Happy Slapping outside the UK?
The UK press and the BBC have been publicising instances of 'happy slapping' recently (e.g. BBC 12/5/05), with it making the front page at the weekend after a minor celebrity's girlfriend was attacked. Even the Deputy Prime minister was allegedly a victim. For those outside the UK, Happy Slapping is the practice of a gang attacking someone and taking a photo or filming it, normally with a camera phone. It apparently started in London in 2004 and has since spread in the UK, but apparently not elsewhere. However there are doubts as too how much of a real phenomenon this really is It has links to other mobile phone hooliganism, such as taking pictures of people in private situations (school shower rooms), as Peter Brandtzag of Sintef reports in Norway. It also has antecedents in TV shows such as Jackass, and the tango drink adverts that featured public slapping attacks , some of which banned. People have also been playing tricks on each other and animals for the camera for years, driven by TV clip shows.However it must also have its roots in particular anti-social behaviour that is fairly common in the UK, a constant issue on the political agenda these days.
Happy Slapping does of course raise the issue of user innovation around technology - this is clearly not something that a mobile phone company ever dreamt up as a way of encouraging people to use MMS. It is a good example of the subversion of a technology by users, in line with the subversion of shopping malls noted by Fiske, and recently in the news around banning of 'hoodies' However, they did promote 'doing your own thing', based on the idea of user-led innovation, appealing to young people to take pictures of all the things they do all day. More importantly phone companies gave away millions of camera phones, putting them in the pockets of everyone, a true democratisation of technology. Richard Swinford wrote today to the mobile society mailing list that he considers some of the operators and manufacturers complicit in violent uses, suggesting Nokia and T-mobile's ads that include filming violence. His conclusion was that this is just the latest feature of a society that seems prone to violence, accepts media violence, and indeed, where filmed or recorded violence of authorities, from the LA police beatings to the Iraq war, is influencing young people to do the same. His positive spin is of course, that victims can use these personal devices to record attacks too, as in the example of a UK police assault.
So far we have only reports of UK incidences, please let me know if you hear of an attack in another country.
This incident fits into my interest in the way that society appropriates new technologies, particular mobile technologies, and develops new behaviours, and the subsequent norms and rules to control them. My current work is to get some research money to study this rule and norm making. I also see the putting of media and communication tools into the hands of everyone in the form of mobile phones, video cameras, RFID readers etc, as a critical feature of modern society that will serve to undermine and challenge many existing social structures.
posted by james @ 15:47
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