When Shopping Turns Scary: Twitter Conversations about Violent Crime in Johannesburg Malls

ABSTRACT

Retail crimes in post-apartheid South Africa have transformed consumer views about malls from safe, pleasurable havens into dangerous spaces embedded with varying degrees of fear and anxiety. Malls are marketed as gated microcosms implementing constant surveillance and security measures, which are aimed at keeping shoppers safe and criminals at bay. When crime intersects this space, it drives a variety feelings and sentiments about what malls ought to represent as a secured territory. This article explores how anxious comments made about retail crimes by a public on social media (Twitter), tends to be less about how armed robberies threaten personal safety, and more about how criminality is implicated as an 'inconvenient' disrupter towards daily shopping rituals. These public concerns are only the tip of the iceberg and an entry point into a broader discourse suggesting that anxiety is ideological: it has political functions. By publicly tweeting about mall robberies, these shoppers lean in towards sentiments associated with apartheid's segregating policies, which symbolically appropriates mall security as a necessitated rite towards maintaining malls as spaces of exclusivity in a country attempting to foster equality.

KEYWORDS:

• Crime
• mall
• anxiety
• shopping
• twitter
• security
• armed robbery
• fear

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Research Foundation [grant number SFH150704123117].