Moral panics and digital-media logic: Notes on a changing research agenda

Introduction

In 1995, Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton introduced their influential deconstruction of moral panic studies by declaring that “[i]t is now over twenty years since the well-established sociology of deviance along with the emergent sociology of mass media produced the concept of moral panic” (McRobbie and Thornton, 1995: 559). They explained how the proliferation of mass-, niche-, and micro-media outlets, along with the many voices that contest meanings of deviance and moral transgression, signals that processes of social regulation and control have undergone some degree of shift, if not transformation. McRobbie and Thornton therefore proclaimed, “it is now time that every stage in the process of constructing a moral panic, as well as the social relations which support it, should be revised” (McRobbie and Thornton, 1995: 559).

McRobbie and Thornton’s deconstruction of the cycles and stages underscoring the original models of moral panic had a lasting impact on how criminologists and sociologists explain the relationships among media, crime, claims-making, and social control. Their arguments about fragmented media sources, the diversity of participants involved in public claims-making, and shifting points of social regulation and control also inspired new and innovative advances in moral panic research (e.g. Carlson, 2015; Hier, 2008; Ungar, 2001). But in the years following the critique, rapidly expanding digital communication networks and collaborative social-media platforms began to reshape the dynamics of interaction involved in the social construction of moral panics. The integration of new digital technologies into the routine conventions of everyday life has now reached the point where the explanatory power of McRobbie and Thornton’s once timely critique is much more limited than most contemporary summaries of their deconstruction continue to suggest. It is, therefore, necessary to rethink some of the ways that moral panics are being cultivated in digitally (rather than only multi-) mediated social worlds. In doing so, it is also important to critically review the explanatory assumptions that McRobbie and Thornton’s arguments are based on to understand how they are predicated on the logic of mass mediation.

Moral panics for multi-mediated social worlds

McRobbie and Thornton open their widely influential deconstruction of classical moral panic theory by arguing that every stage in the process of constructing a moral panic requires revision. They place explanatory emphasis on the implications of expanding mass-, niche-, and micro-media outlets in the early- to mid-1990s, and they draw attention to the importance of pressure groups and commercial interests in the cultivation and contestation of panic narratives. From the vantage point of late-20th century Britain, McRobbie and Thornton surmise that if moral panics were once conceptualized as the unintended outcome of journalistic practices, they seem to have become a goal of such practices.

The changing dynamics of moral panics in multi-mediated social worlds are contrasted to the kinds of social relations envisioned in the original studies. On one hand, McRobbie and Thornton explain, the initial, labeling-inspired models formulated by Cohen (2003 [1972]), Young (1971), and Pearson (1983) theorize moral panics as cultural control mechanisms that function to reinforce if not propagate a single (dominant, conservative) social order. On the other hand, they observe that Hall et al.’s (2009 [1978]) neo-Marxian framework develops deeper insights into the political dimensions of moral panics by explaining how they function as “suffusive social processes” (McRobbie and Thornton, 1995: 563) linking the interests of the state and civil society through the ideological components of common sense.

Despite the different theoretical orientations found in the classical studies, McRobbie and Thornton argue that each of the original models relies on a singularly reductive, if rhetorical, understanding of ‘society’ and ‘social reactions’. Whether Cohen’s ‘society’, Pearson’s ‘collective memory’, or Hall et al.’s ‘hegemony’, they argue that each classical formulation characterizes moral panics in terms of undifferentiated group reactions that are functional to dominant social interests. The problem with homogenizing explanations for social reactions to putative threats, they explain, is that the empirical complexity of actually existing societal relations and interactions is reduced to a totalizing monolith – “a metaphor which depicts a complex society as a single person who experiences sudden fear about its virtue” (McRobbie and Thornton, 1995: 567) – that hides more than it reveals about everyday social interaction.

The explanatory limitations associated with totalizing conceptions of society as an explanatory metaphor are well established. Less convincing are the ways that McRobbie and Thornton seek to demonstrate the complexity of empirical relations involved in contemporary moral panics through the dual lenses of youth culture and the diversification of analog media outlets. They draw, first, on Thornton’s (1995) ethnographic investigation of British club cultures to argue that youth groups, as a segment or constituency within British society, do not uniformly lament a safe and stable past, as totalizing theories of society and social control suggest. Conversely, McRobbie and Thornton argue that youth tend to hold a sense of nostalgia for past transgression (e.g. mods, rockers, punks, New Romantics) that resonates with their often radical bent. Instead of having the effect of excluding and/or controlling youth groups, disapproving mass-media coverage tends to legitimize and authenticate youth cultural movements. McRobbie and Thornton therefore conclude that what classical moral panic theorists identify as deviance amplification can, for youth, entail a process of transforming a scene into a movement.

Added to which, second, they observe that the marketing potential associated with youth groups’ desires to cultivate a sense of transgression has not been lost on the publishing and recording industries. Sleeve notes on record albums, representations in the style/music press, and discourses appearing in the pages of niche music magazines: these strategies by the publishing and recording industries routinely capitalize on knowledge of youth hairstyles, dance trends, and music genres to exploit a variety of fads and fashions. Instead of emerging only from the mainstream mass media in the interests of social control, panic narratives are also deployed as routine marketing strategies incited by the cultural industries to turn a profit.

Notably, McRobbie and Thornton’s critique of the classical studies in moral panic suggests that the cultivation of youth deviance entails a set of relations whose mediation takes place partially – if not entirely – external to youth groups themselves. They claim that the youth cultures of the 1990s are steeped in the legacy of previous panics about transgressive activities, yet the subcultural formation of a youth movement or lifestyle is theorized as dependent on if not epiphenomenal to the commercial interests of the marketing and mainstream media industries. McRobbie and Thornton specifically single out disapproving mass-media coverage, front-page tabloid newspaper stories, and sleeve notes on record albums as the primary media needed to galvanize (deviant) youth movements. In effect, if not intentionally, they theorize youth culture(s) as existing in an asymmetrical relationship with the interests of commercially-driven mass- and niche-media outlets, whereby transgressive youth cultural identities require disapproving social reactions for cultural (trans)formation and legitimacy.

Compounding the limitations associated with how McRobbie and Thornton (inadvertently) conceptualize the relationship between transgressive youth cultures and mass-media narratives are problems with how they explain the plurality of voices involved in public claims-making activities. McRobbie and Thornton explicitly argue that interest groups, pressure groups, lobbies, and campaign experts routinely intervene in (rather than incite) panic episodes to contest claims by moral entrepreneurs. Made possible by the proliferation of mass-, niche-, and micro-media, they explain that folk devils and their supporters fight back by providing information to established mass-media outlets with the intention of reacting to and contesting demonizing narratives.

From the vantage point of the mid-1990s, resistance to tacitly conservative claims-making activities is imagined in terms of providing information in the form of sound bites for journalists working on tight schedules and budgets in a highly structured media production system (McRobbie and Thornton, 1995: 566). McRobbie and Thornton offer intriguing commentary about how specialty magazines, community tabloids, and niche-media outlets are implicated in cultivating and reproducing cultural meanings. Yet patterns of subcultural formation and resistance to hegemonic norms are not ultimately explained in terms of folk devils and their supporters producing their own constitutive and counter-hegemonic narratives. Mirroring the explanatory problems associated with theorizing youth cultural identities as epiphenomenal to disapproving commercial-media coverage, McRobbie and Thornton in effect, if not intentionally, theorize the social construction of deviance in relation to asymmetrical mass-mediated relations, whereby various competing interests vie for a dominant voice in a cohesive, if contested and more volatile, public media sphere.

Moral panics and mass-media logic

McRobbie and Thornton’s deconstruction of the assumptions underscoring classical moral panic theory represents a pragmatic attempt to correct some of the functional simplicity characterizing the original models. They resist conventional tendencies to theorize media, society, claims-making activities, and processes of social regulation and control in a singularly reductive, possibly deterministic, manner. Alternatively, McRobbie and Thornton draw analytical attention to fragmented media sources, diverse social reactions, and the many voices that engender narratives designed to resist the demonization of targeted groups.

The critical intervention offered by McRobbie and Thornton continues to strongly influence how panics are theorized and explained. Their critique, however, bears an uncanny, and yet unacknowledged, resemblance to what Altheide and Snow (1979) originally conceptualized as (mass-) media logic (and see Altheide, 2014). Altheide and Snow (1979) developed the notion of media logic to explain how institutionalized assemblages of organizational tactics, formatting codes, and framing techniques influence how mass media construct representations of social reality (e.g. through issue filtering, narrative structure, aesthetic presentation, source selection, styles of rhetoric). Motivated by the growing influence of television formats on routine social interaction and the politics of everyday life, Altheide and Snow formulated the concept of media logic to explain not only the ways that commercial mass media produce representations of social reality but also how embedded production formats that exist among mass-media institutions increasingly influence behavioural expectations and routine interactions in social institutions beyond media of mass communications.

The logic of mass mediation is premised on the notion that information flows in an asymmetrical direction from mainstream commercial-media institutions to the masses. Cultivated through a set of interconnected and highly structured relationships involving professional actors (the production of news according to journalistic norms), commercial interests (profit-driven motives), and technological innovations (media of mass communication in their different forms), the operating logic of the mass media is understood to continually produce authoritative representations of social reality that are received, normalized, internalized, and reproduced by mass audiences/publics. Whether the medium is radio, television, or print news, mass-media logic assumes a hierarchical structure to information selection, dissemination, and reception whereby vast amounts of potentially newsworthy information are filtered through a class of professional journalists and packaged in a familiar, even predictable, format for widespread consumption.

One of the reasons why McRobbie and Thornton’s critique was so influential in moral panic studies was because it explained how the journalistic filter process involved in media logic entails a more intricate set of conditioning relations than the original models suggested. Material changes taking place in how information is transmitted across various media, they argued, require reassessment of the “complex realm of reception” (McRobbie and Thornton, 1995: 572) that is composed of readers, listeners, and viewers so as to avoid the temptation to homogenize public opinion based on hegemonic representations of social issues appearing in mainstream commercial-media discourse. In the early-1990s, McRobbie and Thornton were starting to recognize the impacts of desktop publishing, computer mailing, niche-oriented consumer magazines, and lobby and special interest groups on the direction of public claims-making, media discourse, and the social construction of deviance. Rather than conceptualizing news discourse and mass-mediated narratives that demonize marginalized groups in terms of a linear, a priori normative logic tied to (or conditioned by) the political economy of news production, they demonstrated that the creation of media discourses and counter discourses is more nuanced and malleable.

Despite the complexity of conditioning relations that McRobbie and Thornton identify, however, the overall logic of mass mediation that guides their assessment of moral panic for multi-mediated social worlds is nevertheless based on tacit assumptions about an institutionalized media production system that exists external to or at a distance from the consumers of media content (i.e. audiences). McRobbie and Thornton convincingly demonstrate how cultivating mass-mediated moral panics is considerably more difficult than the original models suggest. Still, in their perspective the ultimate fate of claims-making activities and framing strategies remains dependent on a systematized logic of asymmetrical mass mediation, replete with its own firmly embedded rules, hierarchies, rituals, and routines.

Moral panics and digital-media logic

McRobbie and Thornton’s assessment of moral panic for multi-mediated social worlds appeared on the cusp of profound changes to the cultural, institutional, technological, and communicative relations on which the notion of (mass-) media logic rests. Their critique focused on emerging niche-print cultures and it was buttressed by passing references to the expansion of tabloid television, the rise of infotainment formats, and the entrenchment of specialized, issue-driven audiences. The ultimate aim of McRobbie and Thornton’s deconstruction was to complicate overly simplistic explanations for the construction of commercial-media discourses that tacitly assume a firm, if not impenetrable, separation between the professional journalists who produce or transmit panic narratives and the audience members who consume them.

Notwithstanding the insights that McRobbie and Thornton provide into the nuances of audience engagement and public (counter) claims-making, understandably absent from their critical assessment of changing relations of late 20th-century multi-mediation are the advances in digital computing technologies that were also unfolding throughout the 1980s and early 1990s: for example, the file- and message-sharing capabilities of Internet Rely Chat, Usenet, and Bulletin Board Systems; the URL and search functions associated with Web 1.0; and the growing popularity of modems that connected home and personal computers through telephone (land) lines to an increasingly available and quickly expanding Internet. Not only was the logic of mediation characterizing innovations in digital computing technologies (e.g. blogs, synchronous instant messaging multiuser chat rooms, text-based email clients) becoming increasingly interwoven with the logic of mass mediation towards the end of the 20th century; the emerging forms of digitally mediated computer interaction that quickly morphed into web-based interfaces, mobile handheld devices, and social-media and -networking sites at the beginning of the 21st century were also changing the ecology of everyday communications in ways that McRobbie and Thornton could not have anticipated when they launched their critique in the early 1990s.

The changing dynamics of social interaction associated with the proliferation of interactive digital communication technologies call attention to the importance of supplementing the logic of mass mediation with insights into the structuring principles that ground the logic of digital mediation. Digital media is a broad concept that includes technological developments spanning the advent of machine-readable computers and satellite television in the last quarter of the 20th century to the proliferation of social media- and -networking sites in the first decade of the 21st century. In some ways, contemporary innovations in digital communication media reinforce and exacerbate the ongoing fragmentation of mass audiences into segmented consumer niche publics – a process that was set in motion with earlier innovations in commercial media including cable television, direct broadcast satellites, VCRs, DVDs, and PVRs. Recent debates about digital gatekeepers, echo chambers, and the filter bubble are popular examples (Pariser, 2011). In other ways, innovations in digital communication infrastructures are undermining the very notion of the audience and, necessarily, concomitant sociological assumptions about what constitutes ‘media’ and the social agents who produce and receive their contents, the style of claims they engender and the arenas they appear in, and the impacts they have on techniques of social regulation and control.

In keeping with the logic of mass-mediated moral panics, audience members represent distant observers of commercial media content who bear witness to images, stories, and primary and secondary testimony (cf. Frosh and Pinchevski, 2009). Conceptualized in this way, eyewitness narratives are cultivated by professional journalists who control the means of cultural production and routinely profit from tales of suffering, injustice, exploitation, and transgression. As the logic of mass mediation continues to influence modes of audience engagement and social reactivity, the logic of digital mediation is at the same time continually reshaping how panic narratives are witnessed in, by, and through new and traditional media.

The most obvious difference that digital mediation makes for how users ‘witness’ moral panics pertains to the scale of participation, the amount of testimonial evidence that can be circulated directly from networked users, and the speed and ease of transmission. Tracing to the rise of interactive digital communications in the 1990s (e.g. Bulletin Board Systems, blogs, personal homepages), the web-based collaborative projects (e.g. wikis), content communities (e.g. YouTube), microblogs (e.g. Twitter), and social-networking sites (e.g. Facebook) that proliferated in the early 2000s are publicly available to, created by, and maintained through the routine activities of end-users (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). To be sure, organizations and website owners, often motivated by commercial interests, are able to manipulate interfaces and algorithms to channel users’ experiences and shape online content (Van Dijck and Powell, 2013). At the same time, changing forms of digital mediation enable if not require networked users to intentionally or inadvertently steer information streams by creating, sharing, liking, filtering, mentioning, recommending, favouriting, tagging, forwarding, commenting on, and linking content.

Flores-Yeffal, Vidales, and Marinez’s (2017) recent study of the ‘Latino cyber-moral panic’ (LCMP) is a case in point. Based on data gathered from a ‘netnography’ investigating how moral panic can be quickly spread through the ‘cyber-public sphere’, Flores-Yeffal et al. examine how online interactions (e.g. hashtags, comments, likes) perpetuated a moral panic about undocumented Mexican migrants in America. They specifically demonstrate how claims made by politicians, CEOs, media hosts, and pundits were disseminated and recycled through online ‘grassroots’ moral entrepreneurism associated with the hashtag #IllegalsAreCriminals (between December 2015 and October 2016, they were able to identify 23 Facebook sites supported by six million members). “The Internet,” Flores et al. (2017: 15) conclude, “becomes a platform where comments, images, videos, filter bubbles, and use of hashtags facilitate and speed up social communication … [and] allows moral panics against Latinos to flourish, increasing the number of people exposed to anti-immigrant narratives.”

As the people formerly known as the audience (cf. Rosen, 2006) become increasingly accustomed to the passive and active participatory architecture of digital media, they are simultaneously getting used to new ways of making, disseminating, receiving, and acting on claims. Conceptualized through the lens of mass or multi mediation, claims-making entails ongoing cycles of competitive social interactions that involve a diverse set of activists vying for strategic positioning in a marketplace of firmly entrenched claims-making arenas (cf. Hilgartner and Bosk, 1988). Sometimes the focus of analysis is trained on the ways in which activists directly intervene in established arenas to influence mass-media frames. Other times the focus of analysis is concentrated on how various coalitions use their own niche media to develop oppositional narratives that are presented alongside hegemonic representations appearing in mainstream media. In either case, alternative framing strategies and oppositional narratives are understood to offer secondary sites of engagement, always indexed to dominant narratives appearing in the mass media (Meyers, 2014).

In contrast to the logic of mass mediation, the past decade has seen millions of images and video files uploaded/posted to various sites by traditional journalists, online journalists, social movement activists, police agencies, human rights workers, and ordinary citizens. Online images and video files undeniably reflect the subjective predispositions, ideological orientations, and material and symbolic interests of diverse users who range from benevolent humanitarians to malicious bigots. But once content is posted to social-media and networking-sites, video files and digital images are subjected to an ongoing sequence of editing, sharing, tagging, categorizing, reposting, repositioning, commenting, remixing, and deleting that continually influences the original meaning of uploaded content, the dynamics of audience engagement, and the future memory of events.

Johnen, Jungblut, and Ziegele’s (2017) discussion of ‘online firestorms’ is important in this regard. Observing how brands, celebrities, and politicians are increasingly confronted with moral indignation and outrage, they conceptualize online firestorms as a special kind of moral panic. Compared to conventional understandings of moral panic, they explain, online firestorms (aka digital wildfires) happen more easily, spread more rapidly among a greater number of users, and display a more indignant character. To be sure, the impact of claims circulated within the confines of digital echo chambers is often minimal. But as Einwiller, Viererbl, and Himmelrich’s (2016) investigation of 130 firestorms picked up by German-language media shows, the reach and impact of digital firestorms is enhanced when mainstream journalists deem online firestorms to have news value (a digital spillover). Intriguingly, digital spillovers into the mainstream media most often concern ‘rectification’ claims, whereby firestorms center on perceived injustices or moral deficiencies. Examples range from moral indignation expressed in response to the killing of innocent animals – Cecil-the-lion (Zimbabwe), Harambe-the-gorilla (Cincinnati), Marius-the-giraffe (Copenhagen) – to social media reactions to racially motivated police violence in the USA (e.g. Michael Brown, Eric Garner). In this way, digital firestorms represent interesting sites to advance understandings of the prospect that a moral panic can be ‘good’ (cf. Cohen, 2003, 2011; Hier, 2017).

The changing ways that people witness transgression in digital environments is, therefore, posing implications for the structure of moral entrepreneurship. Moral entrepreneurs are conventionally understood as structurally advantaged activists who influence mass-media narratives and shape public opinion by forming organizations, giving talks, lobbying governments, and staging protests (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 2013). Be they members of interest groups, social elites, or grassroots campaign networks, moral entrepreneurs represent socially established activists who work in close relation with mass-media institutions to establish a preferred position in, and gain control over, media narratives and public claims-making.

Because traditional moral entrepreneurs enjoy an intimate relationship with mass-media institutions, they have conventionally been explained in terms of a conservative bent that aligns with mass-media logic and bolsters the agenda setting priorities of commercial media outlets. The logic of digital mediation has opened opportunities for a new kind of unwitting moral entrepreneur. In sharp contrast to audience members of previous times, the ‘produsers’ of today are able to engage in qualitatively different styles of claims-making that can take the form of resisting, complying with, and/or inventing new forms of social regulation and control.

Few issues better illustrate the changing forms of social regulation and control better than the proliferation of online shaming. As Hess and Waller (2014) explain, public shaming has been an historical feature of crime and punishment regimes (e.g. stocks, the scarlet letter, the pillory, stories in local newspapers). The rise of surveillance and social media has, they continue, contributed to the shaming of ordinary people for minor transgressions. Be they very public, ‘synoptic’ episodes, such as the rapid and vicious shaming of Justine Sacco, who in December 2013 set off a firestorm when she tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just Kidding. I’m white!” (see Ronson, 2015: 67–109), or more routine claims-making practices such as slut shaming and manspreading, online vilification represents an important example of the type of social practice that McRobbie and Thornton had in mind when they encouraged moral panic scholars to move away from conventional points of control and explore new criminologies of social regulation (McRobbie and Thornton, 1995: 571).

Suffice it to say, since the 1970s explanations for the social construction and amplification of deviance that underscore the bulk of studies in moral panic have more or less hinged on tacit assumptions about an interdependent relationship among traditional mass media, established politics, cohesive audiences (sometimes represented as ‘society’), and predicable levers of social control – what is more, a functional unity sustained by a familiar cast of moral entrepreneurs (e.g. police, politicians, activists). As the impact of digital-media logic continues to transform the dynamics of everyday social interaction, however, deviance amplification is increasingly susceptible to the claims-making activities of an extended range of primary and secondary definers: bloggers, vloggers, Tweeters, memers, hashtag activists/slacktivists/blacktivists, citizen journalists, trolls, YouTubers, viners, gamers, and the millions of ordinary people who have incorporated mainstream, niche, and clandestine social-media platforms and networking sites into their everyday lives.

Conclusion

In their seminal deconstruction of the classical models of moral panic, McRobbie and Thornton (1995) demonstrated that the relationship between (British) society and mass media at the twilight of the 20th century was considerably different than it had been imagined when moral panic studies first emerged in the 1960s. Repudiating the main assumptions of the original studies, they drew attention to the diversity of media outlets, to the multifaceted character of claims-making processes, and especially to the patterns of folk-devil resistance that are often involved in constructing modern moral panics. An updated model of moral panic capable of capturing the greater complexity of media communications, social differentiation, and audience fragmentation in the age of multi-mediated social relations was, they convincingly argued, critically important for maintaining and (re)affirming the relevance of moral panic as an explanatory concept.

Notwithstanding the importance of McRobbie and Thornton’s empirical insights, their deconstruction of moral panic in the mostly analog world of newspaper stories and niche publishing outlets predates the transformations that have since taken place in digital communication infrastructures and collaborative social media networks. The combination of social, technological, and economic forces that contributed to the proliferation of digital (rather than merely mass) media has altered some of the ways in which claims are created, contested, disseminated, and received. Like never before, digital media users (as opposed to mass ‘audience’ members) are able to share stories, articulate controversies, launch grievances, document transgressions, and witness crises instantaneously, interactively, and globally. In some ways, digital mediation is affecting the traditional power dynamics associated with elite agenda setting and the manufacturing of consent by opening new and more accessible opportunities to supplement journalistic claims-making with alternative points of view. In other ways, digital communication networks are creating opportunities to subvert the traditional gatekeeping role of journalists and elites by providing spatially and temporally distant users with an unprecedented set of opportunities to participate in interactions that range from morally righteous digital firestorms to shaming ordinary people for minor indiscretions.

Despite the obvious influences that the newest digital- (particularly social-) media platforms are having on claims-making activities and deviance amplification, moral panic scholarship largely carries on as though we are still living in a world where putative problems play out primarily if not exclusively across the pages of broadsheet newspapers and through asymmetrical channels of mass-mediated communication (see, for example, Carlson, 2015; Wright, 2015). Moral panic scholars are in essence caught in the midst of something resembling a paradigm shift in the structure of media and crime communications – an historical transformation that they stubbornly persist in ignoring. It is important to continue investigating how the changing logic of mass mediation affects social interactions in domains within and beyond commercial-media outlets. At the same time, however, the proliferation of digital infrastructures calls attention to the importance of understanding how digitally mediated interactions are enabling diverse users to actively and passively participate in a range of organic, lateral, hegemonic, and counter-hegemonic claims-making activities, moralizing campaigns, and righteous crusades that have been met by a curious silence in the burgeoning criminological literature on contemporary moral panics.