Book Review: Frank van Gemert, Dana Peterson and Inger-Lise Lien (eds)
| Author | Sveinung Sandberg |
| DOI | 10.1177/13624806090130030611 |
| Published date | 01 August 2009 |
| Date | 01 August 2009 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
413
media’ such as the Internet and mobile phones, the book circulates fairly res-
olutely within the space of ‘traditional’ mass media, such as broadcast television,
motion pictures, newspaper reportage, novels and the like. Yet the development
of these aforementioned new media channels carries implications for understand-
ing that go far beyond a simple multiplication of communicative avenues or the
‘speeding up’ of mediation. To give one example, established debates around
crime and media retain in the last instance a fairly clear demarcation between pro-
duction and consumption, between object and audience—at best, the audience
becomes a co-producer of meaning in the sense that it has the capacity to inflect
and shape meaning through the act of reading. On the other hand, one of the
most noticeable changes occurring in the wake of new media development is the
proliferation of self-organized production by ‘ordinary people’—everything rang-
ing from self-authored web pages and ‘blogs’, to self-produced video created
using hand-held camcorders, camera phones and ‘webcams’. Today we see the
(admittedly troubling) spectacle of young people performing acts of crime and
deviance in order to record them, send them and upload them to the Internet. This
kind of ‘will to communicate’ may be seen in itself as a new kind of causal induce-
ment to law- and rule-breaking behaviour. It may be that, in the new media age,
the terms of questioning need to be sometimes reversed: instead of asking
whether/if ‘media’ instigate crime or fear of crime, we must ask how the very pos-
sibility of mediating oneself to an audience through self-representation might be
bound up with the genesis of criminal behaviour. Although Carrabine may not
have explored new territory such as this, it is undoubtedly to his credit that he has
inspired this reader to ask such questions about the intersections between crime,
culture and media in the contemporary world.
Frank van Gemert, Dana Peterson and Inger-Lise Lien (eds)
Street Gangs, Migration and Ethnicity
Devon: Willan, 2008. 286 pp. ISBN 10: 1843923963 (hbk);
ISBN 13: 9781843923961 (hbk).
• Reviewed by Sveinung Sandberg, University of Bergen, Norway
The anthology Street...
To continue reading
Request your trial