This is not the first time the media has shown us what could be defined as a crime show . Talk shows, news broadcasts, TV series, video games, court trials, every type of media and social and institutional situation shows violence , perpetrators and victims on a daily basis, but the message that is constructed and sent to the recipient always places the criminal at the center, who almost involuntarily becomes a hero , a character in the entertainment industry. Crime, violence and the perpetrator triumph in the media, but in reality no one would want a hero as a criminal, no one would want to witness scenes of violence, although for a few minutes it might be interesting to witness the actions of a "superman" or film his exploits. Everyone desires peace and serenity, but at the same time there is a pathological need to look at evil , to experience violence, at least for a few seconds, which has always characterized the human race (Meluzzi, 2014).
A new type of violence
The American criminologist Randall Collins (2014), after the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001, has built a new paradigm of violence: September 11 becomes the official date of the beginning of a new type of "contemporary violence“. The evolution of society, the new media electronic and digital, the phenomenon of globalization, political-economic changes and, in particular, the constant and daily representation of crime and violence by the mass media, have strongly influenced human interactions, radically changing the way of relating and communicating, of building and perceiving one's own identity e reality. Contemporary society is therefore depicted and perceived as dangerous and violent, criminal, where interaction between individuals occurs almost exclusively through new digital communication tools, with an ever-increasing risk of misunderstanding, of empathic relationships and therefore of "communicative pathologies” (Marotta, 2014).
Habit of insecurity
According to the Italian sociologist Consuelo Corradi (2009), unhealthy communication and violence become not only true instruments of power, but also forces that generate power, which merge with it: social forces capable of structuring reality and giving it meaning. The reality we live in is not at all different from the cinematographic one. The eighth Report on social security and insecurity in Italy and Europe (2015) underlines how we now experience a feeling and a situation of constant habituation to insecurity and criminal events. Crime today is therefore still at the top of the insecurity agenda : however, the narrative of the so-called "anxiety-inducing" news changes. " The pleasure of the violence that is inflicted on the represented character in turn passes into a violence inflicted on the spectator. Leisure is transformed into tension and effort ." This is what the two philosophers of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, wrote in " Dialectic of Enlightenment " (1947). The cultural industry thus becomes a tool of persuasive communication and manipulation with a precise social function: to create obedience, to recognize the media audience's role of passivity in close continuity with the hypodermic theory (Wolf, 1987).
The evolution of language
In the modern society of the web and communication, we are witnessing a profound change also from a technological point of view. linguistic: cinematographic language and journalistic language, in particular, are becoming almost identical today; from the representation of the criminal's profile to the description of a crime scene and the victims. What is communicated to the hearings It's not a fact but a real story. A story with protagonists, antagonists, plot twists, flashbacks, which don't always have a happy ending, but it doesn't matter: the viewer is used to knowing evil and this habit only serves to... strengthen (not increase) the sense of insecurity and fear that has long been part of the individual and modern society. A story that often doesn't even follow temporal logic, which puts aside the concept of privacy and freedom, in order to achieve a high number of clicks and dominate the world of journalistic marketing (Forti, Bertolino, 2015).
The frantic search for the scoop
Criminologist Meluzzi suggests that there are two main factors that fuel this type of mechanism: that of the mysterious crime storytelling (from the very beginning it is extremely difficult to understand what the truth is and how that fact happened) and the one related to the mediatized criminal trial, which has inevitably bent the mechanism of formation of justice and opened the doors to a public not always ready and interested in legal situations. Walter Benjamin, the moment an event or an act becomes reproducible in a mass perspective, their nature changes because the representation and the substance change. Thus a search for news, for the media scoop at all costs, dangerously anticipating judicial outcomes. Information, therefore, has been conveyed through short articles or announcements, losing the noble goal of accurate and balanced reporting and giving way to full-blown media trials and spectacular news of crimes, rapes, and terrorist attacks that take on more Hollywood-like semblance than sound information.
The cultivation process
The curious spectator-citizen is interested and passively participates in the trials and investigations, eager to complete that very convoluted crossword puzzle but with such a low capacity for empathy and compassion towards those who have suffered a violent act, as to make them almost non-human ; he therefore seems destined to constantly adapt; he appears tamed, obedient, shaped according to the media contents (Gerbner, 1971). Continuous violent and immoral messages can encourage identification with negative or antisocial characters and emulator behaviors : the suggestive action is all the more subtle the less obvious the communication is, which can suggest specific responses in the spectator or reader, without them realizing it. As the scholar George Gerbner (1971) argued, what is defined as a " cultivation process " is activated, that is, a continuous, dynamic, developing process of interaction between messages, audiences and contexts.
The Dark Side of the Internet
Even the Internet and digital media have their dark side. We have moved from a communication based on electronic media to a communication "anonymized"With digital media, where information and users often have no source, no identity, there is a flow of communication that has a beginning and moves quickly within a reality that has no end, where all human behaviors are filtered. The web, social networks, have made us all active citizens within a virtual space where we receive news in real time, discuss it, compare it, share it and delve into it without limits of time and space (Menduni, 2009). multimedia and new virtual representations differentiate new media from traditional ones and also impact culture and behavior, increasing the identification between model and target audience and the construction of self-efficacy, as what is offered is extremely similar to reality.
Criminals 2.0
One of the main risks, in fact, is precisely that linked to the difficulty of perceiving and discerning between "real reality" and the virtual-media one, which also affects the private sphere, influencing the beliefs , values , and behavioral patterns that guide our daily lives, in a process of cultivation that begins in childhood. Electronics, information technology, and the Internet have significantly changed the modus operandi and lifestyle of businesses, ordinary citizens, and even criminals. Anonymity, slang, the speed and brevity of information, encrypted data, the construction of different personalities online, the uploading and sharing of files of any kind, facilitate the implementation of illegal activities, even involving individuals who, without a screen and an Internet connection, would never have had the courage to carry out certain actions (Lorusso, 2011). Paradoxically, it is precisely the users who use chat and social networks who feel free to commit crimes, their imagination on the net no longer has limits, cyberspace is a deceptive, sensual and violent place (Lorusso, 2011).
The culture of violence
According to a study by the American sociologist David Finkelhor (2008), the victims of the Cybercrime Today they are mostly minors and contact with their tormentor occurs mainly online, chatting in special private chat rooms and precisely through instant messages (10%) and email (5%). Furthermore, after the latest terrorist attacks that occurred in Paris on 13 November 2015, theInternational Center for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) in London discovered how social networks, chats, and tweets had suddenly become means of propaganda and recruitment for terrorist criminals with more than 27 active accounts online. CyberbulliesCyber-pedophiles, cyber-terrorists: these are the new criminals, and this is contemporary violent communication. These are the modern "superhero criminals," who don't always have a name or a face, but who still function and arouse curiosity in the media. These media, virtual, and social realities are deviant, where boundaries no longer exist, and the risk of distortion and learning certain behaviors and languages becomes increasingly real. This now common system of communicating, representing, and describing certain phenomena and individuals by the media, and the uncontrollable and excessive curiosity of the viewer to learn about violence at all costs, so present online without limits and protections, only reinforces that individualism, that aggressiveness, that desire for domination and control over others that characterize, today more than ever, the human relations and the beginning of a new “culture of violence" (Gallino, 2006). It is therefore not only a communication-relationship problem, but also a profound cultural problem. There is no longer a single cultural center, but a plurality of value options that are very often contradictory and different or better still, a plurality of subculture (often deviant and violent) defined as a subset of cultural elements, shared by the elements of a group, understood as "internal relationality more consistent than the external one, which are in open or covert opposition to the norms and values of the dominant culture in which they are inserted” (Cipolla, 1997).
James Buoncompagni
