978-1285459059 Chapter 2

Unlock access to all the studying documents.

View Full Document

Chapter 2

New Media and Social Constructionism

Chapter Objectives

After reading Chapter 2, students should be able to:

1. have a theoretical foundation for exploring media, crime, and justice

2. understand the primary concepts of social constructionism

3. know how to use social constructionism to follow developments in criminal justice policy

Chapter Outline

I. The Social Construction of Crime and Justice

a. Social Constructionism: people create reality based on their personal experiences

and from knowledge gained through social interactions

i. The capability for social constructions to drive social behavior for good or

ill has been long recognized

ii. Sometimes the process is rapid, other times it can take a lifetime

iii. The process is the same for everyone but the end result, your personal idea

of reality, may contain highly individualistic elements

iv. Social constructionism can result in negative consequences

1. Example: George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin

a. Neighborhood watch volunteer and Florida teenager they

socially constructed one other as threats when encountered

each other in 2012

i. Mr. Zimmerman perceived African American

teenager Martin as a criminal prowling his

community

2. Walter Lippmann remarked in Public Opinion (1922): “For the

most part we do not first see, and then define. We define first and

then see… We pick out what our culture has already defined for

us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the

form stereotyped for us by our culture.”

b. Social constructionism views:

i. Knowledge is socially created by people

1. Premise that accepted knowledge about the world need not mirror

an objective reality

ii. Focuses on human relationships and the way relationships affect how

people perceive reality

iii. Emphasizes the shared meanings that people hold

1. The ideas, interpretations, and knowledge that groups of people

agree to hold in common

iv. Shared meanings are the result of active, cooperative social relationships

1. May or may not be tied to objectively measured

2. People tacitly agree to see the world in a specific way

v. Premise that accepted knowledge is not directly dependent on its validity

c. Understanding the social construction of reality process and the concepts of social

constructionism helps to understand the impact of media on crime and justice

i. Social constructionism is strongly influenced by shifting cultural trends

and social forces

1. Changes in opinion may be independent of changes in physical

situations

2. Regarding crime, for example, social behaviors can be

criminalized or decriminalized independent of changes in

victimization or offense rates

II. The Sources of Social Knowledge

a. Social constructionists seek to understand:

i. the process through which agreement is constructed

ii. the forces and conditions that influence when an accepted construction

changes

b. People acquire social knowledge from four sources

i. Personal experiences (most powerful)

ii. Significant others (peers, family, friends)

iii. Other social groups and institutions (schools, unions, churches,

government agencies)

iv. The media

c. Three Kinds of Reality

i. Experienced Reality: one’s directly experienced world—all the events that

have happened to you

1. Relatively limited

2. Has a powerful influence on an individual’s constructed reality

a. Nearly twice as many citizens in LA credited direct and

conversational reality sources as more important than

media sources in forming their views of police

b. Personal victimization is the most powerful source for

defining one’s view of how serious a particular crime is

i. Personal victimization is comparatively rare

ii. Symbolic Reality: all the events you did not witness but believe occurred;

all the facts about the world you did not personally collect but believe to

be true; all the things you believe to exist but have not seen

1. Comprised from three sources of knowledge—other people,

institutions, and the media

2. Constitutes most of our knowledge

a. In the U.S., media, in particular, dominates our formation

of symbolic reality

i. Creates a cause for concern over media content

ii. What we see as crime and justice is largely defined,

described, and framed by media content

iii. Socially Constructed Reality: what we individually believe the world to be

1. The combined knowledge of personal experience and symbolic

reality mixes to construct our own “world”

2. Subjective reality differs between individuals or groups

3. Individuals with access to similar knowledge and who frequently

interact with one another tend to negotiate and construct similar

social realities

4. Result is a socially constructed subjective reality that directs social

behavior

a. People behave according to how they believe the world is

5. The media comprise the most important element in defining crime

and justice reality for most people

iv. The Social Construction Process and the Media (See Figure 2.1)

1. Four Stages of Social Constructionism

a. Stage 1: the physical world without interpretation

i. Events occur and are noted by individuals and

organizations

ii. Provides the boundaries that the other stages must

work within

iii. Competing constructions cannot maintain

credibility if they run counter to the physical reality

of the world

b. Stage 2: competing constructions emerge offering differing

descriptions of what the world is like

i. Descriptions are frequently of social conditions

identified as social problems

1. Example: drugs

ii. Offer different explanations of why the physical

world is as purported to be

1. Constructions will forward various histories

and theories as to how and why their

description of the physical world happened

2. Example: “Crime is out of control because

the criminal justice system is too lenient.”

iii. Competing constructions often argue for a set of

public and individual policies that should be

supported and pursued

1. Example: “In order to get crime under

control, we must impose longer prison

sentences.”

c. Stage 3: media act as filters (where media plays most

powerful role)

i. Persons forwarding constructions compete for

media attention

ii. Media favor positions that are:

1. dramatic

2. sponsored by powerful groups

3. related to preestablished cultural themes

iii. It is difficult for those outside the mainstream to

access the media and promote their constructions

1. Difficult for some constructions to gain

legitimacy

2. Some constructions never get on the playing

field

d. Stage 4: the emergence of a dominant social construction

i. Media play an important role in the construction

that eventually prevails due to limited direct

experience

ii. The winning dominant construction directs public

policy

1. For crime and justice, this socially

constructed reality will define:

a. the conditions, trends, and factors

accepted as causes of crime

b. the behaviors that are seen as

criminal

c. the criminal justice policies accepted

as reasonable and likely to be

successful

III. The Concepts of Social Constructionism

a. Claims Makers and Claims

i. Claims makers: the promoters, activists, professional experts, and

spokespersons involved in forwarding specific claims about a social

condition

1. Shape our sense of what the conditions mean and what the social

problem is

2. Social problems can be constructed in many different ways

a. Example: Crime can be constructed as a:

i. social problem

ii. individual problem

iii. racial problem

iv. sexual problem

v. economic problem

vi. criminal justice problem

vii. technological problem

3. Each construction implies different policy courses and solutions

a. Solutions are embedded in competing claim makers’ claims

ii. Claims (see Figure 2.2)

1. Factual claims: statements that purport to describe the world

a. Statements about what happened

b. Promoted as objective “facts”

c. Made to categorize or type an event

d. The descriptions, typifications, and assertions regarding

conditions in the physical world

2. Interpretative claims: statements that focus on the meaning of

events

a. Do one of two things:

i. offer an explanation of why a set of factual claims is

as described

ii. offer a course action—a public policy—that needs

to be followed to address the conditions or events

described in the factual claims

3. Linkage: involves the association of the subject of the social

construction effort with other previously constructed issues

a. Strategy used to get a social construction accepted by the

public

b. Example: drugs are linked to crime

i. Leads to the argument that certain drugs should be

criminalized or other types of crime will increase

ii. The social importance of drug abuse is heightened

c. Crime-and-justice issues are often linked to the

endangerment of:

i. health

ii. welfare

iii. families

iv. communities

d. Raises the concern and public importance of the linked

social phenomenon

iii. Frames: prepackaged constructions; fully developed social construction

templates that allow users to categorize, label, and deal with a wide range

of world events

1. Simplifies one’s dealing with the world by organizing experiences

and events into groups

a. Guides what are seen as the appropriate policies and

actions

2. Include factual and interpretative claims and associated policies

3. Regarding crime and justice, preexisting frames make the

processing, labeling, and understanding of crimes easier for the

person holding that frame’s view of reality

a. Crimes can be cognitively dealt with and quickly tied to a

policy position

4. Five frames by criminologist Theodore Sasson (See Table 2.1)

a. All five compete today in the U.S.

b. All five frames accomplish the following:

i. offer explanations of crime

ii. point to specific causes

iii. come with accompanying policies

c. Faulty Criminal Justice System Frame

i. Crime results from a lack of “law and order”

ii. The only way to ensure public safety is to increase

the swiftness, certainty, an severity of punishment

1. Loopholes and technicalities that impede the

apprehension and imprisonment of offenders

must be eliminated, and funding for police,

courts, and prisons must be increased

iii. Symbolically represented by the convicted, repeat

rapist or by the image of inmates passing through a

revolving door or prison

d. Blocked Opportunities Frame

i. Crime is depicted as a consequence of inequality

and discrimination, especially in the following

areas:

1. unemployment

2. poverty

3. education

ii. People commit crimes when they discover that the

legitimate means are blocked

iii. To reduce crime, government must ameliorate the

social conditions that cause it, such as:

1. Unemployment

2. Ignorance

3. Disease

4. Filth

5. Poor housing

6. Congestion

7. Discrimination

iv. Symbolically portrayed through references to dead-

end jobs held by inner-city youth, such as flipping

burgers at McDonald’s

e. Social Breakdown Frame

i. Depicts crime as a consequence of:

1. family and community disintegration

2. skyrocketing rates of divorce

3. out-of-wedlock births

ii. Conservative version: attributes family and

community breakdown to “permissiveness”

iii. Liberal version: attributes family and community

breakdown to:

1. unemployment

2. racial discrimination

3. the loss of jobs and income

f. Racist System Frame

i. Focuses on the criminal justice system rather than

on crime

ii. Depicts the courts and police as racist agents of

oppression

1. Police resources are seen as dedicated more

to the protection of white neighborhoods

than to reducing crime in minority

communities

2. Minority offenders are seen as more likely

than whites who commit comparable

offenses to be arrested, convicted, and

sentenced to prison; administration of the

death penalty is racist

3. In radical versions of this frame, the basic

purpose of the criminal justice system is to

suppress a potentially rebellious underclass

iii. Symbolized by the beating of motorist Rodney

King, the trial of O. J. Simpson, and the Trayvon

Martin shooting

g. Violent Media Frame

i. Depicts crime and social violence as a consequence

of violence:

1. On television

2. In the movies

3. In popular music

4. In video games

ii. Media violence is seen as at least a partial

explanation of violent crime by nearly all

Americans

iii. “By the time the average child reaches age 18, he

will have witnessed some 18,000 murders and

countless highly detailed incidents of robbery,

arson, bombings, shootings, beatings, forgery,

smuggling, and torture”

iv. To reduce violence in society, this frame directs us

first to reduce it in the mass media

h. How Frames Influence Crime-and-Justice Policy

i. All frames are supported by some portion of the

public

ii. Frames are not mutually exclusive

iii. People often simultaneously support more than one

frame

iv. Crime-and-justice claims makers can guarantee a

level of support if they can fit their social

construction within one of these frames

v. Many crime-and-justice events can be differently

constructed using different frames

1. Examples:

a. O.J. Simpson murder trial

I. Guilty = Faulty Criminal

Justice System Frame

II. Innocent = Racist System

Frame

b. 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary

School shooting

I. Social Breakdown Frame

II. Violent Media Frame

III. Faulty Criminal Justice

System Frame

vi. The five frames jockey with one another for:

1. influence over how criminality is understood

in society

2. which criminal justice policies enjoy public

support

3. how new crimes and criminals are perceived

vii. The process through which crime-and-justice

frames fall in and out of favor is closely tied to the

social construction competition in the media

1. The media can boost frames ahead of one

another

2. Recent crime-and-justice content and

portraits tend to favor the faulty system and

social breakdown frames

iv. Narratives: preestablished mini-social constructions found throughout

crime-and-justice media

1. Crime-and-justice portraits that the public already recognizes and

embraces

2. Outline the recurring crime-and-justice types and situations that

regularly appear in the media

a. Examples:

i. the “naïve innocent”

ii. the “masculine, heroic crime–fighter”

iii. the “innately evil predatory criminal”: longest

running criminal narrative

iv. the “rogue cop”

v. the “sadistic guard”

vi. the “corrupt lawyer”

3. Narratives can be utilized to do the following:

a. quickly establish the characteristics of a criminal, a victim,

or a crime-fighter

b. as support examples for larger crime-and-justice frames

4. Consequences of narratives

a. Frequently linked to the faulty system frame because they

infer a simplified single-cause explanation of crime and

shared elements of random, predatory violence and

innocent victims

i. They give a sense of predictability and

understanding to even the most senseless

criminality

ii. Their use reduces the need to explain cause and

effect

1. Accompanying crime-and-justice

interpretative claims can remain unstated yet

implicitly accepted

5. In crime-and-justice, narratives are often applied to specific

criminal events, which are then attached to larger constructions and

forwarded as examples of what is wrong in society

v. Symbolic Crimes: crimes and other criminal justice events that are

selected and highlighted by claims makers as perfect examples of why

their crime-and-justice construction should be accepted (see Box 2.3)

1. Trumpeted to convince people of the existence of a pressing crime–

and-justice problem and a desperately needed criminal justice

policy

2. Taken up by claims makers and forwarded as:

a. “the types of crimes we can expect to happen more often

because we have allowed a set of conditions to fester”

b. “an example of what a new criminal justice policy will

correct if we implement it.”

3. Examples:

a. the beating of Rodney King

b. the kidnapping and murder of Polly Klaas

c. the murder trial of O.J. Simpson

d. the Columbine school shootings

e. the September 11th World Trade Center bombings

f. the Aurora Colorado theater shooting

g. the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting

h. the Boston Marathon bombing

4. The formula for using symbolic crimes in crime-and-justice social

construction:

5. An effective symbolic crime can be the difference between

winning and losing a social construction competition

a. Winning a social construction competition = Gaining

ownership of social problems and issues

vi. Ownership: the identification of a particular social condition with a

particular set of claims makers who come to dominate the social

construction of that issue (see Box 2.4)

1. Claims makers own an issue when they are sought out by the

media and others for their opinion regarding the issue

2. Some groups by virtue of their superior power, finances, status,

organization, technology, or media access have more ability to take

effective ownership of an issue

a. Law enforcement agencies have proprietary ownership of

crime

IV. New Media and Social Construction

a. Legacy media: composed of the dominant twentieth century traditional media

forms of news broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, radio and television, film,

radio, and music

b. New media: incorporates all of these older forms and their content into new high

speed, digital personalized delivery platforms.

c. Key distinctions between old and new media

i. access to content

ii. distribution of content

iii. creation of content (single most important difference)

1. Legacy media: content was created and distributed by distant

others, the media industry, to be delivered to distant isolated

consumers, to have whatever social impact it was destined to have

a. One side created legacy media content , the other side was

affected by it

b. Feedback loops between audience were weak, slow, and

haphazard

c. Clear obvious distinctions between writers and readers,

speakers and listeners, performers and audiences, and

producers and consumers

d. The content creation process flowed nearly exclusively in a

top-down direction

2. New media: consumers can be producers of self-generated

mediated content and assume the role of distributors of content

a. Audience creative participation, peer-to-peer distribution,

and the proliferation of user-generated content

b. Collective experience of “going viral”

d. Four new media differences:

i. Narrowcasting

1. Small homogenous audiences that have a special interest in a

narrow type of content are targeted by new media sources

2. This characteristic was first developed in the traditional media of

radio and in specialized magazines

3. Effect is readily apparent on the Internet where one can find a large

number of highly focused, narrow content dedicated websites

4. Myopic content consumption that ignores most of the available

media content while over-sampling narrow topics is within easy

reach

ii. On-demand nature

1. The archiving of content that frequently accompanies narrow

casting

2. With new media, the delivery of content is controlled and

determined by the consumer

3. Little media content must be consumed at a particular time and

place and few social events must be directly attended

4. The sharing of experiences is eased

iii. Information sharing is decentralized

1. Easy widespread sharing of content

2. Diffused experience

iv. Interactivity

1. A new media consumer can be an active participant in the

development, distribution, social assessment, and ultimate social

impact of their content

2. The audience moves from passive receptor of pre-determined

content to an active participant role in the creation of content.

3. Interactivity is most apparent in the realm of video games where

content is determined live by the actions of game players

4. The traditionally separate domains of “media” (where content and

information are made) and “society” (where content and

information are consumed) are less separated

a. What happens in society frequently becomes media content

as it happens and a large portion of society has become

authors, directors, and publishers of media content

b. The traditional research question of what are media effects

on society is becoming less relevant than the study of how

does a “mediated society” function

e. Four notable effects on society:

i. Individuals communicate anonymously but intimately

1. Result of:

a. the flow of content

b. the globalization of information

2. The Internet has emerged as a particularly powerful social factor

due to it:

a. having both mass and interpersonal elements

b. providing a unique one-to-many communication avenue

c. being word-of-mouth (or mouse) communication with

global reach

d. giving consumers the ability to have multiple online

pseudonyms and complex social networks

3. The rise of mediated over directly experienced reality means that

many today spend more time in a media-constructed world than in

a directly experienced one

a. Starting with home computers and Internet access and

enhanced by mobile phones, new media have encouraged

and allowed people to live together separately – to be

within the family space but to be psychologically elsewhere

b. For the social construction process this has meant that

although the knowledge and claims are obtained from

distant media based symbolic reality sources, they feel like

they are coming from your conversational reality, from

personal significant others

c. This social process has resulted in high levels of

socialization into virtual peer groups and reduced

socialization into physical near groups

ii. “News” has reduced timely interpretation of content

1. Images and emotional reactions are often delivered live, on-

demand, and before events have concluded

2. Exposure to discussions of crime has become more narrow

a. Because new media users can tightly control their content

choices, those interested in crime can watch more crime

news

3. One social effect from new media therefore is a large knowledge

gap

a. Self-selected consumers know a lot about narrow subjects

but little about much else

b. What interpretations and social contextualization they

receive tends to be narrowed to fit tight ideological

viewpoints where pre-set support for a particular crime and

justice frame determines what content one is self-exposed

to i. Described as an ‘echo chamber’ where opposing

perspectives are drowned out by the focused

recycling of particular sets of frames and narratives,

people know more and more about less and less

1. Example: a recent study of cable talk shows

found that discussions of justice issues

tended to promote hardline positions and

distorted racial and gender portraits of

criminality

iii. Effects from new media on the social construction of reality process

1. The social construction of reality process has become more

dominated by media provided information

a. The directly experienced world has a reduced effect and

influence

2. The blurring of experienced and symbolic reality has increased

3. The speed of the competition has increased along with the speed of

the distribution of social knowledge

4. Success in the social construction competition has been affected

a. Successful claims-makers are more often those who are

sophisticated users of new media

b. Claims that fit the new media formats of brief and visual

are the ones that go viral

c. New communication technologies have affected the claims-

making process

i. Example: Blogs have made the process more

efficient and provided outsider claims-makers with

greater opportunity to have a voice on one hand.

On the other hand, there is no evidence that these

effects extend to crime and justice dialogues

iv. Social construction strategy is affected

1. The linking events and claims to larger social problems, policies,

and frames is pursued:

a. more aggressively

b. with more reliance on visually supported factual claims

c. with less reliance on well-grounded interpretative claims

2. Established crime and justice frames all simultaneously attract

supporters who tend to narrowly expose themselves to frame

supportive arguments and examples

a. New media’s exposure to being myopic and ideologically

driven has led to each of Sasson’s five crime and justice

frames generating an audience of ‘true believers’ who

ridicule other frame supporters and ignore counter frame

evidence

3. Narratives and symbolic crimes have become points of competition

where claims-makers and frames advocates seek to gain

monopolistic ownership of high visibility, high value new media

crime and justice content to which claims and policies can be

attached

4. Decreased ability of traditional criminal justice agencies to

maintain ownership of crime issues and events

a. More difficult as new media have broadened access to

information

V. The Social Construction Process in Action

a. Social Construction of Road Rage

i. An example of a media-created crime

ii. Joel Best found that the media sought not only to describe but to explain

and interpret the problem

1. Media offered competing interpretative claims for the problem of

highway violence:

a. As a faulty system frame problem: more law enforcement

was the solution to the problem

b. As a traffic problem: freeway violence would be lessened if

the roads were not so congested

c. Social breakdown frame: freeway violence was a gun

access problem, or a lack of courtesy problem

2. The media was the primary claims maker in the construction of

road rage

a. Took on role in part because of a slow news period

i. Needing crime news and a new crime, the news

media went out and constructed one.

b. Reconstruction of Driving Under the Influence

i. Media can also influence the crime construction process by raising the

perception of a crime’s seriousness

1. Prior to the 1980s, DUI was socially constructed primarily as an

individual rehabilitation problem

a. Lawmakers wanted to lessen the penalties for DUI

b. The imposition of stiff penalties such as license revocation

would interfere with the offender’s ability to work

2. Beginning in the 1980s, new claims makers such as MADD

(Mothers Against Drunk Driving) attacked this dominant social

construction of the drunk driver

a. The drunk driver is now characterized as a “killer drunk”

and one of society’s pressing crime problems

b. Support has grown for much stricter DUI laws and their

enforcement and prosecution

c. Competing Constructions of the Arrest of Rodney King

i. The arrest of Rodney King provides an example of the social construction

competition process in which different constructed realities strove to

become the dominant view

1. Three different constructions of the cause and meaning of the event

competed (each with different associated policies)

a. Construction A: King resisted arrest and the beating was

justified

i. Minimal policy implications

b. Construction B: the beating was unjustified but was an

isolated incident of unwarranted police violence carried out

by a few rogue police officers

i. Policy action would be to fire the rogue officers and

reprimand anyone who helped misrepresent the

incident

c. Construction C: the beating is unjustified and seen as an

example of an endemic problem of unwarranted and

consistent police violence toward minorities

i. Fitted within the racist system

ii. Indicates the need to revamp the administration and

training of the department and make extensive

organizational changes

iii. In the end, this construction won the construction

competition

VI. Social Constructionism and Crime and Justice

a. The ultimate social importance of social constructionism is in its implication for

criminal justice public policy

i. The media and their crime-and-justice content influences the social

construction of crime-and-justice reality by supplying:

b. Today the process favors new media savvy claims makers

c. Social constructionism:

i. encourages a particular set of social attitudes and perceptions about crime

and justice

ii. changes how serious some crimes are viewed by the public

d. Examples of social construction efforts:

i. Predatory criminality

ii. Victim rights

iii. Terrorism

iv. White collar crime

v. Gun violence

vi. Overly lenient justice system

e. Four engines of social construction of reality (See Figure 2.3)

i. Conversational reality: personal experience and information received

directly from people close to us

1. Foundation of our personal socially constructed reality

2. The most influential social construction engine

ii. Legacy media: comprised of news, entertainment, advertisement, and

increasingly infotainment

1. Create a more pervasive, broadly distributed information engine in

the social construction process

iii. Knowledge supplied by the various institutions, organizations, and

agencies that collect and disseminate statistics, information, and claims

about the world

1. Crime-and-justice examples: Annual FBI and Department of

Justice reports about crime in America

2. Have a dependent relationship

a. Little knowledge can be disseminated directly from these

institutions and organizations to individuals, so agencies

and institutions must utilize legacy and new media for

effective distribution of their factual and interpretative

claims

b. The media tap these organizations for credible,

newsworthy, and interesting claims makers, claims, and

marketable infotainment

iv. New media

1. Sit as a high speed central clearinghouse that has two-way

connections to the other three engines

2. Much of the content of the socially shared knowledge at any

particular time is largely determined by the changes of new media

f. The single most important insight to be gained from a social constructionism

perspective is recognition of the social construction competition that is constantly

being waged

Chapter Key Terms

social constructionism [31] interpretative claims [36]

experienced reality [32] linkage [36]

symbolic reality [32] frames [37]

socially constructed reality [33] narratives [41]

claims makers [35] ownership [42]

factual claims [35] conversational reality [53]

Helpful and Interesting Internet Sites

The following sites are interesting sources for this chapter. Please review them before

recommending them to your students.

Crime Mysteries

http://www.mysterynet.com/tv//

http://www.mysterynet.com/timeline/

http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateMystery/tv.html