Search

Online platforms devoted to investigating criminal cases or mysteries are often seen as reaching outwards to identify suspects, promote punishment, and try to solve cases. Simultaneously, internal interactions between posters motivate them to contribute, even to outdo one another, and so a team spirit emerges. This article analyzes a lengthy thread on a Swedish Internet discussion forum, Flashback, in which a wildlife photographer was exposed for manipulating photographs. We explore how the online interaction is characterized by both competition and collaboration, as well as hard work and displayed expertise, and is framed in terms of the morally right and an underdog perspective. The posters' activities are largely directed at the photographer's moral wrongdoing and take the form of an internal process between the participants, where work and play merge. We analyzed the case with the help of Randall Collins' interaction rituals, Erving Goffman's frames, and the concept of playbour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from interviews with posters and an analysis of a dozen discussion threads on the Swedish online discussion forum Flashback, this article sets out to investigate the dramatization of crime news from the point of view of the participants themselves. Analyzing both the online discussions and the articulated motivations and activities of the posters, this article focuses on how participants in these crime discussion threads come together around an epistemic quest for the truth, but also how discussions are ritualized so as to give rise to a collective effervescence and unity when the epistemic drama is perceived to have been resolved, and the truth is revealed to the wider public. Accordingly, this article seeks to remedy a gap in the previous research on online crime discussions by focusing less on the investigative aspects of such work – for example, how participants collaborate to solve crimes – and more on the symbolic and affective aspects of the dramatization of these discussions of crime. What is at the forefront is thus how participants make sense of their engagement and experience of these online discussions, rather than the actual criminal case. To refer to this as an epistemic drama is to highlight how activities, ideals and identities are ordered and sequenced through a ritualization of collective online participation, but also how it involves the establishment of (1) a particular predicament, (2) a collective objective, and (3) ultimately some sort of perceived emotional climax related to solving this predicament through the collective objective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last 10 years, the mobile phone and the emergence of websites, such as Youtube, which facilitate user-generated content, have enabled an explosion of pictures and video clips posted on the internet by civilians documenting the activities of authority figures. This "sousveillance" is a kind of inverse surveillance, reciprocal to surveillance, where members of the grassroots monitor those in power. Initially, sousveillance was primarily seen as an inverse form of surveillance in which citizens monitor their surveillors in order to challenge the surveillance state. The individuals filmed were originally thought to be aware of being sousveilled by others, and it was assumed that every watcher would voluntarily give free access to all information recorded. This article, drawing from an analysis of selfdocumented graffiti videos, aims to further the understanding of sousveillance through showing how graffiti writers—the supposed target of surveillance—use documentation of surveillance in order to present themselves as superior in terms of control and knowledge. Through analyzing the narrative structure and composition of these videos, I will demonstrate that sousveillance, for the graffiti writer, becomes less a matter of resistance and more a means for the symbolic representation of subcultural emotions, activities, and identities. The documentation and dissemination of the movements and activities of anti-graffiti officers, as well as the graffiti writers' successful attempts to outsmart them, are analyzed as a part of a subcultural play, centered on the establishment of an equilibrium or a dance where key roles and rules are assigned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper calls for renewed consideration of the way research subjects are selected in the study of subcultures. All too often, subcultural researchers limit themselves to the use of one or two of the orthodox sampling designs, such as 'convenience sampling' (selecting subjects who are readily available) or 'chain referral sampling' (selecting a readily available subject who refers the researcher to other subjects). While these designs certainly have their merits, especially in the early research phase of negotiating access and acceptance, they may impede insight into the diversity that exists within subcultural groups. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among punks and graffiti writers, this paper introduces a supplementary design, that of 'negative chain referral sampling', which consists of using group members' categorisations of subcultural anomalies as an opening to explore subcultural variation and tensions. This design is one that flips the logic of conventional chain referral sampling: if we are encouraged not to speak to certain subjects, for instance, due to their lack of authenticity or status, this forms the motivation for doing exactly that. Closer examination of subcultural anomalies may deepen our understanding of the boundary work, identity-making and social exclusion that occurs in all subcultural groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]