Purity and contamination in online popular forensics: amateur-expert readings of the Meredith Kercher murder case

Abstract

This article examines online discourses of innocence and guilt in the Meredith Kercher murder case. One of its protagonists, Amanda Knox, sparked intense discussion across the entire mediascape. We discuss how the two principal online communities in this case deconstructed the forensics of a crime that has continued to divide both social and conventional mass media. Elaborating the concept of the amateur-expert which has echoes of crowdsourcing, fandom, communities of practice and self-help cultures, we argue that online engagement with forensics amounts to a particularly intense form of participation which is neither that of a professional nor that of the casual observer. As for the type of amateur-expert discourse that was produced in order to make sense of the Kercher murder, we observe how notions of purity and contamination, which constitute a prominent source of metaphors for cultural representations of innocence and guilt, purveyed the lexicon with which suspects' culpability and the probity of legal-forensic procedures were scrutinized by online forums.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Notes

^1. The availability of alternative terminology should be noted here: for example, Leadbeater and Miller (2004) coined the term ‘pro-am’ in a report for the think tank Demos which offered a largely positive perspective on the participation of amateurs in what were previously considered to be fields of specialist knowledge and expertise. However, what we wish to highlight in this article is that there is scope for a more qualified assessment acknowledging both the potentialities and challenges which arise when amateurs become deeply involved in expert fields.

^2. It should be noted that the original website was relaunched in view of the retrial of Knox and Sollecito in 2013.

^3. We have begun to investigate this issue further as part of our research into wrongful convictions campaigns and social media (see Gies 2013).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lieve Gies

Lieve Gies is a senior lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester. Her main research interests are in the area of law and the media. She is the author of Law and the Media: the Future of an Uneasy Relationship (2008, Taylor and Francis) and Mediating Human Rights: Media, Culture and Human Rights Law (2014, Taylor and Francis).

Maria Bortoluzzi

Maria Bortoluzzi is a lecturer of English language in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures (University of Udine, Italy). Her research interests are in the areas of critical discourse studies and teacher training. Her latest research work and publications deal with multimodal discourse analysis and the developments in ICT discourses of English as a global language.