This document discusses analyses of user comments on YouTube videos about school shootings. It summarizes three main discursive areas found in the comments: 1) Bullying, with comments debating whether the shooters were bullied or not, 2) Trauma, with comments expressing sorrow for the victims, and 3) Social politics, with comments drawing connections to war or criticizing American gun culture. The document also notes that some comments exhibited disinhibition and racism. It concludes by discussing the potential for real-time social media monitoring and issues around privacy and access.

1. QUERYING MEDIA EFFECTS:
DISCOURSES OF BLAME
MAC201
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2. NEW MEDIA
New opportunities
New interactions
New opportunities
New methodologies
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3. NEW MEDIA
“For the first time in history…the media make possible a mass participation in
a productive process at once social and socialized, a participation whose
practical means are in the hands of the masses themselves.”
- Baudrillard, 1985, p.2
Media is increasingly in the hands of society and participatory
Used for creating and maintaining personal relationships as much as it is for
commerce and news generation.
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4. SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING
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5. SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING
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6. SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING
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7. SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING
1. The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club
2. The second rule of Fight Club is YOU DO NOT talk about Fight Club
Enter Facebook…
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8. SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING
Web analytics measuring online conversations eg radian6
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9. SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING
Web analytics measuring online conversations eg jive
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10. SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING
Web analytics measuring online conversations eg socialmention
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11. UTOEYA, NORWAY
ANDERS BEHRING BREIVIK
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12. LIEGE, BELGIUM
NORDINE AMRANI
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13. TYPICAL NEWS?
• a deranged psychopathic killer
- (“A convicted gun fanatic”)
• a death toll
– (“killing at least six people”)
• eye-witness reports
– “It all happened so quickly that we ran
or our lives”
• questions about the motivations of the killer
– (known to be a "gun freak”)
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14. “Nordine Amrani, the lone-wolf gunman who
died after killing five people including a baby
in a crowded Belgian square yesterday, had a
long criminal record but not one of mental
instability.”
TYPICAL NEWS?
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15. YOUTUBE GUNMEN?
Lindgren, S (2011) ‘YouTube gunmen?
Mapping participatory media discourse on
school shooting videos’, Media Culture Society
33(1): 123-136
Link in SunSpace
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16. YOUTUBE GUNMEN?
Moral panic
Media panic
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17. YOUTUBE GUNMEN?
Columbine (1999)
Eric Harris
Dylan Klebold
Jokela (2007)
Pekka-Eric Auvinen
Virginia Tech (2007)
Seung-Hui Cho
Kauhajoki (2007)
Matti Juhani Saari
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18. YOUTUBE GUNMEN?
Media panic
Blame often leveled at new media (see Drotner, 1999)
Social media
Can ‘record, synthesize, and disseminate information that circumvents official
channels of discourse’ (Andén-Papadopoulos, 2009: 26)
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19. VIDEOS
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20. YOUTUBE GUNMEN?
4 popular videos about each shooting
Up to 7th September 2009
20,513 comments
 50% about Columbine
 the aim of this analysis is to map the
discursive space of user comments to
school shooting related footage rather than
to compare comments between the
respective cases
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21. Bibl iomet r ics Social Network Anal ys i s
Quantitative measure of citations
Number of comments and responses
Qualitative relationships between
nodes
Measure social influence (weak ties;
strong ties)
YOUTUBE GUNMEN?
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22. 22

23. 23

24. 24

25. YOUTUBE GUNMEN?
3 main discursive areas:
1) Bullying
2) Trauma
3) Social politics
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26. YOUTUBE GUNMEN?
26

27. YOUTUBE GUNMEN?
BULLYING
#1
“Eric was a fricking psychopath, i.e. no reason other than he thought that he
was superior to the rest of the human race. They were not outcasts, they were
not bullied. Everything in life does not come down to football, hate to break it
to you.”
#2
“That klebold kid has a girlfriend,went to prom, and was popular. The other
kid was on the baseball team the year before. they were gun enthusiast, notice
how they didn’t kill any jocks or even shoot any for that matter. Most of the
kids who died were in the library.”
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28. YOUTUBE GUNMEN?
BULLYING
#3
“He [Auvinen] wasn’t rejected. He had friends who noticed a couple of years
ago that he started to become more and more distant. But he still had friends
before the shooting tragedy.... And for the shooter, the shooting in Jokela high
school was a political statement. Sick, but he wasn’t rejected.”
#4
“This is a very terrible thing, and I believe no one deserves to be shot, not
preps, not bullies, not jocks, no one!! Life is High School, you just have to deal
with it”
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29. YOUTUBE GUNMEN?
29

30. YOUTUBE GUNMEN?
TRAUMA
#1
“this makes me feel ill to think someone could put a bullet into their
classmates.”
#2
“My one hope is that at least a few of you who decided to post on this video
would take the time to learn more about what actually happened. To read such
rants by so many ignorant people makes me feel so much sorrow for those
who were actually involved in this tragedy. They deserve so much better than
most of the trash I’m reading here.”
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31. YOUTUBE GUNMEN?
TRAUMA
#3
“RIP? u fags he [Cho] killed 32 people and made no attempt to socialize
himself dont pity him your he did something wrong! god damn you people for
feeling sorry for someone like this! hes a freekin physco he chose to do this he
is an asshole he does not deserve the sorrow your giving him just because you
saw what he said on this vid and put a sad song on it thats the only reason
your saying RIP i say go to hell you son of a bitch!!!”
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32. YOUTUBE GUNMEN?
32

33. YOUTUBE GUNMEN?
SOCIAL POLITICS
#1
“War is just like a school shooting, only in the school..no one ever praises the
shooter, but in a war they get a fuckin medal..Fuck your ideology..its filled
with holes.”
#2
“LOL you pussy ass americans kill innocent soldiers DAILY in Iraq (half are
your own damn people) but feel sympathetic when 13 people get shot at
school. It’s no wonder why the rest of the world hates you.”
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34. YOUTUBE GUNMEN?
SOCIAL POLITICS
#3
“And this doesn’t happen in Europe? what about Finland? And in holland kids
stab teachers/ students on schools, so don’t act like Europe is perfect with
these things. The world fails with these things, not a certain part of the
world.”
#4
“There was a similar shooting in Finland today, where the fuck is this world
heading to? We need to fix our society otherwise we are all fucked up.”
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35. YOUTUBE GUNMEN?
DISINHIBITION AND RACISM
“White people didn’t start shooting up schools until they went to school with
niggers.”
“Just another whitey doing school terror – like we need any more!”
“Cho Seung-Hui kiled white racists dead.”
“fuck this gook mother fucker..”
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36. WHAT NEXT?
Clearly there are stark contrasts between mainstream media discourses around
school shootings when we compare them to online commentary
Lindgren’s approach points to a method in which it is possible to parse,
collect, collate, and analyze data across social networks.
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37. Real Time Social Media Monitoring
User Generated Content
Privacy issues?
Access?
‘walling off information posted by their users
from the rest of the Web’ (Tim Berners-Lee,
2010).
RTSMM
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38. SOURCES
Andén-Papadopoulos K (2009) ‘US Soldiers Imaging the Iraq War on YouTube’, Popular
Communication 7(1): 17–27.
Baudrillard, J, Maclean, M, (1985). ‘The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media’, New
Literary History, Vol. 16, No. 3, p. 577-589.
Burns R, Crawford C (1999) ‘School Shootings, the Media, and Public Fear: Ingredients for a
Moral Panic’, Crime, Law and Social Change 32(2): 147–68.
Coffey B, Woolworth S (2004) ‘“Destroy the Scum, and Then Neuter Their Families”: The Web
Forum as a Vehicle for Community Discourse?’, Social Science Journal 41(1): 1–14.
Drotner K (1999) ‘Dangerous Media? Panic Discourses and Dilemmas of Modernity’, Paedagogica
Historica 35(3): 593–619.
Lindgren, S (2011) ‘YouTube gunmen? Mapping participatory media discourse on school
shooting videos’, Media Culture Society 33(1): 123-136
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