Gatekeeping, interrupted

As Kellner astutely notices of Virginia Tech:

As the media spectacle unfolded during the first days, it was generally overlooked that the massacre could be seen as an attempt by Cho to act out some of his violent fantasies and create a media spectacle in which he appears as producer, director, and star. (p. 37)

French theorist Guy Debord (1995) observes that the concept of “spectacle” seems to explain much of modern life—particularly society's descent into being organized by and through images, stages, and commodities: “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation” (p. 142). Kellner builds on Debord—fused with Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz's (1992)“media event” model—to argue for the emergence of “interactive spectacle” in the wake of participatory worlds and platforms in cyberspace. The tragedy of Jokela very much played out in the manner of an interactive spectacle: Auvinen's active, “prosumer” engagement with media text and his worldwide online audience's interactive engagement with that product. (More than one mash-up of Auvinen's mash-up appeared online.) The timeworn crime cliché, “getting away with it,” traditionally means not being seen and hence not getting caught; for Auvinen, as well as Cho and the Columbine perpetrators, not being seen would have meant that he didn't get away with it.

And would the press comply? This seems to be the ethical question journalism has to confront in moving forward. Elihu Katz and TamarLiebes (2007) recently updated the concept of “media event” to correspond with the rise of live broadcasts of disaster, terror, and war. They suggest that the mobility and ubiquity of new media technology enables more unscheduled programming disruption than ever before: “If ceremonial events may be characterized as ‘co-productions' of broadcasters and establishments, then disruptive events may be characterized as ‘co-productions' of broadcasters and anti-establishment agencies, i.e., the perpetrators of disruption” (p. 157). Journalism will struggle over complicity with the youth killer shooting for fame. What ethics and practices will emerge as technologies and networks spawn more user-generated content more quickly by those who stand accused of crime? At present, it appears that journalism is torn between competing impulses in the wake of a school shooting tragedy (particularly a school shooting tragedy whereby the killer furnishes a multimedia PR package—via snail-mail or online).

On one hand, journalism—operating in the wake of trauma—feels its reparative calling. Carolyn Kitch (2003) shows how, in the aftermath of September 11, journalism assumed the role of civil religion, reaffirming group values and giving news stories moral and existential coherence and inflection. It affords closure, normalcy, reassurance (Vincent, Crow, & Davis, 1989); it tries to “serve simultaneously as conveyor, translator, mediator, and meaning-maker” (Zelizer & Allan, 2002, p. 2). Cho and Auvinen very deliberately tried to circumvent this institutional interlocutor; they labored to narrate their own spectacle, to provide notes in the margins of the first draft of history, to talk over and past the “interpretive community” that they knew would try to absorb them to bring their act back into the fold (Zelizer, 1993). Nevertheless, in the wake of Jokela, the reparative template was put in motion. The headline of Aamulehti, Finland's second largest newspaper, the day after the shooting? Together. “That was the main lesson that week,” Matti Posio, an editor at the paper, told me in an interview. “That you have to be together after an incident like that.”

Yet that togetherness is not always shared by the community with the media. Neil King (2008) comments on the “siege frame of mind” that Blacksburg locals developed in reaction to the intense exposure—the blinding glare of fame's klieg lights that Cho had brought upon his campus. Hand-scrawled fliers told camera crews to go home (“Hokie nation needs to heal. Media stay away”) and the university administration told reporters to vacate campus buildings. An e-mail petition requested:

We are Hokie Nation and we need to mourn and heal. We need each other. The media has taken advantage of our situation and are exploiting us for their own sensationalism. We will not tolerate the abuse; we love our community far too much to stand for this any more. We, the students of Virginia Tech, are asserting ourselves. We are taking back our campus. All media, if they have any respect for Hokie Nation, will no longer attack the administration. They will no longer hound our students. Leave us to heal. Leave us to ourselves. Hokie Nation needs to be UNITED. Return our campus to us. (Kellner, 2008, p. 181)

If Cho had deprived reporters of part of their task of investigative reporting (furnishing some of his back-story), locals seemed to be depriving reporters of their self-appointed calling to be mythic healers. “In the aftermath of group death, professional norms require reporters to swarm the living and shoot footage of anyone choked with emotion. The rapid progress of events impels them to gain access quickly, via entreaty and intrusion,” King writes (p. 56). “Many locals spoke in grim humor of the cameras and boom mikes that hovered when mourners neared tears. Reporters grew aware of this reaction to their work and made enquiries in the hushed tones of undertakers.” Theirs was an invasion of “sacred space”—a frenzied intrusion to remediate grief by and through public consumption. Jokela experienced its own deluge of media attention and, interestingly, responded with a backlash of its own. When an estimated 100 journalists—both domestic and international—descended on this town of 5,000, the collision seemed inevitable. By the end of the week, 2,000 citizens had signed a petition criticizing the media's handling of the tragedy. About a half-dozen Finnish media outlets either had links to Auvinen's online videos or directly hosted them. Questions abounded within newsrooms as to whether this was “giving in” to Auvinen's posthumous demands. “I don't think that killing itself is the point for the killer,” said Bjorksen Tuomo, a reporter for Aamulehtiwho covered the story as a feature. “It must be somehow related to the fame—when you kill so many people, it's rather about showing to the world that I did this rather than the actual killings themselves.”

Copycat postscript

As it tragically turns out, Auvinen was not the last YouTube content creator-turned-school shooter in Finnish history. In September 2008, a 22-year-old vocational student killed himself and 10 people; shortly before, he had posted an online video in which he pointed a gun at the camera and announced, “You will die next.”

Seung-Hui Cho and Pekka-Eric Auvinen visited a terror upon their respective schools that was not only premeditated (violence calculated in advance) but also “pre-mediated” (direction packaged in advance). Crime has long been accompanied by attempts by the perpetrator to sway coverage of the act: think of the terrorist communiqué or serial killer sending letters to press. Today, the low cost of video production technology and the ease of network distribution means that (anti)social media can be generated easier than ever. Much of the rhetoric surrounding user-generated content springs from a hopeful, empowered archetype; as when Time magazine declared its 2006 “Person of the Year”“You”—the amateur-revolutionary at the heart of Web 2.0—“for seizing the reins of global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working at nothing and beating the pros at their own game” (Grossman, 2006). Auvinen betrays a much darker potential for these tools in that flattened landscape; his handiwork heralds the possibility that if “Generation Mash-Up” cannot achieve fame by cutting and splicing media texts to refashion expressive, often ironic commentary, infamy is no less self-mediated (Serazio, 2008). The ever-increasing supply of amateur content populating the Web means that, when the next school shooting does arrive, there is a fairly decent chance that journalists—and all online audiences, really—will find a cyber-trail of hyperlinked, hybridized, media-saturated presentations of the self. If the youth killer's diary was once only open to reporters at the crime scene, the youth killer's blog is a much more open book. For the terrorist of Jokela High School, the shooting started well before that fateful morning.⁴

Acknowledgments

The author offers his sincere thanks to Barbie Zelizer's Scholars Program in Culture and Communication and to Jari Valiverronen for their support and assistance with this project.

Notes

1. Eighteen-year-old Auvinen's murder-suicide rampage at Jokela High School, just north of Helsinki, on November 7, 2007, left eight victims and Auvinen himself dead. Besides being the deadliest act of school violence in Finnish history to that point, it achieved notoriety for the fact that Auvinen had publicized the incident on YouTube immediately prior to the attack and had posted abundant material online even before that, earning him the nickname, “the YouTube killer.”

2. Ellen Seiter (1999) offers an interesting exploration contrasting “the ‘weak’ theory of media effects held by cultural studies academics, by many industry professionals, and proposed in [her] own work on children's television … with the theories of ‘strong’ effects that were often implicit in conversations I had with teachers and childcare professionals” (p. 59). Political leaders seem to similarly dote on “strong” effects rhetoric in the wake of school shootings.

3. Again, cultivation research is especially well-positioned to explore this connection more empirically: Do heavier consumers of media value fame more? Is television's contribution to the viewer's sense of social reality a tilting of “worth ratios” in the direction of celebrity? Being a critical essay employing three case studies of youth shooter celebrity, the format here is not suited to answering these questions concretely, though future research would do well to explore these correlations in a more focused way.

4. Part of the argument for this paper appeared in a briefly summarized form in the online magazine, Flow.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 913