Digital drift and the criminal interaction order
| Author | Russell Brewer,Andrew Goldsmith |
| Date | 01 February 2015 |
| Published date | 01 February 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480614538645 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Theoretical Criminology
2015, Vol. 19(1) 112 –130
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480614538645
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Digital drift and the
criminal interaction order
Andrew Goldsmith
Flinders University, Australia
Russell Brewer
Flinders University, Australia
Abstract
Despite growing interest in cybercrime, the Internet still poses significant challenges
for criminological understanding. Its penetration of everyday life is relevant to many
crime types, not just cybercrimes. This article examines the ways in which criminal
commitments form using the Internet and related communication technologies that
empower the individual relative to the group (gang, mafia, etc.). We argue this occurs
in two ways. First, it allows individuals to limit involvement in particular associations
or networks. The concept of digital drift is used to explore this element. Second, it
allows them to commit crimes more autonomously through facilitating self-instruction.
Drawing on Goffman, the importance of studying the encounter as the basic unit of a
criminal interaction order is proposed.
Keywords
Criminal interaction order, digital drift, encounter, Goffman, Internet, Matza
Introduction
This article suggests the need analytically to develop a ‘criminal interaction order’ that
incorporates new means of conducting social encounters and new ways of acquiring
Corresponding author:
Andrew Goldsmith, Flinders Law School, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, South Australia,
5001, Australia.
Email: andrew.goldsmith@flinders.edu.au
538645TCR0010.1177/1362480614538645Theoretical CriminologyGoldsmith and Brewer
research-article2014
Article
Goldsmith and Brewer 113
criminal capability through the Internet and related communication technologies such as
mobile computing (smartphones, tablets, etc.). Ten years ago Ronald Clarke (2004: 55)
wrote, ‘The Internet has created a completely new environment in which traditional
crimes … can take new forms’ as well as creating ‘new opportunities for organized
crimes such as money-laundering, credit card forgery, trade in body parts and, of course,
terrorism’. Since then the reach and penetration of the Internet into everyday social rela-
tions has expanded dramatically. While there were approximately 360 million Internet
users in 2000, this figure had grown to more than 2.4 billion by 2012 (Internet World
Stats, 2013). In western countries the percentage of the population accessing the Internet
in 2012 varied from 63.2 per cent (Europe) to 78.6 per cent (North America). The impli-
cations of this massive social trend are yet to be fully appreciated (Lanier, 2013; Pew
Research Center, 2014; Schmidt and Cohen, 2013).
Criminology has been slow to respond to these changes and to grasp their implica-
tions for understanding how crime is being committed. In this article we argue that
Internet-related uses have fundamentally reconfigured the ‘specific social arrangements
for the accomplishment of crime’ (Cohen, 1977: 110) in at least three ways: (1) weaken-
ing the bonding power of groups (and hence loosening group boundaries); (2) expanding
the range of interactions possible for a given individual; (3) placing more power in the
hands of individuals to determine how, when and whether they affiliate with others and
take action in the world. Our focus is not on the forms of cybercrime now taking place
such as hacking and phishing (e.g. Brenner, 2002; Glenny, 2011; Mann and Sutton, 1998;
Wall, 2007). It is rather upon the ways in which these new technologies enable individu-
als to both ‘embed’ and ‘dis-embed’ themselves in a variety of criminal activities and
lifestyles off- as well as online. In short, the changes that concern us, powered by the
Information Age (Castells, 2000), impact upon the level of individual commitment to
criminal activities and lifestyles as well as upon the degree and forms of interdependence
and reciprocity implicated in the accomplishment of crime.
This article explores how the Internet is changing how crime is organized and commit-
ted. The Internet can be seen as significant in two senses—first, as a unique place or set of
places facilitating new and easy encounters between individuals across space and time,
and second, as empowering individuals by providing in effect a proxy partner (or prosthe-
sis) for a wide range of activities. The greater fluidity around criminal interactions facili-
tated through the Internet challenges the understanding of criminal commitments as
‘consistent lines of activity’ (Becker, 1960: 33) or socially embedded activity. In develop-
ing the idea here of a criminal interaction order, we recognize the necessity to re-examine
our understandings of some now well-established constructs in criminology such as the
idea of criminal identities as essentially stable, of criminal interactions as essentially net-
work-like and of criminal learning depending upon face-to-face interactions over time. As
social relations increasingly consist of ‘mediated forms of social interaction’ (Rettie,
2009: 421), it is necessary to reconsider the terms on which interactions occur in order to
understand how, where and when crime is enacted socially. Drawing on Matza (1964,
1969) we propose the concept of digital drift to capture some of the mediated effects of
the Internet upon criminal commitments, particularly his idea that drift into and out of
criminal pathways can often be ‘accidental or unpredictable’ (Matza, 1964: 29).
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