The Electronic Pillory: Social Time and Hostility Toward Capital Murderers

Abstract

In early modern Europe, popular hostility toward criminals could be expressed through the use of the pillory (a device in which offenders were restrained and publicly displayed). Modern electronic communications have facilitated the emergence of contemporary versions of the pillory. One such example is http://prodeathpenalty.com, a Web site created by supporters of capital punishment that permits members to post comments about particular executions. Most such comments are markedly hostile toward the convicted offender. But is the hostility random or patterned? A new theory by Donald Black predicts that hostility will increase with changes in social space, or the movement of social time. Testing Black's theory, we find that the number of online comments hostile to the killer and supportive of the execution increases with the degree to which the murder was a movement of relational, vertical, and cultural time. Moving beyond the electronic pillory, we argue that Black's theory has much to offer to law and society scholars.

When Will Academics Contest Intellectual Conflict?

“…Since the diachronic conception of social space is relatively new, it has generated comparatively little scholarship. Even so, the idea of social time has been invoked to explain the causes and handling of several aspects of conflict: suicide, online hostility, family honor killing, and genocide (Campbell 2013; Cooney 2014; Manning 2014; Phillips and Cooney 2015).…”

Domestic Violence and Social Time

“… See, e.g., HORWITZ, 1982; BAUMGARTNER, 1988;SENECHAL DE LA ROCHE, 1996, 1997 BLACK, 1998 BLACK, , 2004a BLACK, , 2004b BLACK, , 2010COONEY, 1998 COONEY, , 2009MANNING, 2012 MANNING, , 2014 CAMPBELL, 2015;PHILLIPS and COONEY, 2015;TUCKER, 1999 TUCKER, , 2015.23 All couples in a society obviously do not have the same amount of domestic violence -if they have any at all. Nor do any individuals engage in domestic violence on a continuous basis, whenever the partners are together.…”