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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:
21
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
22
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
23
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
24
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
25
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
26
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
27
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”
28
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
29
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
30
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
31
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
32
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
33
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
34
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
35
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]
36
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
