Inside/outside : victims/offenders

An article co-authored by myself and Ragnar Lundström was recently published in Social Semiotics. The abstract of the article follows.

Inside victims and outside offenders: dislocations and interventions in the discourse of rape Simon Lindgren and Ragnar Lundström

This article is based on case studies of the reporting of four widely-publicized incidents of rape and/or sexual assault (in one case combined with murder) in the Swedish press. The analysis uses Thompson’s theory of ideology, and Laclau’s concepts of ‘‘dislocation’’ and ‘‘hegemonic intervention’’. The main argument is that variations in representational strategies cannot be understood exclusively in terms of actual variations as regards the contexts of these crimes. Rather, stories tend to take on their particular forms as a response to certain discursive ‘‘needs’’. We want to emphasize that the specific ways in which social problems — such as crimes — are symbolically constructed can be seen as products of which types of victims and offenders are needed by hegemonic discourse for it to be able to sustain itself. The news stories tend to employ a strategy according to which offender images are typically externalized and pushed towards the ‘‘outside’’ while victim images are constructed in terms of inclusion.

Keywords: discourse; rape; victims; offenders; ideology; hegemony

Social Semiotics, Vol. 20, No. 3, June 2010, pp. 309-324

Critical Studies in Peer Production

Since the VIRT3C conference in Hull earlier this spring, I am involved with an exciting group of people in the launch of a new scholarly online journal focused on collaboration and conflict in relation to commons-based production. I am a member of the scientific committee of this journal, for which a call for submissions is out now.

Critical Studies in Peer Production (CSPP) seeks high-quality contributions from researchers and practitioners of peer production. We understand peer production as a mode of commons-based and oriented production in which participation is voluntary and predicated on the self-selection of tasks. Notable examples are the collaborative development of Free Software projects and of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia. Through the analysis of the forms, operations, and contradictions of peer producing communities in contemporary capitalist society, the journal aims to open up new perspectives on the implications of peer production for social change. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: the political economy of peer production; peer production and expertise; critical theory and peer production; peer production and exchange; peer production and social movements; peer production as an alternative to capitalism; peer production and capitalist cooptation; governance in peer projects; peer production and ethics; the peer production of hardware; peer production and feminism; peer production, industry and ecology.

All contributions will be peer reviewed. Contributors are invited to follow the Harvard citation style and to submit papers using free software such as Open Office. Once papers have been accepted, it is the author’s responsibility to format them in accordance with our specifications. The journal welcomes submissions based on interdisciplinary approaches including information and computer sciences, law, economics, geography, history, communications, and sociology.

Our approach to peer reviewing is informed by Whitworth and Friedman’s (2009, part 1; part 2) criticism of current academic publishing as a form of competitive economics in which “scarcity reflects demand, so high journal rejection rates become quality indicators”. This self-reinforcing system where journals that reject more attract more results in a situation where “avoiding faults becomes more important than new ideas. Wrongly accepting a paper with a fault gives reputation consequences, while wrongly rejecting a useful paper leaves no evidence”. Whitworth and Friedman propose an alternative evaluation system:

1. higher rating discrimination: a many-point scale, not just accept-reject
2. more submissions to be rated: rate all
3. more people to rate: community involvement
4. different ways of rating: formal review vs. informal use ratings.

Our process is also informed by Toni Prug’s ideas about community reviewing: all submission proposals must be made on our open email list. Prospective authors will then be told by the peer review community whether their proposal is appropriate for the journal and if any additional key elements are missing. Once authors have completed a full submission, they submit it to the editor who will assign it to three reviewers. Reviewers are encouraged to communicate with one another. Reviewers will provide any necessary recommendations for improvement.

Online porn fan discourse

An edited volume featuring a chapter written by me was just published in Peter Lang’s series on Digital Formations. Feona Attwood, who does highly interesting research on new pornographies, online sex practices, and controversial images at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, did a great job editing this book. It also seems as if there will be an AOIR panel based on the book at the Gothenburg conference in October. I really hope that I can participate in that, even though my autumn programme is already filling up. Returning to the book, this is the description from the publisher:

porn.com: Making Sense of Online Pornography Ed. Feona Attwood.
Digital Formations/Peter Lang

Pornography has often been central to debates about sex and about new media technologies as they emerge, and today debate is increasingly focused on online pornographies. This collection examines pornography’s significance as a focus of definition, debate and myth, its development as a mainstream entertainment industry, and the emergence of a new economy of Porn 2.0 and of new types of porn labor and professionalism. It looks at porn style behind the scenes of straight hardcore, in gay, lesbian, and queer pornographies, in shock sites, and in amateur erotica. It investigates the rise of the online porn fan community, the sex blogger, the erotic rate-me site and the visual cultures of swingers. Treating these developments as part of a broader set of economic and cultural transformations, the book argues that new porn practices reveal much about contemporary and competing views of sex and the self, the real and the body, culture and commerce.

My chapter is entitled “Widening the Glory Hole: the Discourse of Online Porn Fandom” and explores participation and communication in online porn fandom. The traditional image of the porn consumer is that of the perverted and shamed loner. In pre-internet times such an image was probably rather adequate, and even today – when pornographic materials are easier and easier to come by – it is still a qualified guess that most porn consumption takes place in individualized and private situations. The porn audience, thus described, becomes an archetype of late modern man: Part of a global media and consumer culture, yet detached and left to himself. Blasé and numb from visual overload, yet constantly looking for new sensations (cf. Baudrillard etc.). In this type of male user, pornography is an expression of “episodic sexuality” and the will to sexually control women – an urge that gets increasingly compulsive as traditional roles and structures are liquefied in late modernity (cf. Giddens etc.).

But what happens, I ask, to the audience when porn goes online? The anonymous masturbatory onlooker certainly remains, but porn inevitably also reaches new audiences. The Internet has brought pornography, by its exploding availability, closer to the popular culture mainstream (cf. Paasonen, McNair, Attwood etc.), and in so doing connected it to audiences more like those of popular culture in general. The aim of my chapter is to analyze how porn users collectively construct their viewer position in the online community FreeOnes <http://board.freeones.com/>. The discussion of empirical material gathered from conversations on this bulletin board takes current research on participatory culture and fandom as its point of departure (cf. Jenkins; Hills) in assessing how audience members consume, use and integrate pornography in their everyday lives.

Renegotiating gender subjectivities in MTV’s Jackass

Today, a paper that I co-authored with Maxime Lélièvre was published in Critical Studies in Media Communication. The title of the article is “In the Laboratory of Masculinity: Renegotiating Gender Subjectivities in MTV’s Jackass“. This is the article abstract:

This article presents a content analysis of all 25 episodes of the popular television series Jackass aired on MTV between 2000 and 2002 and of the two movies Jackass: The Movie (2002) and Jackass Number Two (2006). Starting with a brief discussion of white male backlash and representations of masculinity in crisis, we move on to show that the text of Jackass seems to reaffirm hegemonic masculinity while still maintaining an ambiguous position vis-à-vis the ideals of machismo and hyper-virility. This, at first hand, may appear as a paradox. Our argument, however, is that if one reads Jackass from outside of, what Judith Butler calls, ‘‘the heterosexual matrix,’’ things do not appear that paradoxical at all. Seeing that gender subjectivities are not essentially fixed or naturally given, Jackass can instead be read in terms of the symbolic struggle between different forms of masculinity within a dialectical process of change throughout history.

Contact me for the full article if interested.

Mapping participatory media discourse on school shooting videos

In November, I will go to Helsinki for the conference Violence and Network Society: School Shootings and Social Violence in Contemporary Public Life. The title of my paper is YouTube Gunmen? Mapping participatory media discourse on school shooting videos. I just finished it, and feel quite satisfied with the ways in which I managed to mix some semi-experimental use of Google Trends data, with the discourse visualization techniques that I have been working on recently. Please, email me for the full draft if you are interested. Below are two excerpts (abstract + conclusions).

[...]

Before the school shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007, as well as before the similar tragedies in Finnish Jokela 2007 and Kauhajoki 2009, the gunmen gave warnings by posting video clips on YouTube. This fact was strongly emphasized in the subsequent news media coverage of these events, and generally it can be said that there seems to have been a media panic about violence and the internet in the aftermath of the shootings. The aim of this paper is to look beyond the assumption that the panic reaction is all-encompassing. Firstly, I will review some search engine and online news statistics in order to evaluate the existence and extent of a panic reaction. Secondly, I will analyze YouTube user comment discourse on school shooting clips. Telling from previous research, it seems reasonable to assume that such participatory media discourse differs largely from traditional news media discourse. The overarching question is whether the panic reaction sequence can be identified in the YouTube comment discourse, or if the latter displays a different pattern.

[...]

Even though the moral panic reaction sequence can be clearly identified in news reporting as well as search traffic relating to issues at the intersection of digital media and school shootings, the main result of this paper is that broadly applying the panic perspective would paint a simplified picture of the emerging new media landscape where audiences play an increasingly active role as co-producers of content (Gauntlett, 2004; Jenkins, 2006b; Jenkins, Purushotma, Clinton, Weigel, & Robinson, 2009).

In line with this, Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton (1995) have suggested that the emergence of “multi-mediated social worlds” require a revision of how moral panics are conceived of. While Cohen’s original model was developed for a society where media were univocal, and hegemonical relations were monolithic, today’s media are characterized by fragmentation and multiplicity. McRobbie and Thornton argue that classic moral panic studies (such as Hall et al. 1978; Pearson 1983) have a tendency to overstate the power of hegemony and social control, while understating the role played by counter-discourses. In the age of participatory media it becomes increasingly important to “take account of a plurality of reactions, each with their different constituencies, effectivities and modes of discourse” (McRobbie and Thornton 1995, 564). With this argument, McRobbie and Thornton call for an exploration of various mass, niche and micro-media.

In this paper I have analyzed one such mode of discourse in one particular medium, namely YouTube user comments to school shooting videos. The comment threads under analysis illustrate that the media is to a diminishing degree something that is separable from society. The analyzed texts are not reports on, or narratives about, the school shootings in the traditional media sense. Instead, they illustrate the process wherein social reality is “experienced through language, communication and imagery” (McRobbie and Thornton 1995, 570). The reality of school shootings is continuously being defined in these comment threads, as users discuss issues of bullying, high school culture, gun control, and racism, while at the same time publically, socially, and emotionally trying to deal with the trauma of these events.

[...]

Doing discursive networks at CAQR

Me and my colleague will be in Utrecht, Netherlands, for CAQR2009 (2nd International Conference on Computer-Aided Qualitative Research) on June 4th and 5th. Our paper is related to my project on crime victim discourse, but the presentation will focus on methodological aspects.

DISCURSIVE NETWORKS: VISUALIZING MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS OF CRIME VICTIMS USING PAJEK

This presentation will outline a method for text analysis which combines qualitative discourse analysis and quantitative network analysis. The approach has been developed as a response to the fact that the traditional variety of quantitative content analysis tends to decontextualize data to an extent that makes results potentially meaningless. On the other hand, much of qualitative discourse analysis – a field from which the authors themselves originate – is quite insensitive to things such as frequencies and correlations. It seems ideal to be able to combine the advantages of the two approaches without losing too much complexity.

One of the challenges faced by qualitative text analysis in the 21st century is related to the specific considerations that need to be made when data collection or fieldwork is carried out on the Internet. This presentation concentrates on one particular type of online data, namely print newspaper articles available in digitized form from fulltext databases. Our specific analytical example comes from a research project in which media representations of crime victims have been analyzed.

We will introduce a method that can be useful in working with such material. Even though the approach could be applied to any type of text data, its advantages become more apparent in the case of online fulltext data. This is because the sheer volume of text collected in this way – and also quite fast − easily exceeds the amount collected through traditional fieldwork or manual archival studies. In order to come to grips with these large corpora of text, some sort of quantitative strategy of analysis is called for. But since the straightforward word counting of standard content analysis is not a viable option from the perspective of cultural analysis, we want instead to sketch out an approach combining the discourse theory of Laclau & Mouffe with bibliometric and network analytical tools. In our particular case, we have used the freeware applications Bibexcel and Pajek in order to prepare the text data, analyze co-occuring concepts within in, and visualize the results in the form of vector based network maps.

Men’s violence and youth robberies

Within the last couple of days, two articles of mine have been published. The first one stems from years back (2002-03 to be precise) when I was working on a project within the field of historical sociology. In fact, the paper was long forgotten and hidden in the depths of my hard drive when I suddenly decided, last spring, to make an attempt at resuscitation. Something that proved successful. Even though its subject matter is quite far removed from the kind of things that I am studying nowadays, it still reflects some of my basic ideas on text, culture and discourse. The second one is on the moral panic about so called youth robberies that took place in the Swedish media between 1998 and 2002. Between 2004 and 2006, I ran a research project on representations of this alleged “crime wave” and I have also written on it elsewhere.

The first article is an analysis of a set of 19th century cases of ‘marital disagreement’ (male violence) in a small northern Swedish town. The data is analysed in two steps: firstly, through a general content analysis with the purpose of uncovering the principal patterns and predominant features and secondly by a discourse analysis of a key case. One of the key questions of gender theory has been that of how a social order in which men are seen as superior to women manages to prevail through space and time – transgressing historical and cultural borders. How can this order subsist in a succession of epochs and cultures which are, in many respects, dramatically different from one another? This question has already been addressed many times within feminism, particularly as part of the debate concerning the concepts of ‘patriarchy’ versus ‘gender order’. This article once again revisits this terrain, and aims to use its very specific historical case study as a point of departure for a more general discussion of how continuity and change in transhistorical male dominance and violence might be theoretically understood.

— Lindgren, S. (2008).”Theorizing continuity and change in the discourse of male violence: A case study of ‘marital disagreements’ in 19th century Sweden”. Anthropological Notebooks, 14(3), pp 5-23.

The second article aims to analyze racist news discourse by applying some notions from Norman Fairclough’s and Teun van Dijk’s work. We know that racism is shaped and defined in relation to specific historic and cultural contexts. How, then, should we grasp the many similarities between different case studies? This issue is addressed by relating the results of the case study mentioned above to the ones arrived at by Stuart Hall et al. in their classic Policing the crisis (1978). The conclusion is that these similarities have to do with the recurring externalization of internal conflicts in capitalist societies.

— Lindgren, S. (2009).”Representing Otherness in Youth Crime Discourse: Youth Robberies and Racism in the Swedish Press 1998 – 2002″. Critical Discourse Studies, 6(1), pp 65-77.