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
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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.
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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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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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