Antisocial media: spectating affray in the age of Facebook

© 2016 Dr. Mark WoodWith the advent of the camera phone and social media, street fighting has met the information superhighway and entered a new phase of production, distribution and consumption. As more and more footage of bareknuckle violence has migrated online, Facebook, the world’s most popular social networking site, has come to host a legion of fight pages dedicated to aggregating and hosting such footage. Though the consumption of violent media content has been a perennial subject of research, policy, and social concern, fight pages remain little-researched. This study examines these new sites for spectating bareknuckle violence, and takes stock of the new technological conditions for distributing, spectating, and consuming recordings of crime that Facebook provides. In doing so, it charts the rise of what I dub antisocial media: participatory websites dedicated to aggregating and sympathetically curating footage of criminalized acts. Drawing on data obtained through following five fight pages over eight months and surveying 205 fight page users, this dissertation addresses two research questions critical to understanding this new media phenomenon: First, what modes of spectating bareknuckle violence do fight page users engage in when they view the content hosted by these pages? Second, what implications do fight pages and Facebook’s technological infrastructure have for the way individuals consume footage of bareknuckle violence on the platform? Ultimately, I argue that whilst the aggregation, curation, and algorithmically-filtered distribution of bareknuckle violence on Facebook may, in several different ways, legitimate certain forms of violent behaviour for many fight page users, it is important to recognise the many and varied reasons individuals view fight videos on the site – not all of which are potentially harmful. Moreover, I argue that fight pages may legitimate certain forms of violent behaviour as a result of not only their content, but also the algorithmically curated information environment they are embedded within