Expanding upon Web Sleuths: The new wave of true crime media and its citizen detectives

该项目将通过对网络侦探这一现代现象的理论和经验探索，为不断扩大的文化和批判犯罪学领域做出贡献。网络侦探，公民侦探或扶手椅侦探，很少被犯罪学家研究，因为这种情况最近才在学术界出现（亚德利等人，2018）。网络侦探在社会中备受争议，因为越来越多的人从事低级侦探工作，满足他们对真实犯罪信息娱乐的需求（Seltzer，2008）。以技术转变为标志，这些公民将业余时间集中在公共信息中检测身份不明的尸体和失踪人员（斯托克斯，2018年）。他们的情报包括“搜索信息，上传文件，图像和视频，评论，辩论，推理，分析，识别嫌疑人，并试图与执法部门和其他与案件有关的组织和个人接触”（亚德利等人，2018：82）。对真实犯罪的迷恋可以追溯到17世纪，当时公开处决开始成为一种娱乐（Turnbull，2010）。哥伦比亚人还热衷于识别越轨行为，区分他们的犯罪异常（杰明，2012）。然而，今天，新自由主义的社会变革已经在一个特殊的发展中，在另一个方面，一个世纪的传统（亚德利等人，2018）。由于迷恋现在包括观众的主动检测，在不同的社会政治背景下的数字世界中完成，这就是该项目倾向于调查的内容。

The project will contribute to the expanding area of cultural and critical criminology through a theoretical and empirical exploration of the modern phenomenon of web sleuths. Web sleuths, citizen detectives or armchair detectives, are little researched by criminologists, as the occurrence has only been recently composed amongst academia (Yardley et al, 2018). Websleuths are highly debated within society, as an increasing number of individuals engage in low-level detective work, feeding their need for True-crime infotainment (Seltzer, 2008). Marked by a technological shift, these citizens spend their free time focusing on detecting unidentified bodies and missing persons, amongst publicly available information (Stokes, 2018). Their intelligence includes 'searching for information, uploading documents, images, and videos, commenting, debating, theorising, analysing, identifying suspects, and attempting to engage with law enforcement and other organisations and individuals connected to the cases' (Yardley et al, 2018:82). The fascination with true crime dates to the seventeenth century when public executions began to feature as entertainment (Turnbull, 2010). Victorians were also fascinated with identifying deviants and distinguishing their criminal abnormalities (Jermyn, 2012). However today, neoliberal social change has trigged a particular development, in what appears otherwise, a century-old tradition (Yardley et al, 2018). As fascination now includes pro-active detection by audiences, completed in a digital world under a different social-political context, which is what the project tends to investigate.