The digital pillory: media shaming of ‘ordinary' people for minor crimes

Abstract

This paper discusses the intensified role of the media in shaming ‘ordinary' people when they commit minor offences. We argue that shaming is a powerful cultural practice assumed by the news media in western societies after it was all but phased out as a formal punishment imposed by the judiciary during the early nineteenth century. While shaming is no longer a physically brutal practice, we reconceptualize the idea of a ‘lasting mark of shame' at the hands of the media in the digital age. We argue that this form of shaming should be considered through a lens of media power to highlight its symbolic and disciplinary dimensions. We also discuss the role new and traditional media forms play in shaming alongside formal punishments imposed by the judiciary. While ‘ordinary' people armed with digital tools increase the degree of disciplinary surveillance in wider social space, traditional news media continue to play a particularly powerful role in shaming because of their symbolic power to contextualize information generated in social and new media circles and their privileged position to other fields of power.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who provided helpful advice on this paper.

Notes

^1. We do not want to contribute to this woman's shaming, but direct evidence is required to properly consider the phenomenon, the circuits through which her misdemeanour was taken up in digital media and how that intersected with traditional media. We argue that through shifting the gaze of the reader here on to the actions of the media itself, we speak back to the power that shamed her. Both digital and traditional media producers' motivations in promoting the footage are the focus of this study, rather than the woman's actions.

^2. ‘Feral bogan' is an Australian slang phrase that describes a person who is from a poor socio-economic background and is uncouth and not clean.

^3. Intellectuals began to challenge the public spectacle of torture and humiliation in the eighteenth century. Penal reformers decided to remove criminals from their environment to teach them good habits so that they could return to society. There were also humanitarian concerns and the democratic view that brutal punishment was distinctive of hierarchical relationships. During the Enlightenment period, the system of punishment was influenced dramatically by the ideas of Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham, an English advocate of utilitarian philosophy. Beccaria argued that torture and infamy (public shaming) were not as effective as swift and certain punishments: Bentham believed that punishment should not be administered if it was groundless, if it did not act to prevent mischief, was unprofitable or needless (see Waller and Hess 2011).

^4. An analysis of 25 newspaper articles from international academic database Newsbank, along with results from search engine Google between 5 July 2011 and 30 June 2012, was undertaken.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kristy Hess

Kristy Hess lectures in journalism at Deakin University, Australia. Her research on journalism, the news media and society has appeared in a number of academic journals, most recently Communication Theory and Digital Journalism.

Lisa Waller

Lisa Waller is a senior lecturer in journalism at Deakin University. Her current research interests include Media and Indigenous Policy in Australia, research methodologies for journalism, media representation and the legal system as well as regional and rural news media.