vrosej10
Questioning your sanity??
- Joined
- Feb 24, 2009
- Posts
- 6,167
Given that this place is like mecca for your average moral panic (eventually they all turn up here), I thought the more intellectual GBers would like some serious information of them in the hope of spotting them early.
This page considers what some observers characterise as sporadic 'moral panics' (incidents of mass hysteria, often directed against minorities) and others argue are merely manifestations of media irresponsibility and aggrandisement by interest groups rather than a mass panic or irrational outbreak of concern about morals and public safety.
It covers -
* introduction
* studies
introduction
UK sociologist Stanley Cohen comments that
Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people.
Those panics are apparent in contemporary society and in the past, occasioning Macaulay's remark that there is "no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality".
They have centred on entities and activities as diverse as comics, online paedophiles (or offline paedophilic clergy and policemen), satanists in kindergartens, 1950s rock & roll, pachinko, 'mods & rockers', 1920s jazz, engineers and other 'wreckers' in 1920s and 1930s Soviet Russia, homosexuality, fin de siecle hooligans, 'white slavery', electronic games or the addictive internet.
They are typically manifested through -
* official inquiries (including reports by Royal Commissions and Parliamentary Committees in Australia, New Zealand and Canada)
* denunciations of the stigmatised activity and representatives by 'community guardians' such as senior police, clergy, pundits and journalists
* passage of new legislation and strengthening of existing legislation, sometimes implemented with inadequate regard for legal protections or notions of human rights
* exemplary investigations and prosecutions, which are often protracted and do not uncover evidence of substantial abuse or other ills but may destroy the careers, lives or health of targets such as schoolteachers
* diversion of public and private resources from action that provides a substantive response to real problems.
Margaret Talbot thus suggested that the key features of contemporary moral panic over sex offences (which among other things resulted in proliferation of Offender Registers) include: -
1. inflated statistics.
2. dismissal of countervailing evidence
3. dubious research
4. indiscriminate merging of crime categories
5. diversion of attention and resources from more prevalent forms of child abuse (eeg emotional and physical neglect, physical abuse, abandonment and poverty).
Kenneth Gagne's 2001 dissertation Moral Panics Over Youth Culture and Video Games noted that moral panics are usually expressed as expressions of outrage rather than unadulterated fear and framed in terms of a dominant morality threatened by the activities of a stereotyped group (children, migrants, schismatics).
One consequence is that consumption of stigmatised commodities (such as comics and electronic games) may be reified, with attention by the mass media and by authority figures demonstrating to consumers that what they are doing is noteworthy.
Leaders in the community address the group from a supposed moral high ground, "treating" the panic with solutions that more often than not reinforce the stereotype and fail to produce any real resolution. Eventually the stereotype fades of its own volition, to be replaced in a few years by another moral panic, perhaps when the original entertainment form and the response to it change, creating a panic that is a variation on the original.
A moral panic is a panic over what is seen as deviant. The subject of the panic is usually not a suddenly new phenomenon, but something which has been in existence for many years, and suddenly comes to society's and the media's attention.
This page considers what some observers characterise as sporadic 'moral panics' (incidents of mass hysteria, often directed against minorities) and others argue are merely manifestations of media irresponsibility and aggrandisement by interest groups rather than a mass panic or irrational outbreak of concern about morals and public safety.
It covers -
* introduction
* studies
introduction
UK sociologist Stanley Cohen comments that
Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people.
Those panics are apparent in contemporary society and in the past, occasioning Macaulay's remark that there is "no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality".
They have centred on entities and activities as diverse as comics, online paedophiles (or offline paedophilic clergy and policemen), satanists in kindergartens, 1950s rock & roll, pachinko, 'mods & rockers', 1920s jazz, engineers and other 'wreckers' in 1920s and 1930s Soviet Russia, homosexuality, fin de siecle hooligans, 'white slavery', electronic games or the addictive internet.
They are typically manifested through -
* official inquiries (including reports by Royal Commissions and Parliamentary Committees in Australia, New Zealand and Canada)
* denunciations of the stigmatised activity and representatives by 'community guardians' such as senior police, clergy, pundits and journalists
* passage of new legislation and strengthening of existing legislation, sometimes implemented with inadequate regard for legal protections or notions of human rights
* exemplary investigations and prosecutions, which are often protracted and do not uncover evidence of substantial abuse or other ills but may destroy the careers, lives or health of targets such as schoolteachers
* diversion of public and private resources from action that provides a substantive response to real problems.
Margaret Talbot thus suggested that the key features of contemporary moral panic over sex offences (which among other things resulted in proliferation of Offender Registers) include: -
1. inflated statistics.
2. dismissal of countervailing evidence
3. dubious research
4. indiscriminate merging of crime categories
5. diversion of attention and resources from more prevalent forms of child abuse (eeg emotional and physical neglect, physical abuse, abandonment and poverty).
Kenneth Gagne's 2001 dissertation Moral Panics Over Youth Culture and Video Games noted that moral panics are usually expressed as expressions of outrage rather than unadulterated fear and framed in terms of a dominant morality threatened by the activities of a stereotyped group (children, migrants, schismatics).
One consequence is that consumption of stigmatised commodities (such as comics and electronic games) may be reified, with attention by the mass media and by authority figures demonstrating to consumers that what they are doing is noteworthy.
Leaders in the community address the group from a supposed moral high ground, "treating" the panic with solutions that more often than not reinforce the stereotype and fail to produce any real resolution. Eventually the stereotype fades of its own volition, to be replaced in a few years by another moral panic, perhaps when the original entertainment form and the response to it change, creating a panic that is a variation on the original.
A moral panic is a panic over what is seen as deviant. The subject of the panic is usually not a suddenly new phenomenon, but something which has been in existence for many years, and suddenly comes to society's and the media's attention.
