CAPÍTULO 2: BÚSQUEDA DE LA INFORMACIÓN
2.2 Pasos para buscar y encontrar la evidencia
In reference to the relationship between cinema, social media and the study of crime, it is important to go back to how, historically, crime stories have entered mass media narratives and become a common feature of their daily agenda. Of course, modern systems of communication did not ‘invent’ the phenomenon of human curiosity and the popular fascination with felony and lawbreaking, but have simply tapped into a former tradition of social network and public communication. The most illuminating account of this shift between a pre-modern sensitivity and a more rationalised communicative ethos in society is, incidentally, outlined in Kai Erikson’s work on 17th-century Massachusetts Puritan colonies (Erikson, 1966). Assessing the role that deviancy has in establishing the moral borders in a communitarian identity, the American sociologist describes an important change in modern attitudes toward crime and morality, which is worth citing in full:
In our own past, the trial and punishment of offenders were staged in the market place and afforded the crowd a chance to participate in a direct, active way. Today, of course, we no longer parade deviants in the town square or expose them to the carnival atmosphere of a Tyburn, but it is interesting that the ‘reform’ which brought this change in penal practice coincided almost exactly with the development of newspapers (and now radio and television) that offer much the same kind of entertainment as public hangings or a Sunday visit to the local gaol. A considerable portion of what we call ‘news’ is devoted to reports about deviant behaviour and its consequences, and it is no simple matter to explain why these items should be considered newsworthy or why they should command the extraordinary attention they do. Perhaps they appeal to a number of psychological perversities among the mass audience, as commentators have suggested, but at the same time they constitute one of our main sources of information about the
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normative outlines of society. In a figurative sense, at least, morality andimmorality meet at the public scaffold, and it is during this meeting that the line between them is drawn. (Erikson, 1966, 12)
From this point of view, the scaffold is the social stage where lawbreakers and lawmakers enact a violent confrontation, with the final, physical expulsion of the criminal from the community of the living (Merback, 1999, 139). At the same time, the participation of onlookers at the event gives publicity and legitimisation to those involved in this social ritual (Friedland, 2012, 119). However, when the scaffold was dismantled and removed from the social scene, as no longer in tune with popular sensibilities, something else took the place of this centre of public participation. My theory is that the gradual development of mass communication systems succeeded authoritative displays of violent death in a public square, at least in part substituting for it tales about misdoings or the penal sentencing of real and fictional characters. In this way, a public of onlookers became a virtual community of readers first, and spectators later, where new forms of interaction among community members were possible, together with the commercial exploitation of technical innovations in the distribution of stories related to crime.
More generally, the disappearance of the body of the condemned from the public stage is part of a process of civilisation, accurately described by Elias, that comes with the decline of the medieval social order and the rise of western nation states (Elias, 2000). The subsequent refinements of public feelings and social manners are the result of a transformation from an aggressive expression of pleasure, proper to warlike societies, into a more passive and ordered mode of ‘spectating’ (Elias, 2000, 170) that marks the beginning of the modern era. Durkheim highlights this transition in modern times, from a legal point of view, by pointing to the difference between criminal acts against collective values or authorities (Religious Criminality) and other acts that offend only against individuals (Human or Individual Criminality) (Durkheim, 1899-1900, 41). The first category, according to the French sociologist, will regress along with social evolution: it will disappear, so that punishments consisting only in deprivation of freedom will become the normal type of repression (ibid., 40-41). In other words, punishment increasingly takes place
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behind closed doors, initiating a ‘sobriety of punishment’ that resorts no longer to previous centuries’ theatrical representation of inflicted pain, but instead to solitary confinement and private repression removed from the public eye (Foucault, 1977, 14).Replacing these social rituals of public display, the advent of the mass communication system (e.g. broadsheets, news reports of sentencing, penny newspapers) increases mediated forms of interaction with recipients, while favouring the concentration of symbolic and economic power in new social organisms (Thompson, J.B., 1995, 202). Thus, the participatory moment of the spectator in a local community gives way to a ‘window’, a view, on the world offered by a system, where the visual field provided by the media replaces the visual world of direct experience. At the same time, a mediated discourse about crime stories taps into previous collective rituals of popular participation in public executions. From this point of view, social media provide a new way of refashioning collective identities based on the sharing of knowledge, entertainment and spectatorship, organised along the blurred lines of aesthetic fascination, power to punish, social influence and maximisation of profit.