New media, new panics

When Stuart Hall and his Birmingham School colleagues argued that media technologies were essential to the production of moral panics, they focused on the relationship between mass media and the state. Because new technologies have altered our cultures of ostracism and punishment, we offer a revised...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Critical studies in media communication 2016-12, Vol.33 (5), p.455-467
Main Authors: Ingraham, Chris, Reeves, Joshua
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Citizens
communicative capitalism
Criminal proceedings
cultural studies
Cultural values
Ethics
Hall, Stuart
Industrial production
Internet
Mass media
Mass media effects
moral panics
Morality
participation
Political participation
Punishment
Shaming
Social conditions & trends
Social Media
Social networks
Sociology of culture
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Summary:When Stuart Hall and his Birmingham School colleagues argued that media technologies were essential to the production of moral panics, they focused on the relationship between mass media and the state. Because new technologies have altered our cultures of ostracism and punishment, we offer a revised analysis of this relationship that examines the role of online shaming in current moral panics. Not only do we analyze the new technological affordances of digital media, we argue that our current shaming culture is symptomatic of a deep-seated political disenfranchisement that leaves subjects grasping to "do something." Contributing to a social media-driven panic culture that punishes and ostracizes deviants thus stands in for meaningful political participation. Ultimately, we argue that the evolving orientation to public life fostered by these new technologies has created a culture of shaming whereby citizens often prosecute their own discrete moral panics amid the more sustained sense of political crisis that characterizes contemporary life.
ISSN:1529-5036
1479-5809
DOI:10.1080/15295036.2016.1227863