Imagining globalised fears: school shooting videos and circulation of violence on YouTube

Abstract

In recent years there has been a revival of interest in the concept of circulation in the field of anthropology. This article aims at elaborating the idea of circulation, namely, in the context of media anthropology. We illuminate the workings of circulation by illustrating how violent media images travel on YouTube and how video clips contribute to the formation and reformation of globalised social imaginaries of violence. Special attention is given to the circulations of school shooting videos on YouTube. Through fieldwork on YouTube videos associated with the Columbine, Virginia Tech, Jokela and Kauhajoki massacres, the article draws on George Bataille's ideas on symbolic violence to claim that the school shootings as visual media spectacles of violence, death and terror can be seen as paradigmatic examples of deadly events that have a potential to stimulate social imaginaries of horror and anxiety through the cultural logic of circulation in the era of globalisation.

In their own words: What bothers children online?

“…I get scared. (Boy,15,Sweden) While children in this study had little opportunity to describe the circumstances in which they encountered such content, research on viewing violent imagery has pointed to a lively peer culture of testing how much can one take (Jerslev, 2001) or a curiosity about what the world contains outside the adult-imposed boundaries that constrain children (Sumiala and Tikka, 2011). One 11-year-old boy from Ireland gave a hint of these circumstances when he wrote: 'Scary things -I saw something at my friend's house and I can't get it out of my head.'…”

Crashing a National Media Event: The Circulation of Social Imaginaries in the Gatecrashers Riots in Finland

“…In recent years, circulation has been the focus of rising interest among media scholars, to the point where even 'the circulatory turn' (Straw, 2010) has been mentioned. The concept has been applied in attempts to understand the flux of meanings and information in such diverse phenomena as school shootings (Sumiala and Tikka, 2011), 'innovationism' (Valaskivi, 2012), media spectacles (Phillips, 2013), nation branding (Aronczyk, 2013;Valaskivi, 2013), management gurus (Kantola, 2013) and religious framing of media technologies (Campbell and La Pastina, 2010).…”

YouTube: fragments of a video‐tropic atlas

“…This has spawned a variety of methods. The idea of fieldwork in, and on, the internet being akin to an ethnographer's journey is one method for trying to study it as an archipelago of amateur, lay and fan communities (Hine ; Sumiala and Tikka ). Another method is the traditional cultural geographer's work of decoding or interpreting or analysing broadcast media.…”