Participatory Media and Moral Panic

The transformation of the media landscape invites us to rethink the dialectic between "media" and "moral panic", by focusing on the ways in which participatory media enables the public’s participation in moral panic. The coproduction of moral panic, via media participation, can be analyzed to document how individuals, through their relational links, trigger, maintain and propagate moral panic or how these forms of moral regulation affect sociability, notably those stigmatized by the controversial subject. This may also allow the study of how mediatization of social relations, stemming from participatory media, leads to renegotiating a number of democratic balances. These include the relationship between private and public spheres as well as the role of publics in constituting collective dynamics, such as the formation of public problems