The previous chapter outlined the nature and extent of homicide and considered how criminology has engaged with questions of media around this crime. It was established that to date, criminologists have largely analysed media representations of homicide as opposed to what those involved in homicide do with media. Within this chapter, the author identifies the work of a small group of criminologists who have started to grapple with these issues alongside promising approaches from media and communications studies. The chapter begins by further exploring the shifts in media noted in Chapter One and the extent to which criminologists have accommodated these changes in their work. Thereafter, the criminological literature around school shootings will be considered because of the unique way in which scholars working in this field explore perpetrators’ use of media. The chapter concludes by proposing stronger links between these strands of literature – which to date have run parallel, but have rarely intersected.

Mediatisation

In Chapter One, the author explored the questions of media with which she had grappled when researching ‘Facebook murder’ (Yardley and Wilson, 2015). This involved mining the media and communications studies literature to understand the wider context of such crimes. This literature is a rich repository of conceptual and theoretical frameworks for making better sense of media in homicide. The past five years have seen a rapid expansion of scholarly activity further exploring media in everyday life (Couldry, 2012; Deuze, 2012, 2014; Couldry and Hepp, 2013, 2017; Hepp and Krotz, 2014; Hepp et al, 2015). One of the concepts these scholars draw attention to is invisibility – as newer media become more intricately interwoven into the fabric of everyday life, they become older media, blending into the background and taken for granted (Deuze, 2012, 2014). Researchers deploy a range of terms to emphasise the importance of media in the social, for example ‘mediapolis’ (Silverstone, 2007), ‘media life’ (Deuze, 2012), ‘mediatized worlds’ (Couldry, 2012) and ‘mediascapes’ (Appadurai, 1990). A key distinction is drawn between the terms ‘mediated’ and ‘mediatised’: