In the early morning of Saturday 22 September 2012 an Australian woman, Gillian 'Jill' Meagher, was reported missing after spending an evening out with work colleagues in suburban Brunswick (Melbourne, Victoria). Thousands of Australians followed the crime event as it unfolded via the mainstream news and online. On Sunday 23 September, a Facebook group 'Help Us Find Jill Meagher' was created, accumulating 90,000 followers in just four days, while the hashtags #jillmeagher and #meagher were two of the highest trending topics on Twitter across Australia. This article focuses on the social media narrative constructions of this crime: from Jill's initial disappearance, to the identification of her alleged killer and discovery of her body, through to the street march held in her memory on Sunday 30 September 2012. Through a qualitative analysis of a Twitter dataset comprising over 7000 original tweets, the article explores metanarratives of sexual victimisation, 'risk' and 'safety', as well as 'digilantism' and activism that characterised Australian Twitter users' responses to this violent crime. In doing so, the article reflects on collective practices of meaning-making in response to public crime events that are enabled in a digital society.
The production of the #cokedrone YouTube advertisement by Coca-Cola Singapore in 2014 is a manifestation of the broader trend toward the domestication of drone technologies within city spaces, indicating a prolonged desire to eschew its relationship to violence. This article seeks to briefly provide one interpretation into this ad and the broader contextual implications of drones in cities. We argue that while a variety of strategies are clearly deployed within this ad—the redesign of the body of the drone, the attempt to negate the relation between drones and violence, and finally, through the reconfiguration of the drone eye from the eye that ‘watches’ to the eye that ‘sees’—the overall implications of drone technologies within city spaces warrants further investigation. Particularly as drone technologies are easily adaptable to changing environments, often concealing its security and surveillance capabilities, commercial and domestic participants in this trend must be critically aware of the potential consequences underlying the normalisation of drones as part of everyday life in the city.
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