Crime,Media,Culture: An International Journal

Internet use is commonly portrayed as a form of disembodied communication, that is, communication from which bodily performativity has vanished, leaving users free to indulge in identity play and even downright identity fraud. In this article, I seek to challenge this particular construction of cyberspace. I argue that in the broadband era, enhanced bandwidth is increasingly facilitating the exchange of bodily cues and creating stronger convergence with audio-visual media. Second, even in largely text-based online communications, bodily markers often emerge either unintentionally as part of the dynamics of discourse construction or deliberately to authenticate users' identity. Third, the material body is central to Internet use, which is to a considerable extent motivated by bodily needs and desires, as the popularity of countless health and lifestyle websites suggests. Finally, I also argue that constructing the Internet as virtual and disembodied obscures the material and embodied lived reality in which technology operates.

This article presents a number of examples of prison inmate graffiti photographed by the author in Australian decommissioned prisons. The images are examined with regard to aspects of the sociology and social psychology of the prison environment. Abiding themes of prison life are identified and discerned as factors contributing to the content of the graffiti. These include especially power relationships, sexuality, revenge, violence, boredom and the simple desire for some form of entertainment, however fleeting.

This paper addresses the role and importance of badness within the youth subculture (`Road' Life) of young black Caribbean males growing up in an East London neighbourhood. The research that I have undertaken attempts to explore how the notion of badness particularly influences the young informant's attitudes, values, behaviour and dress wear. Adapting and integrating the concepts of `drift' (Matza, 1964), `code of the street' (Anderson, 1999), and the `seductions of crime' (Katz, 1988), I examine the way in which the majority of young black males involved with Road Life, look to appropriate and flirt with certain aspects of badness for reasons to do with survival, `money-making', and aesthetics (style and fashion). I will then go on to briefly focus on the small minority of young males whose lifestyles centre around the practicing of badness; where I am mainly concerned with detailing their values, attitudes and the types of activities that these `rude boys' might be involved in. This paper is based upon a much larger ethnographic study undertaken in an East London neighbourhood. Empirical data was gleaned via participant observation supplemented by semi-structured interviews.

This paper presents a microanalysis of the media representation of victimhood in key public narratives. It builds on Peelo's account of the `mediated witness' as part of the struggle for control of the crime agenda. To extend Peelo's analysis to other areas of public policy making, the paper uses the example of an iconic welfare `scandal' (the Maria Colwell case) and focuses particularly on the role of victims themselves in the struggle to own and exploit victimhood. The paper argues that ambiguity in the ascription of victimhood can reveal points of unresolved tension in the emerging public narrative that the scandal (or crime) is meant to signify, explain and incorporate.

This article investigates the construction of place in crime reporting through bystander quotes in recent crime stories in newspapers from the north-eastern US. These quotes are part of a larger pattern of reporting that highlights environmental features of serenity and peacefulness as antidotes to crime. Against claims that crime in the media is always exaggerated, this research demonstrates how the impact of crime is moderated by declaring it unlikely and by discursively shifting it to other geographic locations. It is argued that crime reporting shares a structural similarity with fictional representations of place found in film, and that this pattern of crime reporting helps to reinforce a suburban consumption ethos.

This paper produces a critical reading of discourses of criminality, family and racialization circulating in an interrelated set of feature articles published in late 2006 in a major New Zealand newspaper. Through images, diagrams and written text, local crime is mapped as a familial aberration that threatens a whole city and region. Rather than demonstrating a novel approach to reporting crime, this paper argues that the representation of crime in these texts puts the body politic of the state, and good governance, at risk in ways that resonate with the new modes of subjectivity and responsibility that Nikolas Rose (2007) traces from contemporary biomedicine into populist discourses.