike. 2009. ‘Ubiquitous Media: An Introduction.’ Theory, Culture and Society 26(2): 1–22.Featherstone, Mike and Roger Burrows (eds) 1995. Cyberspace ⁄ Cyberbodies ⁄ Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological

Embodiment. London: Sage.Featherstone, Mike, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (eds) 1995. Global Modernities. London: Sage.Feeley, Malcolm and Jonathon Simon. 1992. ‘The New Penology: Notes on the Emerging Strategy of Corrections

and Its Implications.’ Criminology 30(4): 449–74.Ferrell, J. 1999. ‘Cultural Criminology.’ Annual Review of Sociology 25: 395–418.Ferrell, Jeff, Keith Hayward, Wayne Morrison and Mike Presdee (eds) 2004. Cultural Criminology Unleashed. Lon-

don: Glass House.Ferrell, Jeff, Keith Hayward and Jock Young. 2008. Cultural Criminology: An Invitation. London: Sage.Fiske, John. 1996. Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Franco Aas, Katja. 2006. ‘The Body Does Not Lie: Identity, Risk and Trust in Technoculture.’ Crime, Media, Cul-

ture 2(2): 143–58.Foucault, Michel. 1991. ‘Governmentality.’ Pp. 87–104 in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by

Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller. Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf.Fukuyama, Francis. 2002. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. London: Profile.Gane, Nick. 2006. ‘When We Have Never Been Human, What is to be Done? Interview with Donna Haraway.’

Theory, Culture and Society 23: 135–58.Garland, David. 2000. ‘The Culture of High Crime Societies.’ British Journal of Criminology 40: 347–75.Garland, David. 2001. The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press.Garland, David. 2008. ‘On the Concept of Moral Panic.’ Crime, Media, Culture 4(1): 9–30.Genosko, Gary. 1999. McLuhan and Baudrillard: Masters of Implosion. London: Routledge.Gibson, William. 2003. Pattern Recognition. London: Viking.Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity.Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.Giddens, Anthony. 1999. Runaway World: How Globalisation is Shaping Our Lives. London: Profile Books.Gillespie, Marie and Eugene McLaughlin. 2002. ‘Media and the Shaping of Public Attitudes.’ Criminal Justice Matters

49(1): 18–23.Green, David. 2006. ‘Public Opinion Versus Public Judgement About Crime: Correcting the ‘Comedy of Errors.’

British Journal of Criminology 46: 131–54.Greer, Chris (ed.) 2010. Crime and Media: A Reader. London: Routledge.Haggerty, Kevin D. and Robert V. Erikson. 2000. ‘The Surveillant Assemblage.’ British Journal of Criminology 51:

605–22.Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts. 1978. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the

State, and Law and Order. London: Macmillan.Hall, Stuart and Tony Jefferson. 1976. Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London:

Hutchinson in association with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books.Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_Oncomouse. New York: Routledge.Hayward, Keith and Jock Young. 2007. ‘Cultural Criminology.’ Pp. 102–21 in The Oxford Handbook of Criminology,

4th edition, edited by Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan and Robert Reiner. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Hine, Chris. 2000. Virtual Ethnography. London: Sage.Hough, Mike. 2003. ‘Modernization and Public Opinion: Some Criminal Justice Paradoxes.’ Contemporary Politics

9(2): 143–55.Hough, Mike and Julian V. Roberts. 1998. Attitudes to Punishment: Findings from the British Crime Survey: Home Office

Research Study 179. London: Home Office.Hunt, Darnell M. 1999. O.J. Simpson Facts and Fictions: News Rituals in the Construction of Reality. Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press.Innes, Martin. 2001. ‘Control Creep.’ Sociological Research Online: http://www.socresonline.org.uk/6/3/innes.html

(Last Accessed 21 January 2010).Janner, Marion. 2002. ‘Creating Public Awareness Campaigns.’ Criminal Justice Matters 49(1): 10–11.Jefferson, Tony and Joanna Shapland. 1994. ‘Criminal Justice and the Production of Order and Control.’ British

Journal of Criminology 34(3): 65–90.



Jewkes, Yvonne. 2004. Media and Crime. London: Sage.Jewkes, Yvonne (ed.) 2007. Crime Online. Cullompton: Willan.Jewkes, Yvonne and Majid Yar (eds) 2010. Handbook of Internet Crime. Cullompton: Willan.Jones, Trevor. 2007. ‘The Governance of Security: Pluralization, Privatization, and Polarization in Crime Control.’

Pp. 841–65 in The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, edited by Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan and Robert Reiner.Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Katz, James E. and Mark Aakhus (eds) 2002. Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lash, Scott. 2002. Critique of Information. London: Sage.Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.Latour, Bruno. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.Law, John (ed.) 1991. Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology, and Domination. London: Routledge.Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge.Law, John and Annette Mol. 2002. Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices. London: Duke University

Press.Lea, John and Jock Young. 1984. What is to be Done About Law and Order? Harmondsworth: Penguin.Loader, Ian and Richard Sparks. 2004. ‘Contemporary Landscapes of Crime, Order and Control: Governance, Risk

and Globalization.’ Pp. 83–111 in The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 3rd edition, edited by Mike Maguire,Rod Morgan and Robert Reiner. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lyon, David. 2001. Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. Maidenhead: Open University Press.Mason, Paul. (ed) 2003. Criminal Visions. London: Routledge.Matthews, Roger and Jock Young. 1986. Confronting Crime. London: Sage.McCahill, Mike. 2002. The Surveillance Web: The Rise of Visual Surveillance in an English City. Cullompton: Willan.McLaughlin, Eugene. 2008. ‘Hitting the Panic Button: Policing ⁄ ’Mugging’ ⁄ Media ⁄ Crisis.’ Crime, Media, Culture

4(1): 145–54.McLuhan, Marshall. 1987. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Ark.Merrin, William. 2005. Baudrillard and the Media: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity.Michael, Mike. 2000. Reconnecting Culture, Technology and Nature: From Society to Heterogeneity. London: Routledge.Miller, T. 2008. ‘‘Step Away from the Croissant’: Media Studies 3.0.’ Pp. 213–30 in The Media And Social Theory,

edited by David Hesmondhalgh and Jason Toynbee. London: Routledge.Morley, David and Kevin Robins. 1995. Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries.

London: Routledge.Murray, Charles. 1990. The Emerging British Underclass. London: Institute for Economic Affairs Health and Welfare

Unit.Mythen, Gabe and Sandra Walklate. 2006. ‘Communicating the Terrorist Risk: Harnessing a Culture of Fear?’

Crime, Media, Culture 2(2): 123–42.Nichols, Bill. 1994. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana Univer-

sity Press.Nicholson, Linda J. (ed.) 1990. Feminism ⁄ Postmodernism. London: Routledge.Nightingale, Virginia and Karen Ross (eds) 2003. Critical Readings: Media and Audiences. Maidenhead: Open Univer-

sity Press.Norris, Clive and Gary Armstrong. 1999. The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV as Social Control.

Oxford, New York: Berg.O’Malley, Pat. 1998. Crime and the Risk Society. Aldershot: Ashgate.Patton, Paul. 1995. ‘Introduction.’ Pp. 1–21 in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, essays by Jean Baudrillard, trans-

lated by Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications.Pavlich, George. 2009. ‘The Subjects of Criminal Identification.’ Punishment and Society 11(2): 171–90.Poster, Mark. 2001. The Information Subject. Amsterdam: G&B Arts International.Radford, Jill and Diana E. H. Russell. (eds) 1992. Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing. Buckingham: Open Uni-

versity Press.Redhead, Steve. 1995. Unpopular Cultures: The Birth of Law and Popular Culture. Manchester: Manchester University

Press.Reiner, Robert, Sonia Livingstone and Jessica Allen. 2001. ‘Casino Culture: Media and Crime in a Winner-Loser

Society.’ Pp. 174–94 in Crime, Risk and Justice: The Politics of Crime Control in Liberal Democracies, edited by KevinStenson and Robert Sullivan. Cullompton: Willan.

Rose, Niklaus. 2000. ‘Government and Control.’ Pp. 183–208 in Criminology and Social Theory, edited by DavidGarland and Richard Sparks. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Ross, Jeffrey Ian. 2007. ‘Deconstructing the Terrorism-News Relationship.’ Crime, Media, Culture 3(2): 215–25.Scraton, Phil. 2002. ‘The Demonisation, Exclusion and Regulation of Children: From Moral Panic to Moral

Renewal.’ Pp. 9–39 in Crime: Fear or Fascination? edited by Anne Boran. Chester: Chester Academic Press.



Sibley, David. 1995. Geographies of Exclusion. London: Routledge.Smart, Carol. 1977. Women Crime, and Criminology: A Feminist Critique. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Sparks, Richard. 1992. Television and the Drama of Crime: Moral Tales and the Place of Crime in Public Life. Bucking-

ham: Open University Press.Stenson, Kevin and Robert R. Sullivan (eds) 2001. Crime, Risk and Justice: The Politics of Crime Control in Liberal

Democracies. Cullompton: Willan.Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. 1996. Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. London: MIT Press.Surette, Ray. 1998. Media, Crime and Criminal Justice: Images and Realities. London: Wadsworth.Thacker, Eugene. 2005. The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture. London: MIT Press.Tierney, John. 2010. Criminology: Theory and Context. London: Longman.Valverde, Marianne. 2006. Law and Order: Images, Meanings, Myths. London: Glasshouse Press.Waldby, Cynthia. 2000. The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine. London: Routledge.Wood, Jennifer and Clifford Shearing. 2007. Imagining Security. Cullompton: Willan.Young, Allison. 1996. Imagining Crime: Textual Outlaws and Criminal Conversations. London: Sage.Young, Jock. 1999. The Exclusive Society: Social Exclusion, Crime and Difference in Late Modernity. London: Sage.Young, Jock. 2007. The Vertigo of Late Modernity. London: Sage.Zedner, Lucia. 2003. ‘Too Much Security?’ International Journal of the Sociology of Law 31: 155–84.



Media/Crime/Millennium: Where Are We Now? A Reflective Review of Research and Theory Directions in...

Documents

Transcript of Media/Crime/Millennium: Where Are We Now? A Reflective Review of Research and Theory Directions in...