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Antisocial Media pp 113–154Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Digital Arena

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture ((PSCMC))

Abstract

This chapter examines how fight pages have generated participatory modes of spectating bare-knuckle violence, and in doing so, have brokered agonistic publics where street justice and ​bare-knuckle brawling are valorized. Drawing on a content analysis of close to 6000 user comments posted on Crazy Street Fights, The Craziest Fights Ever, Just Fights Videos, Real Crazy Fights and Only Street Fighting, I examine why individuals commented on these pages, what they said when they did so, and how Facebook’s architecture might generate new criminologically significant socialities where criminal acts are legitimated.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Given their heterogeneity, Robards and Bennett (2011) argue that it is more productive to conceptualize the emergence of such online collectives not through the lens of subcultural theory, but through post-subcultural theory, or as what Maffesoli (1996) terms neo-tribes.

  2. 2.

    One such practice of audience management is through carefully crafting a homepage persona. As Cheung (2004) notes, homepages provide individuals with a means of suppressing stigmatized or controversial facets of their identity through modifying their written self-narrative (see also Cover 2012). With its potential for offering a controlled narrative of the user, the homepage—represented by the personal account Timeline on Facebook—indicates that certain beliefs, preferences and attitudes are central to an individual’s identity. In this way, commenting represents a technique of writing the self, or ‘self-writing’ (Sauter 2014)—a technique that extends to commenting on other posts.

  3. 3.

    Indeed, Bourdieu (1990, 80) himself fleetingly mentions ‘the exchange of blows’ as an example of exchange in his own work, albeit without connecting it to his expanded understanding of capital .

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  1. Criminology, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

    Mark A. Wood

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Wood, M.A. (2018). The Digital Arena. In: Antisocial Media. Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63985-7_5

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