Digital Detectives - How Mediatization and the Culture of Convergence Allows Us to Conduct Trials Online

True crime has established itself as a genre with a huge amount of dedicated viewers worldwide,and has gone from ”trash culture” to big, Emmy award-winning productions. Consumers of thegenre has evolved from passively watching the series on the couch, to actively getting engaged in thecase over internet forums as ”digital detectives”. In combination with the technological developmentand the growth of the media, including the shift in power this has contributed to, we now face newchallenges that society has not yet been able to address. The genres influence on its consumers iswidely debated, as is the influence of today’s media climate on our perception of the world, andstudies that address why we expose ourself to this type of content have been written about anddocumented in numerous ways. However, there is no account of the consumers’ own understandingof the relationship between the media, increased opportunities of communication and the genres'growing popularity. This study aims to investigate how today’s media climate and the digital culturewe live in have contributed to the phenomenon that true crime is, and what factors causethe consumers to evolve from passive to active. The documentary Making a Murderer serves asbasis for the study, it is available in two seasons and depicts the murder of Teresa Halbach.To fulfill the purpose of the study, a qualitative method approach was used. As part of the pilotstudy a focus group was conducted, which was then supplemented with personal interviews. Thedata that emerged in these studies were processed and analyzed thematically with the support of thedocumented theories. From the themes and patterns that were developed, conclusions could bewritten, the sub-questions could be answered and the purpose of the study was fulfilled. I came tothe conclusion that mediatization and convergence culture can be assumed to play a major part inthe emergence of digital detectives, as well as in the development of a relatively new form of spoilerculture in which collective intelligence is used to reform society. Furthermore, I found a concernamong the consumers about how dangerous it can be if media and civilians act as judges insociety, and how the possible lack of source criticism can affect the public’s perception of the world.In order for consumers to evolve from passive to active, and for them to be affected on an emotionallevel, a real and detailed picture of the case needs to be portrayed, with socio-economic factors aswell as an insight into the protagonist’s life