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 ANTISOCIAL
MEDIA
Crime-watching in
the Internet Age

Mark Wood

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CRIME, MEDIA AND CULTURE

Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture

Series editors
Michelle Brown
Department of Sociology
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN, USA

Eamonn Carrabine
Department of Sociology
University of Essex
Colchester, UK
This series aims to publish high quality interdisciplinary scholarship for
research into crime, media and culture. As images of crime, harm and
punishment proliferate across new and old media there is a growing rec-
ognition that criminology needs to rethink its relations with the ascen-
dant power of spectacle. This international book series aims to break
down the often rigid and increasingly hardened boundaries of main-
stream criminology, media and communication studies, and cultural
studies. In a late modern world where reality TV takes viewers into cop
cars and carceral spaces, game shows routinely feature shame and suffer-
ing, teenagers post ‘happy slapping’ videos on YouTube, both cyber bul-
lying and ‘justice for’ campaigns are mainstays of social media, and
insurrectionist groups compile footage of suicide bomb attacks for circu-
lation on the Internet, it is clear that images of crime and control play a
powerful role in shaping social practices. It is vital then that we become
versed in the diverse ways that crime and punishment are represented in
an era of global interconnectedness, not least since the very reach of
global media networks is now unparalleled.
Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture emerges from a call to
rethink the manner in which images are reshaping the world and crimi-
nology as a project. The mobility, malleability, banality, speed, and scale
of images and their distribution demand that we engage both old and
new theories and methods and pursue a refinement of concepts and tools,
as well as innovative new ones, to tackle questions of crime, harm, cul-
ture, and control. Keywords like image, iconography, information flows,
the counter-visual, and ‘social’ media, as well as the continuing relevance
of the markers, signs, and inscriptions of gender, race, sexuality, and class
in cultural contests mark the contours of the crime, media and culture
nexus.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/series/15057
 Mark A. Wood

Antisocial Media
Crime-watching in the Internet Age
Mark A. Wood
Criminology
University of Melbourne
Parkville, VIC, Australia

Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture

ISBN 978-3-319-63984-0    ISBN 978-3-319-63985-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63985-7

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 Acknowledgements

Throughout writing the doctoral thesis that formed the basis of this book,
I was lucky enough to be supported by a range of incredible friends, men-
tors and colleagues. Though many friends and mentors left an indelible
mark on this book, I’d like to single out several in particular. Like the
dissertation before it, this book wouldn’t have been completed without
their support, guidance and friendship. Firstly, my PhD supervisors
Alison Young and Natalia Hanley, thank you for continually supporting
my research, and for your patience and insight. I really couldn’t have
wished for two better supervisors, and as I’ve began supervising my own
Honours and PhD students, I often find myself asking, ‘what would
Natalia and Alison do?’
Whilst completing this book, I was hired at my old alma mater, the
University of Melbourne, as a lecturer. Though my old teachers became
my colleagues, their continuing mentorship remained vital in navigating
my entry into academia. In particular, I’d like to thank Fiona Haines,
Dave McDonald, Nesam McMillan, Julie Evans, Diana Johns, Jennifer
Balint, and Stuart Ross, for helping me learn the ropes and for their excel-
lent advice on juggling teaching with writing, and keeping a healthy work–
life balance. You are the people that kindled my passion for criminology,
and I feel supremely lucky to now count you among my colleagues.

v
vi Acknowledgements

Some sections of certain chapters in this book are revised versions of

articles that have been previously published. Chapter 4 expands on ­several
of the ideas advanced in ‘Antisocial media and algorithmic deviancy
amplification: Analysing the id of Facebook’s technological unconscious,’
published in Theoretical Criminology (2017). Similarly, Chap. 5 is a much
expanded version of ‘“I just wanna see someone get knocked the fuck
out”: Spectating affray on Facebook fight pages,’ an article published in
Crime, Media, Culture (2017). I am extremely grateful to the anonymous
reviewers of these two articles, whose recommendations helped shore up
several of my then nascent ideas and pointed me towards several neglected
bodies of research.
To my parents, Linda and Robert, sister Amanda, and second family,
Leisha, Ian, and Adam—thank you for your ongoing support and love.
To my partner, collaborator, fellow bird enthusiast and best friend Chrissy
Thompson—you’re a good sort.
 Contents

1 Introduction   1

2 Breaking the First Two Rules of Fight Club  23

3 Unpacking a Punch  53

4 Feeding Violence?  79

5 The Digital Arena 113

6 Conclusion: Breaking Up and Breaking Down the Fight 155

Appendix A: Logging in—A Brief Note on Methodology 177

Appendix B: Additional Tables 191

Bibliography 197

Index 233
vii
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 A web of violence and hypermasculinity: the hyperlink

network of fight pages and other male interest pages within
two degrees of separation from Only Street Fighting37
Fig. 5.1 Frequency of comment types on Only Street Fighting,
Crazy Street Fights, The Craziest Fights Ever,
Just Fights Videos and Real Crazy Fights, May to
December 2014 (see Table A.12). 122

ix
 List of Tables

Table A.1 Like counts of the 99 encountered fight pages that

remained online in March 2016 191
Table A.2 Survey participants’ motivations for viewing clips of
bare-knuckle street violence on Facebook, 2014 192
Table A.3 Subcategories of the 104 fight pages I encountered
during this study, 2014 192
Table A.4 Survey participants’ motivations for viewing clips of
bare-knuckle street violence on Facebook, 2014 192
Table A.5 Survey participants’ demographics, 2014 193
Table A.6 Survey participants’ frequency of viewing clips of
bare-knuckle street violence on Facebook, 2014 193
Table A.7 Survey participants’ time spent viewing clips of
bare-knuckle street violence on Facebook, 2014 194
Table A.8 Survey participants’ pathways to online clips of
bare-knuckle street violence, 2014 194
Table A.9 Survey participants’ viewing of comments left on fight
clips, 2014 194
Table A.10 Survey participants’ preferred fight clip content, 2014 195
Table A.11 Survey participants’ views on when violence is
acceptable, 2014 195
Table A.12 Frequency of comment types on Only Street Fighting,
Crazy Street Fights, The Craziest Fights Ever, Just Fights
Videos and Real Crazy Fights, May–December 2014 196

xi
 1
Introduction

An affray assails the urban streetscape: a violent fissure in the familiar that
captures the gaze of neighbouring eyes. In this moment of commotion, a
score of spectators are created. And as the street is awakened from the
mundane, the discord is recorded. A solitary onlooker reaches for their
smartphone, aims its camera towards the melee and presses record, etch-
ing images of the event into archive. The brawl culminates and fades from
the streetscape. Yet its image is retained—preserved in witness recollec-
tions and digital files. Through this video memento, its audience expands.
The smartphone is repurposed into a miniature cinema, passed from
friend to friend as more eyes are invited to pry at the violent scene. The
recording is then sent to other smartphones, its audience expanding by
the day. Finally, the recording migrates online. It is uploaded into social
media. From the uploader’s profile, the video is shared by others and
dispersed even further. Eventually, a copy comes to sit alongside other
scenes of violence as the footage finds its way into Facebook. Occupying
the screen with a variety of links to similar scenes of public disorder, the
event’s audience reaches its apogee. On this user-generated page, dedi-
cated to hosting footage of street fights and public bare-knuckle violence,
individuals dissect every minutiae of the event—denigrating, glorifying
and debating in the wake of their online spectatorship. The spectator is

© The Author(s) 2018 1

M.A. Wood, Antisocial Media, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63985-7_1
2 1 Introduction

recast as commentator and adjudicator, their rulings and commentary

typed out and posted beneath the footage to be subsumed by future view-
ers into the event’s mise-en-scène. Veneration, glorification and diatribe
coincide in the collection of spectator responses to the video as individu-
als map their attitudes to violence. When the affray has played out, the
viewer browses the site’s content, wanders their cursor across the screen
and selects a second fight to view, construe and respond to.
In the early twenty-first century, the street fight met the information
superhighway. Driven by two vehicles, the camera phone and the Internet,
footage of street fights and public hand-to-hand violence entered a fresh
phase of production and distribution. Through the lens of the increas-
ingly ubiquitous camera phone, the spectacle of public violence has been
witnessed and captured at an unprecedented rate. Where spectatorship of
public violence was once confined to the immediate bystander, and then
later to the national audiences of televisual programming, now the street
fight has been opened to the transnational free-for-all of the Internet, and
with it, a legion of social media users. For in this era of increasing media
convergence, all roads lead to Facebook, and many bear traffic in search
of new avenues for viewing transgression. In an age of social media,
Facebook stands as not only one of the world’s most popular and well-­
frequented web domains, but also one of its foremost sites of violence,
home to a multitude of user-uploaded fight clips, re-shared videos of
transgression, and the primary subject of this book: fight pages. Emerging
out of Facebook’s ‘fan’ pages feature, which enables users to follow and
connect around a shared interest, cause or brand, fight pages are user-­
generated pages that aggregate, narrowcast and archive amateur record-
ings of street fights and other forms of public violence. If, to reinvent a
worn-out phrase, the Internet can be thought to play host to a web of
violence, with each hyperlink a thread connecting users to footage of
violent events, then fight pages are where this web is at its most dense.
They offer to their users, who subscribe through ‘liking’ the page, a repos-
itory of transgression that far surpasses any other that has preceded them
in the sheer quantity of content they make available.
This book is about the impact social media have had on the way we
consume, view, distribute and curate footage of crime and violence. In
it, I argue that fight pages represent an example of an emergent online
 1 Introduction 3

­ henomenon that might be termed antisocial media: participatory web-

p
sites dedicated to hosting and sympathetically curating footage of trans-
gression. In studies of media effects, the notion of antisocial media is
occasionally used to refer to content that is deemed antisocial (Dill
2009; Shaw et al. 2015), often by way of contrasting it with prosocial
media (see Fischer et al. 2011; Kundanis 2004; Greitemeyer 2010). The
term is also regularly used, albeit as no more than a punning title, by
journalists reporting on the potential for social media to promote unso-
ciability (see O’Connell 2014). It has been used to open articles cover-
ing topics as diverse as the use of Facebook for threatening and
intimidating others with violence (Birke 2010); the rate of racist mes-
sages posted on Twitter (Hoenig 2014); the Obama 2012 campaign’s
use of social media (Parker 2012); social media monitoring, data reten-
tion, and geotracking (Plant 2012); a filmed attack on a teenager
uploaded to social media (Times of Trenton Editorial Board 2015);
online responses to terrorism in the wake of the attacks on Paris and
Beirut (Adolphie 2015); the on-air murder of a news reporter and her
cameraman by a disgruntled former colleague (Spector 2015) and an
infamous YouTube channel dedicated to footage of horrifying caught
on camera pranks (Duncan 2015). Antisocial media, then, has been
used by journalists as something of a catchall for socially harmful or
destructive uses of social media.
My conceptualization of antisocial media is much narrower. It
departs both from the notion of antisocial media as media content that
promotes antisocial behaviour and the notion of antisocial media as anti-
social uses of social media. Instead, I conceptualize antisocial media as a
class of media, and specifically, a class of media that is intrinsically tied to
the rise of participatory social media. Through examining fight pages,
this book develops the notion of antisocial media beyond a clever play on
words to describe a class of media that has received little attention from
researchers. As I demonstrate through tracing the content, consumption
and media ecology of fight pages, the rise of antisocial media represents a
key shift in the conditions for distributing, encountering and spectating
footage of criminalized acts.
Antisocial media can, therefore, be distinguished from online deviance
undertaken either individually or by pre-established offline networks.
4 1 Introduction

Though social media provides a platform for individuals to engage in

antisocial behaviours such as cyberbullying, such individually undertaken
acts are not what I propose the term antisocial media to refer to. Rather, by
my definition the term refers solely to participatory pages dedicated to
promoting and/or undertaking antisocial behaviours. To qualify as anti-
social media there must, in short, be a clearly demarcated site of antiso-
cialism, rather than decentralized antisocial behaviour emanating from
an individual or collective. Further, whilst antisocial media are participa-
tory in providing their users affordances for responding to the footage
they view, they are frequently underpinned by a distributor–audience
structure, with a page administrator distributing transgressive material to
a page’s frequenters. This therefore distinguishes antisocial media from
online social networks that intermittently share footage of antisocial acts
online. It also marks perhaps the main commonality between antisocial
media and broadcast media: their shared one-to-many model of
distribution.
Antisocial media can also be distinguished from online domains inhab-
iting the so-called netherworld or underground of the Internet. Much
has been written on transgressive material within the so-called digital
underground: the vast assortment of unsearchable deep web pages, and
peer-to-peer dark net communities that afford users anonym-
ity (see Bartlett 2015).1 Antisocial media can, however, be distinguished
from these dark net peer-to-peer communities and deep web domains in
two significant ways. First, they differ in their levels of visibility. Whereas
dark net and deep web sites are mostly invisible, hidden in the unsearch-
able recesses of the Internet or in anonymous peer-to-peer Tor networks,
antisocial media are located in the surface web and are consequently
highly visible, searchable and traceable. Further, whilst many antisocial
media allow users to employ pseudonyms, and therefore allow their users
to be anonymous to one another, they remain unencrypted domains.
Consequently, their users can be traced, as can their creators, administra-
tors and moderators. Antisocial media can be understood as the ‘clearnet’
or ‘surface web’2 counterpart of transgressive dark web domains, where
anonymity is optional. Owing to these, and other factors that will be
examined in this book, antisocial media support very different forms of
sociability to dark net and deep web domains.
 1 Introduction 5

Like radical and alternative media, fight pages and other forms of anti-
social media distribute content that is rarely, if ever, published by main-
stream media outlets. Yet whilst radical and alternative media are
politically motivated and have transformative aims (see Downing 2000),
antisocial media are not. Unlike these overtly political forms of media,
antisocial media narrowcast footage of transgression primarily for the
purposes of entertainment. They must therefore be contrasted with blogs,
YouTube channels and Facebook pages that, whilst promoting the com-
missioning of illicit acts, do so in the service of a political goal, which
may include the act in question’s decriminalization.
Given their transnational nature, defining antisocial media through a
legalistic definition invites problems. Crime is socially and historically
contingent. Acts that are criminalized in one state or jurisdiction are
often entirely legal in others, and, consequently, websites that might be
classified as antisocial media within one state would not be within
another. At least three approaches might be taken to address this issue: a
realist harm-based approach, a social constructivist approach or a critical
realist synthesis of the two. In the realist approach, antisocial media are
conceptualized as a real class of media defined not by their sympathetic
curation of criminalized acts but by their promotion of harmful acts.
That is, antisocial media are sites that not only curate footage of harm,
but author statements promoting similar acts of harm onto others. Such
an approach accords with other harm-focused criminological perspec-
tives, including Smith and Raymen’s (2016) deviant leisure perspective
and Hall and Winlow’s (2015) ultra-realist perspective. Arguably, it also
situates the concept of antisocial media not within criminology but zemi-
ology: the study of social harms (Hillyard et al. 2004). However, framing
antisocial media solely through the lens of such a harm-based approach
invites its own problems—if opened to include legal and culturally
accepted harms, where can we draw the line between antisocial media
and other online media? Whilst reserving use of the concept solely for
criminalized acts precludes its application to websites that promote harm-
ful acts that perhaps should be criminalized, it also stops the term becom-
ing too all-encompassing.
In the second, constructionist approach, antisocial media are not con-
ceptualized as a ‘real’ class of media that exist independent of the social
6 1 Introduction

responses they engender. Instead, antisocial media are conceptualized as

any content aggregator that has been accused of eliciting illicit or antiso-
cial behaviour in its users. Viewed through a constructionist lens, antiso-
cial media are websites that have generated significant societal disapproval
for the oppositional values and law-breaking behaviours they are thought
to encourage. Put simply, whilst a realist reading of antisocial media cen-
tres around questions of harm, a constructivist reading hinges on ques-
tions of (formal) deviance.
A third approach synthesizes aspects of these two approaches, and
treats antisocial media as the point where formal deviance and social
harm overlap. Antisocial media, in other words, are conceptualized as
aggregators and sympathetic curators of harmful criminalized acts. This
approach has several benefits over the other two. Firstly, it doesn’t assume
outright that antisocial media generate widespread censure. It doesn’t
assume that the acts curated on antisocial media are widely deemed ‘devi-
ant.’ Indeed, some of the acts curated on antisocial media may be the
subject of widespread praise, despite their illicit nature. Secondly, it
doesn’t encompass websites dedicated to curating footage of acts that are
harmless albeit criminalized in one or more jurisdictions. As such, it
views crime and criminalization through a critical rather than orthodox
criminological framework. Unlike orthodox criminology, it doesn’t
uncritically accept state definitions of crime as a starting point for identi-
fying antisocial media. Instead, it builds upon critical criminology’s long-­
standing problematization of crime and concern with how laws are
created and enforced (see Taylor et al. 2013).
This feeds into a second issue with the term—its ostensible moralism.
In proposing any new concept, we have to be aware of the semantic bag-
gage carried by the terms we repurpose and reconfigure. The term ‘anti-
social’ has long been used by politicians, academics, journalists and other
moral entrepreneurs as a vehicle for criticizing for certain behaviours,
practices and acts. Similarly, when journalists speak of ‘antisocial media’,
they are usually making a value judgement and proclaiming a particular
behaviour, technology or practice associated with social media as objec-
tionable, offensive or otherwise harmful. Given its history, the notion of
antisocial media runs the risk of primarily remaining a moral rather than
analytical category. In conceptualizing antisocial media as online domains
 1 Introduction 7

dedicated to sympathetically curating and aggregating footage of harmful

criminalized acts, I hope to steer a middle course between realism and
constructivism that avoids moralism on the one hand, and moral relativ-
ism on the other. In doing so, I wish to suggest that antisocial media
aren’t just domains that run contrary to the laws of a society, but that they
are of vehicles of harm through the discourses their administrators pro-
mulgate. If we understand criminology as a discipline dedicated to reduc-
ing various forms of harm, then such a conceptualization of antisocial
media cannot avoid issuing a negative value judgement of such domains.
Yet criticism need not equate to censure, moralism or demonization, and
in exploring antisocial media it is important that we tease out the nuances
of these domains.
Beyond Facebook and other mainstream social media sites, antisocial
media include a variety of websites and forums dedicated to sharing
image-based sexual abuse (see Henry and Powell 2015), and footage of
street fights, and illegal animal fighting. Other online domains such as
4Chan’s now infamous /b/imageboard, which has been the site of several
‘naked celebrity’ image hacks (see Massanari 2015), are on the verge of
being antisocial media in their ‘no rules’ policy and acceptance of any
behaviour without strictly falling within the parameters of the concept.
For whilst the /b/imageboard and other such forums allow any behav-
iour, they are not dedicated specifically to aggregating footage of antiso-
cial acts. In running through this cursory list of antisocial media, it
quickly becomes apparent that they are often distinct in both content
and form, that is, their architecture, features and affordances as online
environments. Consequently, to understand their impact, we must be
attentive to both of these dimensions - the content they distribute and
their technological form. Further, we must treat the content and form of
antisocial media platforms as ultimately inextricable.
Rather than providing a survey of various different forms of antisocial
media then, in this book I focus specifically on the phenomenon of the
Facebook fight. Lack though they may, the tens of millions of likes celeb-
rity Facebook pages attract, fight pages are far from a minor phenomenon
on Facebook. The demand for footage of authentic street fights on
Facebook is evidenced by the considerable number of fight pages that
have accumulated hundreds of thousands, and occasionally millions, of
8 1 Introduction

likes. During this study, I encountered 104 fight pages that remained
online in March, 2016. Of these pages, 13 had between 250,000 and
499,999 likes, 7 had between 500,000 and 999,999 likes, and 4 had over
1 million likes (see Table A.1).
To investigate these domains, over the course of several years between
2013 and 2016, I followed five popular of them using my personal
Facebook profile: Crazy Street Fights, The Craziest Fights Ever, Just Fights
Videos, Real Crazy Fights and Only Street Fighting. Further, taking an
approach in line with reception studies, I surveyed 205 fight page users to
gain deeper insights into why they viewed bare-knuckle street violence,
how they experieced and read this violent footage, and how they under-
stood and/or enacted violence in their own lives. Drawing inspiration
from reception studies, digital sociology and digital anthropology, this
mixed methods approach to investigating these pages—which I detail in
Appendix A—enabled me to investigate not only fight page users beliefs
but also their behaviour in practice.

Crime-watching and Spectatorship

As a book about antisocial media this is also a book about crime-­
watching: the act of viewing footage of criminalized acts, whether
through television, cinema or social media. Of the numerous issues
associated with crime-watching, the issue of media effects has received
the most sustained attention by academics, policy makers and the gen-
eral public. Much research into new media, including, most notably,
video games, has concerned the behavioural and cognitive effects of
viewing violent content through these platforms (see Greenfield 2014;
Shaw et al. 2015). Yet of no less importance than the effects of viewing
media content are reasons why an individual consumes it.
Understanding a spectator’s reasons for viewing a violent event is
essential to understanding how they will be affected by it. Consequently,
this book treats the issues of media effects and media uses as insepa-
rable and mutually co-constructing: inseparable because the effects of
violent media content are, in part, tethered to the viewer’s reasons for
engaging with it, and co-constructing because an individual’s uses for
 Crime-watching and Spectatorship 9

violent content are, in part, determined by the effects registered by

their previous encounters with such content.
Rather than restricting its investigative scope to examining whether
viewing online violence begets offline violence, this chapter instead asks
a broader question: what does spectatorship to fight page hosted violence
do? The potential answers to this are legion: it may generate, sustain or
abate particular imaginings of violence, coordinate behaviours, perform
identities, compose emotions, affect bodies or afford the spectator a
cathartic release or other gratification; all is dependent on the particular
mode of spectatorship that an individual engages in.
Central to my line of inquiry is the guiding presupposition that spec-
tatorship performs various actions both on and for the spectator. It is for
these reasons that this research substitutes a narrow concern with media
effects for a broader interest in what can be termed modes of spectatorship:
particular configurations of viewing, interpreting and responding to con-
tent. Here, I employ an expanded definition of spectatorship that under-
stands the term to include not only the action and effects of viewing a
(typically mediated) spectacle nor the type of association this relational
act entails, but also the practices generated from this association and
enmeshed in the act of viewing itself. In this way, spectatorship can
simultaneously be understood as an association, a practice, and a catalyst:
a relationship that engenders effects wholly contingent on the concatena-
tion of factors involved. Such a definition is diametrically opposed to
understanding spectatorship as a passive and motionless act, devoid of
movement or communication. Rather, to spectate is to watch and respond:
to perform in our response to a performance. This definition therefore
invites an investigation of not just the association between the spectator
and the spectacle, but also the association between spectators. Though
the association between the spectator and the spectacle must be accorded
primacy as the sine qua non of spectatorship, the relationships and
co-­
­ presence between spectators contributes in shaping individuals’
responses to the spectacle.
The notion of modes of spectatorship has a long history within cinema
studies (Hansen 1993; Rose and Friedman 1994; Tait 2008; Oddey and
White 2009; Rushton 2009), but also literature studies (Bernstein 2004),
cultural anthropology (Friedman 2006) and digital sociology (see
10 1 Introduction

Pattanaik and Chatterjee 2008). What is most notable about the use of
the term in these studies is its polysemy and inexactness. Not only is there
no agreed upon definition of the term that these studies accord to, but
most do not provide their own definition, lending it a nebulous quality.
Notably, most uses of the term concern only one dimension of axis of
spectatorship relevant to the study at hand: for Hansen (1993) it relates
to historically constituted modes of spectating cinema, for Rose and
Friedman (1994) it relates specifically to gendered modes of spectator-
ship, for Friedman (2006) it relates to the contrast between active and
passive modes of spectating content, and for Oddey and White (2009),
the different mediums through which spectatorship occurs (theatre, tele-
vision, Internet, film, mobile phone, etc.).
Contrary to these studies, I want to suggest that all of these dimen-
sions are integral to spectatorship, and consequently, to unpacking the
nature and implications of fight page spectatorship. This project therefore
advances a polyvalent conceptualization of modalities of spectatorship: a
conceptualization that addresses not just a single dimension of spectator-
ship, but the intersection and interplay between every dimension of spec-
tatorship. The researcher who comes closest to adopting such a
multidimensional approach is Higson (2002). Crucially, Higson, who is
worth quoting here in full, states that a study of film culture must address,

The range of sociologically specific audiences for different types of film,

and how these audiences use these films in particular exhibition circum-
stances; that is to say, we need to take into account not only the historically
constituted reading practices and modes of spectatorship and subjectivity, the
mental machinery and relative cultural power or readerly competences of differ-
ent audiences—but also the experience of cinema(s) in a more general cul-
tural sense: the role of marketing and audience expectation, the reasons
why particular audiences go to the cinema, the pleasures they derive from
this activity, the specific nature of the shared social and communal experi-
ence of cinema going … [and] the different experiences offered by the vari-
ous types of theatrical exhibition spaces. (2002, 64, my italics)

Like Higson, I agree that addressing each of these phenomena is para-

mount to generating a holistic account of spectatorship. However, my
conceptualization of modes of spectatorship is broader still than Higson’s.
 Crime-watching and Spectatorship 11

Higson distinguishes modes of spectatorship, which he conceptualizes as

particular reading practices conditioned by the spectator’s subjectivity,
from the experience of viewing cinema. This study departs from such a
division in contending that, rather than just pertaining to interpretative
reading practices, a mode of spectatorship encompasses all of the various
factors listed by Higson: content, experience, intention and ecology.
Following from this conceptualization of spectatorship, a mode of
spectatorship can be defined as a particular configuration of viewing,
experiencing, responding and relating to content. That is, a mode of
spectatorship designates the holistic process of spectatorship, from the
circumstances leading to the viewing of the spectacle, to the way it is then
experienced and understood, and to the effects of viewing it. Further, a
mode of spectatorship denotes not only the effects generated by a specta-
torial encounter but also the ensemble of factors that generated these
effects. As such, research into modes of spectatorship views any effects of
viewing content as relationally constituted within a heterogeneous net-
work of influences that includes, inter alia, the content being viewed, the
platform through which it is viewed and responded to, and the spectator’s
subjectivity. This discussion therefore adopts a thoroughly anti-­essentialist
approach to investigating spectatorship to violence.
This definition of spectatorship and the theoretical presuppositions it
rests upon depart somewhat from that used within the spectator theory
of cinema and screen studies. The most notable of these departures is that
my conceptualization of spectatorship rejects the notion of the spectator
as the ‘ideal subject’ of an audiovisual text, as per spectatorship theory
(see Sturken and Cartwright 2009). Rather than deriving an ideal sub-
ject/spectator by working back from the content of the spectacle, this
project instead begins with the audience, and the diverse modes of expe-
riencing, reading and responding to fight videos that can be found
therein. Conceptually, this places my use of the term closer to the notion
of ‘reception’ espoused within audience reception studies (see Jensen
1987; Jensen and Rosengren 1990) than to the notion of spectatorship
propounded within cinema studies. Though these terms have different
intellectual histories and implications (see Bennett 1996), following
Staiger’s (2005) lead, I use the notions of reception and spectatorship
interchangeably.
12 1 Introduction

As an exploration of spectatorship, this project can readily be situated

within both cultural and visual criminology. Positioning this project as a
visual criminological analysis is not, however, unproblematic. In
approaching online spectatorship, it is imperative to recognize its multi-
modality, that is, that it is composed of numerous different modes of
communication (Kress 2000; Pink 2011). Several modes of communica-
tion, not all visual, are apparent on fight pages: video, speech, sound, text
and gesture. As such, this project had to implement approaches that were
not limited to investigating visual modes of communication. By title
alone, visual criminology betrays its deliberate oculocentrism. This focus
upon visuality is well justified, given that criminological inquiry is prone
to downplaying the import of images. However, focusing solely on the
visual aspects and practices of fight pages would result in what Bal (2003)
has termed visual essentialism: a privileging of the visual aspects of an
object or event to the exclusion of all other senses. As Clifford (2012/1986,
12) notes, research into cultural praxis requires not only an ethnographic
gaze but also an ethnographic ear. Because this project is concerned not
only with the sight of violence, but also its sound, it cannot limit itself to
the insights provided by this emerging sub-discipline. Nor, for this rea-
son, does it fit neatly within the bounds of visual criminological inquiry.
Instead, this project’s investigations may be better located within the
criminology of spectatorship proposed by Young (2013): an approach that
holistically examines individuals’ encounters with mediated scenes of
crime. The use of the term encounter here is by no means incidental.
Encounter connotes the inescapable uncertainty that characterizes specta-
torship—the unforeseeable effects of an image on a spectator. More impor-
tantly however, as Young (2014) elucidates, the term encounter provides
an important reframing device for analysing the visual within criminology.
Namely, the term focuses inquiry on the attachment or association between
spectator and image, as opposed to treating the image/event as an object
to be analysed by the researcher in its own right (Young 2014).
This encounter-oriented approach is preferable for several reasons.
Firstly, it provides for the multiplicity of spectator responses that are elic-
ited by an image (Young 2014). By contrast, placing images themselves as
the object of analysis risks reducing their meaning and effects to the inves-
tigator’s interpretation. Secondly, focusing on the relational ­encounter
 Crime-watching and Spectatorship 13

between spectator and image avoids abstracting images from their social
moorings, which analysing images as objects risks doing. Finally, the term
encounter may be used to temper functional perspectives on media con-
tent, such as uses and gratifications theory, which presuppose audience
activeness. As not every spectatorial exchange is intentional, but is often
rather the result of what Peirce (1998, 182) would term ‘the brute com-
pulsion’ of experience, the notion of encounter is productive to conceptu-
alizing passive non-selective modes of coming across content.
To give primacy to the encounter, another analytical reframing is required,
from analysing the meaning of images to analysing how images work on
people (Young 2010; Carney 2010; Zaitch and de Leeuw 2010). Such an
approach is predicated upon the now familiar recognition that images carry
no inherent meaning in and of themselves. Rather, meaning is imparted on
images by viewers—interpretation supplants interpolation. As Carney
(2010, 31) notes, the photograph—and by extension the image more gen-
erally—‘presents more than it represents, produces more than it reproduces
and performs more than it signifies.’ In practice, these three notions—pre-
sentation, production and performance—are profoundly interlinked. What
is presented (and omitted) by an image generates the meanings, identities,
emotions and sensations it produces. Yet what is required is more than just
an inventory of the different elements present within an image or video: we
must also address how an image performs to/on spectators.
Asserting that images perform more than they signify is redolent of a
truism: that images function through evoking meanings, memories, emo-
tions and sensations. This truism is, however, disregarded within visual
studies that focus solely on signification. Concentrating on how images
perform overcomes the respective issues associated with two diametrically
opposed perspectives on images and subjectivity: the social determinism
of the dominant ideology perspective and the subjectiveness of the plu-
ralistic postmodern perspectives (Yar 2010). That is, a focus on perfor-
mance over signification equips images with the agency to effect audience
readings and experiences, without descending into determinism. Finally,
the term perform does not limit the power of images to the domain of
signification. This opens up investigations to attend to the affective
dimension of spectatorship: the visceral bodily responses registered by
connecting with images (Young 2010).
14 1 Introduction

The Id of Facebook’s Technology Unconscious

More fundamentally, Antisocial Media examines the mediatization of
crime through social media. As Couldry and Hepp (2016, 15) explain,
the social world is not just mediated but mediatized: it is ‘changed in its
dynamics and structure by the role that media continuously (indeed
recursively) play in its construction’. Mediatization, then, refers to the
process through which changes in media and communications technolo-
gies come to change societies (Hepp et al. 2015). In examining crime’s
mediatization through social media, Antisocial Media therefore also falls
within the growing field of digital criminology, which is concerned with
how crime and justice are experienced, understood, perpetrated and
responded to in a ‘digital society’ of computational and mobile media
(Stratton et al. 2017; Smith et al. 2017).
In viewing a video on Facebook, the spectator steps into not just the
recording, but an entire media ecology comprised of hyperlinks, social
media buttons, comment boxes and myriad other data structures. To
investigate the mediatization of street fights on Facebook, we too must
step into this ecology and survey its affordances and architecture. We
must, in other words, conceptualize such online crime-watching as socio-
technical: comprised of inextricably intertwined social and technical
dimensions (Latour 1991).
In examining crime-watching on Facebook, Antisocial Media takes a
software studies (see Fuller 2008; Manovich 1999, 2013) inspired
approach to mapping the ‘technological unconscious’ of Facebook: the
often taken-for-granted data structures and invisible algorithms that
actively shape human praxis on the platform (see Kitchin and Dodge
2011). Or, to malappropriate Freud (1962), as my analysis is concerned
primarily with the criminogenic effects of antisocial media on Facebook,
it might be said that it maps the id of the site’s technological unconscious:
the unintended, unrestrained, and often harmful forms of gratification-­
seeking behaviour that the site’s architecture promotes in its users.
My analysis focuses on three characteristics of Facebook’s technological
unconscious and their implications for the mediation of footage
of transgression on the platform: their interactivity, their fostering
of hyperconnectivity and their algorithmic personalization and curation
of ­content. My exploration of algorithms in Antisocial Media differs
 The Id of Facebook’s Technology Unconscious 15

s­omewhat in focus from most other criminological studies of computa-

tional media to date. Hitherto, criminologists interested in algorithms
have tended to focus on their role in predictive policing and actuarial risk
assessment within the criminal justice sector. Such studies have primarily
examined how algorithms, datafication and Big Data have influenced the
way crime is understood and responded to by criminal justice agencies
(Chan and Bennett Moses 2016, 2017; Smith et al. 2017). To use
Manovich’s (2001) terms, these criminologists have been concerned with
how algorithms have transcoded concepts of crime into quantitative and
measurable forms – that is, how the logic of computational media has
shaped the way we understand, categorise, and respond to crime. As
Cheney-Lippold (2017, 11) might put it, in computation media crime is
understood ‘on data’s terms’; through the logic, ontology, and values
inscribed-into software (Cheney-Lippold 2017).
Whilst I am equally concerned with how crime is transcoded into
computational media, in Antisocial Media, my focus is upon algorithms
employed not for social control, but rather for commerce. Specifically,
Antisocial Media explores how the algorithmic architecture of Facebook
and other social media shapes the way crime is consumed, experienced,
understood and responded to by users. Of particular concern in my anal-
ysis are personalization algorithms, which employ data collected on users
to personalize the information they receive on a site. Through shaping the
information that see and consume as social media users, such personaliza-
tion algorithms also play a role in shaping our identities. As Cheney-
Lippold (2017, 19) states, ‘our datafied lives, when aggregated and
transcoded [by algorithms] … increasingly define who we are and who
we can be’. Through algorithmically monitoring users’ online actions – a
process Clarke (1988) terms ‘dateveillance’ – social media generate ‘algo-
rithmic identities’ for their users: interpretations of who we are and what
we like based off our aggregated data. In Antisocial Media, I examine how
social media may fashion its users dynamic ‘algorithmic identities’ that
come to shape how they experience, perceive, understand crime in a
hyperconnected world. In particular, I focus on how Facebook’s ‘Top
Stories’ algorithm, which curates the content users receive in their News
Feed interfaces, has the potential to amplify and reinforce fight page
users’ attitudes towards violence—a process I dub ‘algorithmic deviancy
amplification.’
16 1 Introduction

Chapter Overview
The following four chapters each focus on a different dimension of anti-
social media: content, consumption, technological form and participa-
tion. In Chap. 2 I examine how fight pages, as a form of antisocial media,
have changed the terrain for distributing footage of public bare-knuckle
violence. Drawing primarily upon my experiences following five fight
pages, I provide an account of the content hosted on these pages, from
the clips of bare-knuckle brawls they curate, to the video descriptions
that enframe them. Through doing so, I show that the violent entertain-
ments hosted by pages were not only highly heterogeneous but also
curated in a manner that legitimated street fighting and street justice:
eye-for-an-eye retributive violence enacted in response to a wrong.
Turning to the consumption of such clips, in Chap. 5, I examine why,
how, and to what end individuals view footage of bare-knuckle street
violence. As I illustrate, participants’ reasons for viewing fight videos were
many and varied: entertainment, amusement, intrigue, righteous justice,
boredom alleviation, self-validation, self-defence learning and risk aware-
ness. Through analysing these different modes of spectating bare-knuckle
violence on fight pages, I show that, in order to understand why indi-
viduals use these pages, we must examine how they read, and affectively
respond to viewing specific forms of bare-knuckle street violence.
Shifting to the technological form of fight pages, in Chap. 6, I examine
how Facebook’s interactive and personalized algorithmic architecture
shapes fight page users’ encounters with footage of bare-knuckle violence.
Focusing on Facebook’s ‘Top Stories’ algorithm, which curates the con-
tent users receive in their News Feed interfaces, I examine how Facebook’s
technological unconscious has the potential to amplify and reinforce
fight page users’ attitudes towards crime and violence. Moreover, I exam-
ine how the rise of mobile media and a hyperconnected network society
impact on the way crime is consumed, and have the potential to generate
an ambient awareness of violence, where mediated violence becomes a
normal part of the fabric of an individual’s social media use.
Like any form of social media, antisocial media are participatory, offer-
ing individuals the ability to communicate with another and generate
content. Chapter 7 therefore examines how fight pages have generated
new participatory modes of spectating bare-knuckle violence, and in
 Bibliography 17

doing so, have brokered agonistic publics where street justice and bare-­
knuckle brawling are valorized. Drawing on a content analysis of close to
6000 user comments posted on Crazy Street Fights, The Craziest Fights
Ever, Just Fights Videos, Real Crazy Fights and Only Street Fighting, I exam-
ine why individuals commented on these pages, what they said when
they did so, and how Facebook’s architecture might generate new crimi-
nologically significant socialities where criminal acts are legitimated.
‘Computation,’ as David Berry (2015, 125) notes, ‘has moved from a
small range of activities to a qualitative shift in the way in which we engage
with knowledge and the world.’ Taking stock of this shift, in Chap. 8, I
therefore consider how social media generated new modes of crime-watch-
ing and changed the way we come to understand and culturally construct
crime. With the rise of the Internet and other digital environments, crimi-
nologists must cast a critical eye on software and its role in shaping cul-
tural understanding of crime. In concluding this book, I therefore explore
how digital criminology might encompass a critical criminology of soft-
ware dedicated to examining how the values inscribed into software influ-
ence the way we understand, perceive and respond to crime.

Notes
1. Though the terms ‘dark net’ and ‘deep web’ are often used interchange-
ably, such a conflation of these terms is inaccurate. The deep web refers to
content on the World Wide Web that is not indexed by search engines
(Barratt 2015), whilst the dark net refers to online networks that can only
be accessed via anonymizing software.
2. The clearnet refers to the unencrypted Internet where users can be identi-
fied by their IP addresses, whilst the surface web refers to the searchable
web (Barratt 2015).

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 2
Breaking the First Two Rules of
Fight Club

In an early chapter of Chuck Palahniuk’s (1996, 12) Fight Club, Tyler

Durden lays down ground rules to members of the novel’s eponymous
club. He begins, infamously, with rules one and two: ‘First rule of fight
club: you do not talk about fight club. Second rule of fight club: you do
not talk about fight club.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, fight pages are frequently
associated in media reports to Palahniuk-style fight clubs; collectives
formed solely for the purpose of recreational no-holds-barred fighting
(Dean 2015; Bennett 2014; MacNiven 2014). Dean’s (2015), Daily Mail
Australia article on the Australian fight page NT Fights, for example,
describes the domain as a ‘shocking real-life fight club where videos of
bare-knuckle brawls are shared by thousands on Facebook,’ before noting
that the page encourages users to upload their own footage of fights.
With the rise of fight pages, has Durden’s call to keep fight clubs con-
cealed from the public gaze gone unheeded? Has Facebook (2015), with
its self-proclaimed ethos of connecting and sharing, led droves of recre-
ational brawlers to break the first two rules of fight club?
Whilst evocative, this assumed link between fight pages and fight clubs
often does not stick. Far from being the online clubhouses of offline fight
clubs, many fight pages are more akin to video aggregators: websites that
gather online videos from a variety of sources for their visitors to view. To

© The Author(s) 2018 23

M.A. Wood, Antisocial Media, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63985-7_2
24 2 Breaking the First Two Rules of Fight Club

clear up these, and other misconceptions, this chapter provides a detailed

account of the nature, history, content and curation of fight pages.
Drawing primarily upon my experiences following five popular fight
pages, I provide an account of the content hosted on these pages, from
the clips of bare-knuckle brawls they curate, to the video descriptions
that enframe them. Through doing so, I show that the violent entertain-
ments hosted by pages are not only highly heterogeneous, but also curated
in a manner that legitimated street fighting, and street justice: eye-for-an-­
eye retributive violence enacted in response to a wrong. Moreover, I illus-
trate how, together, (anti)social media and the camera phone have
changed the landscape for distributing and curating footage of street vio-
lence and other criminalized acts.

A Media Archaeology of the Fight Page

Fight video aggregation did not begin with Facebook. Though fight pages
on Facebook have received an inordinate amount of media attention,
they represent the most recent form of online domain dedicated to host-
ing footage of bare-knuckle violence. To understand their emergence as
online archives of violence, we have to trace their precursors and techno-
logical preconditions. Whilst fight pages are the product of an ensemble
of historical, social, political, cultural and technological factors, like other
forms of Facebook-embedded antisocial media, their emergence can be
traced to three key technological developments: (1) the introduction of
Facebook Pages and Facebook Video, (2) the development and uptake of
camera phone technology and (3) the uptake of Facebook itself.
Before fight pages arrived on Facebook, footage of bare-knuckle vio-
lence was viewed primarily on video sharing sites, the most significant
being YouTube—a site that has had an unparalleled influence on the very
way we produce and consume audiovisual media content. As van Dijck
(2013, 111) notes, YouTube ‘has irrevocably redefined the very condi-
tions for audiovisual production, dragging television into the ecosystem
of connective media.’ Founded in 2005, YouTube provided an early plat-
form for uploading and viewing amateur footage of violence. The site
came to host a number of dedicated fight channels, the most notable
being STREETBEEFS FIGHTS (2015), established in March 2008.
 A Media Archaeology of the Fight Page 25

YouTube’s role in the growth of antisocial media is twofold. Culturally,

YouTube’s imperative to ‘broadcast yourself,’ as articulated in the site’s
former slogan, has fostered practices of uploading amateur user-­generated
content and gaining a social media presence. In doing so, the site has
inadvertently fostered the phenomenon of ‘performance crimes’ staged
for the camera and a social media audience (Yar 2012; Surette 2015).
Technologically, YouTube’s popularity has motivated competing social
media platforms, including Facebook, to incorporate similar applications
for uploading, viewing and hosting videos into their own user-interfaces.
In doing so, YouTube has generated new hosts for antisocial media in the
form of popular mainstream social media.
Of course, antisocial media aren’t tethered to mainstream social media
host sites. Enterprising website creators have established standalone anti-
social media websites including ‘fight-tubes’1 hosting footage of street
fights and bare-knuckle violence. During 2013, I encountered three prev-
alent fight-tubes: HQ Fights, Insane Street Fights and Gorilla Fights. The
user-interfaces of each of these pages replicated that of mainstream video
sharing domains such as YouTube and featured video rating buttons and
comments sections beneath videos. In addition to these standard video
sharing site attributes, however, each of these pages was marked by a fea-
ture that foreshadowed their impending obsolescence: a Facebook share
button. By 2014, these three sites and many other fight-tubes I encoun-
tered had gone offline. Of those that remained, the low view count of
their videos indicated that the growth of Facebook fight pages has left
fight-tubes largely redundant.
Whilst fight-based antisocial media have existed in various forms from at
least 2005, it was not until Facebook released its Video and Page features in
2007 that the platform finally came to host fight pages. Designed to inte-
grate the features of video sharing sites into Facebook’s platform, Facebook
Video provided affordances for uploading and sharing videos on users’ per-
sonal profiles, whilst Facebook pages introduced ­user-­generated pages to
Facebook’s landscape. Though originally intended for businesses to create
profiles for their brand (Facebook 2007), Facebook Pages opened the
floodgates for the emergence of unofficial fan pages and pages dedicated to
causes and particular forms of content (see Harlow 2011). Together, these
two developments in Facebook’s functionality enabled users to establish
video-centric pages similar to those of a YouTube channel. Yet despite these
26 2 Breaking the First Two Rules of Fight Club

affordances for video-centric pages, fight pages remained uncommon until

2012. Indeed, the oldest fight page encountered during this project, School
Fights,2 was founded only in 2010. Two factors might explain the rise of
fight pages post-2012: the development and uptake of camera phone tech-
nology and the uptake of Facebook itself.
Though social media offer an array of channels for distributing record-
ings of violence, for this distribution to occur, there must be a ready sup-
ply of such footage. The increase in fight pages from 2012 onwards might,
therefore, be attributed in part to the increased uptake of portable video
capture technologies, and more specifically by the uptake of smartphones
with video capture functions. Whilst the first mobile phone capable of
taking photographs was released by J-Phone in 2000 (see Goggin 2006),
it was not until the release of the Nokia N93 in 2006 that camera phones
incorporated video recording functions. Less than a year later, video
recording had become a common feature of mobile phones, enabling
large pockets of the population to record events like never before.
Finally, the increasing number of fight pages from 2012 can also be
explained by the high uptake of Facebook from that year onwards. The year
2012 saw Facebook reach 1 billion users for the first time—an increase of
211 million users from the previous year (Fowler 2012). This increase in
the uptake of Facebook helps explain not only the rising prevalence of fight
pages, but also the decreasing use of fight-tubes. As more individuals gain
access to Facebook’s array of daily updated fight pages, there is marked drop
in demand for external fight-tubes. The decline of the fight-tube is a fate
that can, then, be attributed to media convergence: the blending of differ-
ent media forms (Burnett and Marshall 2003). For Facebook users fight
pages provide a means of accessing footage of street fights with fewer clicks
and keystrokes and far greater convenience than their predecessors permit-
ted. As new features, functions and content are subsumed into Facebook,
discrete fight-tubes have become increasingly redundant.

From Violence of the Reel to Real Violence

On fight pages, authenticity reigns. In contradistinction to professional
sports fights broadcast on TV—where poor production values would gar-
ner criticism from viewers—on fight pages, users place a premium on the
 From Violence of the Reel to Real Violence 27

authenticity of clips. Indeed, the realness of the footage, in relation to

both the event it depicts and its amateur and often-incidental produc-
tion, is frequently evoked in the promotion of these pages. There is an
expectation that recordings will bear the hallmarks of their amateur pro-
duction, and footage that exhibits overly professional production values,
such as a high image quality, is open to accusations of fakeness. An ama-
teur aesthetic is at work in the enjoyment of fight page videos: film a fight
poorly and the recording’s shaky camerawork will negate any enjoyment
coming from it; film a fight too well and its status as authentic will be
compromised. This is not to say that there isn’t a significant demand for
professionally shot (and typically arranged) no-holds-barred street fights,
as the popularity of the Kimbo Slice Fights (2016b) and Felony Fights
(2016a) series both attest. Moreover, videos produced by each of these
professionally shot series were frequently uploaded on the amateur fight
pages I followed. Nevertheless, for the vast majority of fight page users,
authenticity is paramount and fights are promoted as being real,
impromptu and no-holds-barred affairs ‘caught on camera’ by everyday
spectators.
One clip that demonstrates the central role authenticity plays in spec-
tator enjoyment of fight clips is a short 11-second recording hosted on
Real Crazy Fights entitled ‘CHUBBY GUY RUNS UP AND GETS
KNOCKED OUT.’ The clip depicts a dispute between two teenagers
that culminates in a single punch knockout. Taking place within the
beige family room of a residential property, the first teenager walks
towards the camera, as his shirtless opponent issues a warning; ‘You
always talk shit, like you just need to shut your mouth or you’re gonna get
your ass beat bro.’ His opponent responds in kind, issuing a provocation
before walking to within a few feet of his opponent and shoving his
opponent’s shoulder. He is then hit by a left hook that knocks him to the
ground and seemingly renders him unconscious. The victor stands over
his felled opponent and, tensing his arms and shoulders, issues an epithet
to his defeated opponent.
The clip is not unlike many others hosted on fight pages: a one-punch
knockout between two quarrelling young men. Yet as many commenters
observe, several things seem amiss in the scene. The dialogue between the
two boys is too stilted, the obscuring of the punch questionable and the
sound of the impact unnatural in its timbre and volume. Moreover, the
28 2 Breaking the First Two Rules of Fight Club

context is wrong. The domestic setting and lack of additional bystanders

render the cameraperson’s incidental act of recording the event implau-
sible. The scene feels staged. Commenters are quick to denounce the
footage as ‘fake’ and chide the site administers for wasting their time with
it. The apparent inauthenticity and fakery of the violence portrayed in
the clip completely compromises any enjoyment being derived from it.
Amateur aesthetic aside, the recordings of bare-knuckle violence
hosted on each of the five pages I followed varied significantly. Each page
posted footage featuring a diverse range of non-combat sports related
bare-knuckle violence, and events that varied greatly in their setting, par-
ticipant demographics, interactional dynamics, outcome and legality.
Nonetheless, almost all of the violent recordings posted on these pages
were placed by page users into one of three categories: the ‘clean’ fight,
the ‘brawl’ and the one-sided attack or ‘beating’ (see Table A.2).
Variously termed ‘clean fights,’ ‘fair fights’ and ‘respectable’ fights by
users, ‘clean fights’ are competitive (and usually one-on-one) fistfights
where both parties refrain from using ‘dirty’ underhanded moves and
show restraint in the violence they inflict on their opponent. They may
take the form of amateur bare-knuckle contests where there is no antago-
nism between the two opponents, or as a method of ‘settling’ a quarrel,
in the tradition of duelling and mutual combat. The ‘good clean fight’ is
as much about demonstrating self-control as it is about demonstrating
technical effectiveness. Such self-control may include refraining from
striking a downed opponent and instead allowing them to regain their
feet before resuming blows. Further, in clean fights that end with a par-
ticipant being knocked unconscious, the combat immediately concludes,
and occasionally the victor will see to the wellbeing of their opponent. In
demonstrating limits on the acceptable use of violence ‘clean fights’ more
closely resemble adjudicated combat sports matches than they do anar-
chic street violence.
Often (n.34), clean fights were comparable to combat sports matches
in two other ways: the planned and consensual nature of the fight, and
the crowd of onlookers that arrive to be entertained by it. Invariably, the
participants in a ‘good clean fight’ are acquainted with one another and
with members of the crowd, who often fulfil a duel role of both encour-
aging participants and ensuring that they do not overstep the mark in
 From Violence of the Reel to Real Violence 29

their violence. The vast majority of these fights did not appear to be spon-
taneous altercations, but rather pre-arranged events, and in many videos
(n.293) the size of spectating crowds indicated that there has been a sig-
nificant build up to the event.
Though entered into voluntarily by both parties, when undertaken in
public space participants of such arranged fights are still liable in many
jurisdictions to be charged with disturbing the public peace and affray
offences, which do not require an individual physically harmed in the
event to lay a complaint. Given these legal repercussions, many of clean
fights uploaded to the pages I followed occurred either on private prop-
erty such as an individual’s backyard (n.24) or in secluded areas, such as
uninhabited car parks (n.54), sequestered forest clearings (n.43) and
school ground heterotopias (n.43). Others though were intensely public
events in their visibility, occurring in urban and suburban streets, and
well-populated schoolyards. Undoubtedly, a small number of these fights
are legal, as they occur in jurisdictions, such as Washington State, that
feature mutual combat laws: legal provisions that permit fights that both
parties enter into willingly as long as they do not pose a risk to other
individuals, or the property of others.3 The majority of fights, however,
are unlikely to be protected by such legal measures. In such bouts, the
risk of detection, reprimand and even prosecution that leads other brawl-
ers to seek secluded settings for their contests is disregarded and, to quote
Bauman (Bauman and Lyon 2013, 23), ‘the fear of disclosure has been
stifled by the joy of being noticed.’
The most common form of fight video across all five pages I fol-
lowed, however, was what users termed ‘brawls.’ Recordings classed as
brawls often featured spontaneous, impromptu affairs that appeared to
erupt immediately following a perceived slight. In several of the brawls
I viewed (n.98), the opening act of violence appeared entirely unpro-
voked and unexpected. More frequently (n.290), however, they fol-
lowed a verbal exchange between two individuals or groups. In the first
scenario, the reciprocation of unbridled violence was a product of self-
defence, as an individual used any means possible to fend off their
attacker. In the second more common scenario, mutual combats took a
similar form to what Polk (1999) terms ‘honour contests.’ Honour con-
tests, as Polk theorizes them, have a distinct interactional dynamic
30 2 Breaking the First Two Rules of Fight Club

comprising three phases: (1) an opening move in which a real or per-

ceived challenge is issued in the form of an insult, extended eye contact
or jostle, (2) a countermove whereby the targeted individual interprets
this behaviour as a challenge and escalates the conflict through issuing
a retaliatory face-­saving act and (3) a mutual agreement to aggression in
which both parties in the dispute become committed to engaging in a
violent exchange.
Many of the brawls uploaded to these pages also conformed to Polk’s
notion of honour contests in another way: their leisure scene settings.
Many recorded brawls occured outside of nightclubs (n.76), restaurants
(n.12) and other night-time economy domains, and, in a further com-
monality with Polk’s analysis, featured individuals who appeared to be
intoxicated. Not all the brawls I viewed took place in night-time econo-
mies and leisure settings however. Many, on the contrary, took place in
work (n.43) or residential (n.154) environments. Such residential street-­
corner fights also differ from the textbook exchange presented by Polk’s
analysis, in that they appear to show altercations between well-acquainted
individuals or groups rather than strangers.
Whereas ‘clean’ fights temper force with self-control, the violence of
brawls is completely unrestrained and channelled purely into inflicting
harm on an opponent. Often, participants in the clips I watched were
knocked unconscious, beaten when they were down and subjected to a
barrage of blows after conceding defeat or attempting to exit the conflict.
Moreover, whilst the clean fights I viewed were mostly one-on-one con-
tests, the brawls hosted on the pages I followed were one-on-one, one
versus many and group against group. The dynamics of such fights would
also change quickly; one-on-one fights progressed into ‘all in brawls’ as
friends of both parties become involved, and individual fighters would
become quickly outnumbered and overwhelmed as their opponent’s
friends intervene and lend their support.
In addition to these competitive contests, where all the individuals
engulfed in the event employ acts of violence, the pages I followed also
featured footage of one-sided attacks or ‘beatings’ (n.167), as many users
referred to them. Owing to their entirely asymmetrical nature, such
events cannot be categorized as fights (see Jackson-Jacobs 2014). Unlike
the clean fights and brawls hosted on these pages, in such attacks a clear
 From Violence of the Reel to Real Violence 31

and unproblematic perpetrator/victim binary applies. Such recordings

were the least common form of violent content across all five of the pages
examined in this study. Occasionally (n.38), recordings of attacks took
the form of CCTV footage of random assaults and muggings. More com-
monly though (n.129), they took the form of caught on camera revenge
beat-downs, where an individual or group sought out and assailed another
in retribution for past wrongs. Also common were instances where one
party in a verbal dispute ‘sucker punched’ the other, who was neither
expecting nor willing to use violence in the exchange. Similar to the clips
of brawls on these pages, footage of beatings had varying dynamics. Some
featured a single attacker assaulting a single victim (n.76), others a single
attacker assaulting multiple victims (n.24), others multiple attackers
assaulting a single victim (n.46), and others still multiple attackers
assaulting several victims (n.21).
These three categories are not, however, an unproblematic typology.
Though most of the fights I viewed could readily be classified by viewers
as either clean fights, brawls or attacks, some traversed and destabilized
these categories. Fights that began as planned ‘clean’ bouts with pre-­
agreed upon rules and restrictions, descended into asymmetrical beat-
ings when a participant transgresses one of these agreed upon rules
(n.34). Further, participants in a clean or no holds barred fight would
walk away victorious only to be attacked and overwhelmed by the
friends of their original opponent (n.57). Finally, verbal disputes where
both individuals express their willingness to come to blows may culmi-
nate in an individual being knocked unconscious before being able to
retaliate (n.34).
Clips ended in one of the several ways. At their most conclusive, many
one-on-one fights ended with a ‘knockout,’ that is, an individual being
knocked unconscious, or with an individual being knocked to the ground
and tacitly capitulating to their opponent (n.146). In numerous instances
(n.78), this knockout blow did not signal an end to the violence, and
bystanders or spectators intervene and pull an individual off an uncon-
scious or surrendering opponent. More frequently though (n.239), fights
ended when a combatant had gained the upper hand and decided they
had dealt their opponent enough damage. Other fights, however, lacked
such clear-cut endings. Some instead finished when both participants
32 2 Breaking the First Two Rules of Fight Club

were too exhausted to continue or deal significant damage to their

­opponent. Indeed, many of the clean fights I viewed ended without a
clear victor (n.120) when both fighters succumb to exhaustion. Often,
this exhaustion set in quickly, and even in instances where a fighter isn’t
KO’d, most of the fights I viewed were fleeting affairs that lasted less than
30 seconds. Finally, numerous fights were interrupted by bystander inter-
vention (n.149), with the two parties being pulled apart from one
another. This frequently occurred in clips where fights ended up on the
ground, and bystanders determined that one participant had gained the
upper hand over their opponent.
None of these forms of violence are unique to a particular region. In
visiting these five pages, however, one is struck by the predominately
North American setting of most of their footage. Though the location in
which footage on these pages was filmed cannot be properly verified,
from the accents of fighters and bystanders, most (67% = n.712) of the
recordings hosted on the five pages I followed in appeared to originate
from the USA. By comparison, whilst footage seemingly filmed in the
UK and continental European countries was reasonably common—mak-
ing up 12% (n.127) of the recordings I viewed—footage filmed in the
countries of the Global South was something of a rarity, amounting to
only 3% (n.31) of all the videos I encountered.
Moreover, just as the fights I viewed occur in a variety of countries and
settings, so too did they feature participants who differ significantly in
age, gender and ethnicity. That said though, the majority (87% = n.934)
of fights accorded to well-established criminological knowledge that vio-
lence is primarily perpetrated by young men (Kellermann and Mercy
1992; Rennison 2009). Most fights were also between individuals who
appeared to be roughly the same age and the same gender, with only a
small amount of fights featuring participants of multiple genders, or
fighters who differed considerably in age. Further still, most fights also
featured participants of the same race, with fewer fights featuring two or
more participants of different races. Whenever such inter-racial fights
were posted, they ignited significant racism in their comments sections,
and occasionally let users to state that the page was deliberately trying to
enflame racial tension.
 From Violence of the Reel to Real Violence 33

Though commenters often passed off the fights they viewed as largely
harmless, several videos graphically depicted the physical risks of hand-­
to-­hand violence. Usually, the graphic injuries depicted in these videos
did not go unnoticed by fight page administrators, who often adding
viewer discretion disclaimers advising that the footage contained poten-
tially disturbing content. At the lower end of the spectrum, in a number
of the videos I viewed (n.63), individuals who had been struck with sig-
nificant force showed visible signs of concussion: vacant stares, confusion
and coordination issues. In more severe cases (n.31), videos captured
individuals who had received a substantial blow to the head convulsing in
seizures—a common symptom of head trauma that is not infrequently
seen in professional boxing matches. More serious and confronting still,
however, were the selection of videos (n.63) where fighters sustained head
injuries after being knocked to the ground. Interpersonal violence is a
leading cause of traumatic brain injury (Bruns and Hauser 2003) and
though it would be folly to diagnose traumatic brain injury from this
footage alone, the circumstances surrounding these recorded head trau-
mas are consistent with individuals who have suffered such injuries.
Namely, they took place on concreted streets and asphalted roads and in
several recordings the sound of fighters hitting their heads on these sur-
faces can be audibly heard. In several videos, fighters who have hit their
heads on these hard surfaces fit and convulse momentarily and then
remain unconscious and unresponsive until the recording ends, some-
times over a minute after the blow.
In an even smaller number of videos (n.16), the violence I viewed may
have proven fatal. In one video posted but since removed from Only Street
Fighting, a young man falls is attached by a number of men on a subur-
ban street. He is knocked unconscious, then punched and kicked repeat-
edly in the head and upper body by his three attackers. Though the
consequences of the attack cannot be ascertained from the footage, the
severity of the assault, coupled with the victim’s unresponsiveness at the
end of the recording led many viewers to comment that they had just
witnessed a homicide. Watching these videos was a confronting experi-
ence, a feeling that was shared by many other viewers, with many com-
menting to register their horror or disgust at what they had seen.
34 2 Breaking the First Two Rules of Fight Club

Though they often promoted themselves as sites dedicated exclusively

to stockpiling and hosting footage of street fights, all five pages posted
other often content to varying degrees. Such content often exhibited the
forms of subjectivity, justice and masculinity valorized by the administra-
tors of each page, and in doing so, provided a more holistic map of the
cognitive schemata undergirding violence on these pages. Common on
all of the pages were videos or links featuring individuals caught on cam-
era engaging in ignoble acts, accompanied by titles designed to shame
them for their behaviour. Such ‘shaming’ videos (see Hess and Waller
2014) frequently featured women ‘caught in the act’ cheating on their
partners, or parents filmed engaging in dubious, if often legal, child-­
rearing activities. Other videos of this vein, however, featured acts that
were undeniably illegal, and often represented examples of citizen jour-
nalism (see Allan and Thorsen 2009) undertaken in the public interest.
Many videos, for example, were instances of ‘inverse surveillance’ or sous-
veillance (see Mann et al. 2003) where individuals exposed police mal-
practice on their smartphones (see Greer and McLaughlin 2010).
In addition to exposing wrongful behaviour, other links featured indi-
viduals taking justice into their own hands and seeking overt retribution
and revenge for wrongs against them. Ranging from footage of drivers
getting revenge on other motorists who had stolen their parking spots to
mugshots of alleged paedophiles beaten and apprehended by the parents
of the children they abused, each of these ‘just deserts’ links presented
images depicting either the moment or result of wrongdoers receiving
their comeuppance. What these shaming and just deserts videos illustrate
quite profoundly is the intensely retributive ‘eye for an eye’ conception of
justice valorized on these pages. Implicit in each of these videos is a belief
in the justice of retribution. Indeed, the message put forward by many
just deserts videos is that retribution is justice.
Just deserts videos are further redolent of another ideological tenant of
fight pages: the belief that the individual, rather than the state, should be
the primary vehicle for resolving disputes and dispensing justice. This
belief that individuals may ‘take the law into their own hands’ and engage
in illegal acts to uphold the greater good of punishing a wrongdoer, was
pervasive on the fight pages I examined. Moreover, it played a key part in
legitimizing much of the violence they curated. On these pages, it was
 From Violence of the Reel to Real Violence 35

also a belief that appeared to be predicated upon a lack of faith or trust in

official social control mechanisms, which were frequently portrayed as
ineffectual, unjust or corrupt. Further, it was a belief entangled in the
very particular code of masculinity idealized by these pages; a code that
valorizes strength, toughness, physicality, competitiveness, violence and
the repression of emotions.
Much of the non-violent content posted on these pages was tailored,
often very explicitly, for men. An example of this was the plethora of gym
related content on fight pages that featured footage of men lifting heavy
weights, attempting personal bests and pushing bodies to the limit. These
videos of men in the process of developing hard muscular physiques serve
to illustrate three attributes these pages hold up as being integral to mas-
culinity: toughness, physicality and male competitiveness. In pushing
their bodies close to failing point in the pursuit of strength, the gym-­
goers in these videos demonstrate great physical and emotional tough-
ness: the capacity to withstand pain and adversity, and remain stoic in the
face of hardship. A similar display of toughness appears in fight videos
themselves, where participants who demonstrate strength, fortitude and
a high pain threshold were often praised by page administrators and com-
menters for their resilience.
On the pages I followed, demonstrating this form of toughness was a
necessary condition to demonstrating one’s masculinity, and by correla-
tion, distancing oneself from femininity, which was regularly constructed
by page administrators and commenters as emotive, weak and ineffec-
tual. Failing to demonstrate such toughness or, fighting dishonourably
would frequently result in users or administrators labelling an individual
a ‘pussy’—a gendered insult that enforces a particular vision of masculin-
ity (see James 1998). The most effective way to avoid being labelled a
pussy on these pages was through displaying physical mastery in risky
activities.4 In the eyes of many page users, engaging in such feats exhibits
both courage and physical ability. Like bare-knuckle brawling, lifting
extremely heavy weights and engaging in other impressive gym feats are
activities rooted in physicality—a concern that cut across most of the
content hosted on these pages. There was, consequently, a notable privi-
leging of physicality over intellectuality on these pages which emphasized
36 2 Breaking the First Two Rules of Fight Club

the ability to ‘step up’ and display physical prowess as a requisite of mas-
culine identity.
Weight lifting is, of course, not an innately competitive enterprise.
Filming it, and valorising impressive quantitative ‘personal bests’ under-
taken in the presence of other less capable individuals does, however,
frame it as such. In such instances, weight lifters are in competition not
only with themselves but also with those who view their pursuits. Like
many of the other acts recorded and hosted on fight pages, weight lifting
is also a risk-laden act, as the series of videos depicting gym accidents
attests. This championing of competitiveness seen in weight lifting videos
is also palpable in videos depicting impressive and often risky feats under-
taken beyond the gym. In helmet-cam videos showing cyclists mountain
biking down treacherous terrain and in parkour videos showing free-­
runners scaling high buildings unaided, individuals engage in mediated
‘edgework’ (Lyng 1990) through demonstrating physical mastery in
potentially life-threatening situations.
On the pages I followed, toughness, physicality and competitiveness
were co-constitutive. ‘Toughness,’ as a quality of masculinity, directly
relates to, and indeed relies upon, strength and physical prowess. Being
tough requires a repertoire of practices aimed at honing and strengthen-
ing the body, and as such, the presence of gym videos on fight pages is
highly consonant with the scenes of violent masculine conflict they aggre-
gate. Placing these gym videos alongside bare-knuckle fight videos, it
becomes clear that fight pages promote a form of hypermasculinity that
exaggerates stereotypical masculine norms of physical strength, aggressive
competitive behaviour, finding excitement from danger and being emo-
tionally closed (see Mosher and Sirkin 1984). What these videos pre-
sented then, were scripts for ‘doing gender’ (see West and Zimmerman
1987): social routines that when cited and performed for an audience
demonstrate the actor’s alignment with a favoured code of masculinity or
femininity.
In addition to the masculine scripts embedded in fight videos and
other competitive physical practices, hypermasculinity was also valorized
through a number of symbols. One such symbol was the American pit
bull terrier. With its powerful physique, confident temperament and
association with dog fighting (see Cohen and Richardson 2002), the pit
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 His story may be quickly told for he got most of his education from
the libraries and from reading the scores of the great masters.
Having no piano he could be found daily sitting on a bench in the
park studying the Beethoven sonatas. But he loved Wagner best of
all, and held his meeting with that master his life’s greatest joy. Wolf
had composed little until after he was twenty-eight, then his writing
was feverish, interrupted only by his lapses of mind. He died in one
of these spells, of pneumonia, at 37. All his work was done in four or
five years, for of the last nine years during five of them (1890–95) he
was prostrated and often unable to speak.
 Bruckner

Among the composers around this time and later, there are but
few who have left more than a ripple on the musical ocean. Some
created a stir in their own day and even now there is hot discussion
about them among the critics, while some people are pleased and
others are not.
In those days, as now, every composer had his friends and people
who felt it to be their duty not only to stand up for their friend, but to
ridicule “the other fellow.” So it was with Brahms, for in the same
way that he was abused by those who measured him against Wagner,
his friends refused to recognize in Anton Bruckner (1824–1896) a
rival of their idol (Brahms).
Brahms was living in Vienna but he was not born there, so the
feeling was strong against him when he began to threaten the
position of the Viennese, Anton Bruckner, who though nine years
older than Brahms, was not recognized so early. There was much in
favor of Bruckner. He was a very fine musician. Themes, melodies
bubbled forth constantly like an oil-gusher, but he did not know how
or when to stop them. If he had only known how to control this
continuous flow, he might have been as great a figure as Brahms and
the story of his life been different.
It is wonderful, however, what he made of himself, for he was a
poor schoolmaster and organist who had only his natural gifts to
start with, and had little education. But he wrote symphonies by the
wholesale and they were so long that they fairly terrified conductors
to whom he brought them in the hope of having them performed. He
won his point, however, and lived to gain no small amount of
recognition. We heard several of his symphonies in America in 1924,
the hundredth anniversary of his birth in Ausfelden, Upper Austria.
He died in Vienna in 1896.
Anton Bruckner wrote during the time of the height of Richard
Wagner’s glory and the dawn of Richard Strauss’s fame, and was
eleven years younger than Wagner, whom he idolized.
 Mahler in America

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) enters at this point. It would be

difficult to make a definite statement about him, for whatever be said
for or against him, is sure to draw argument. He had been a storm-
center for many years before his death, and even afterward those
who were against him waged war quite as bitterly, while those for
him fought more valiantly than ever.
America was in the thick of this fight and many friendships of long
standing were broken on account of it. Mahler living in New York as
recently as 1908–1911 makes us realize the more fully what men of
genius have had to suffer.
Mahler was a powerful musical genius, with astounding ability to
work and amazing skill in handling his massive scores. He died at the
age of fifty-one leaving so many symphonies, choral and festival
works that it was a wonder how one man could have accomplished
that much even had he lived to be a hundred.
We marvel at his genius, but do we want to hear often works that
last for hours and hours? Some do, who can follow his themes, his
amazing treatment of them and his ingenious writing for
instruments. Others are fatigued by the length of time he dwells
upon one subject and by the length of the work itself, and they
sometimes object to his strong contrasts in light and shade. But all
this must be left to the future, the scales in which all art is weighed.
We should be thankful that America enjoyed the benefits Mahler
brought.
He made his American début as conductor at the Metropolitan
Opera House, January 1, 1908, and in 1909 he became conductor of
the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The labor was so hard, more
in trying to adjust himself to the ideas of his Board of Directors than
in the work itself, that it broke his health and he returned to his
home to die that same year.
He came here with a tremendous career behind him. It was
strange, having all his life led operas and produced them in lavish
fashion, he did not write one! But he did write many beautiful and
very difficult songs. When his works are given, it is usually made a
gala occasion, as they can only be done by the largest organizations
and with the greatest artists. The Society of the Friends of Music give
some work by Mahler each season in New York.
Gustav Mahler was born in Kalischt, Bohemia, and died in Vienna.
He studied philosophy at the Vienna University and among his
teachers of music were Julius Epstein and Anton Bruckner.
When Anton Seidl left the opera house of Prague, 1885–86, Gustav
Mahler jointly with Angelo Neumann succeeded him. He made a
great success of the Court Opera of Vienna where he was director of
the house and conductor for ten years, but he demanded nothing
short of perfection. His insistent ardor for the best in music and in its
performance caused him the greatest unhappiness and really cost
him his life.
 Max Reger

Max Reger (1873–1916) caused a stir during the latter part of the
19th century and the beginning of the 20th. His father, a
schoolmaster and good organist, wanted Max to be a schoolteacher,
but at an early age young Max began to write for piano and organ.
After hearing Die Meistersinger and Parsifal in Bayreuth (1888) he
was so stirred that he began to write big works. Reger was perhaps
most influenced by Bach, and notwithstanding his very modern ideas
he never lost sight of the old classic form which may have made his
work seem stiff and formal at times. Some of his songs are very fine
and his orchestral numbers are frequently played in America.
Max Bruch (1838–1920) was born in Berlin and besides being a
composer of chamber music, three symphonies and familiar violin
concertos, he wrote many choral works.
 Father Franck

From this period, but not from this same country, arose one of the
most important and most beautiful influences of the 19th century.
We have learned enough about the world’s great men to know that
we can never judge by appearances, unless we are keen enough to
recognize a beautiful soul when it looks through kindly eyes.
Such was the countenance of César Franck (born in Liège,
Belgium, 1820—died in Paris, 1890), often called the “French
Brahms”—but he was neither French, nor was he enough like
Brahms to have been so called. While César Franck was not French,
we may say that the entire French school of the second half of the
19th century was of his making. This, because instead of devoting
himself to playing in public and making long concert tours, he
preferred to have a quiet home life so that he could compose. This
seriously disappointed his father who had sent him from Liège to the
Paris Conservatory.
He was but five years of age when Beethoven died, but his work
throughout his entire life strongly showed the influence of the
Master of Bonn, perhaps because his first teacher in Paris was Anton
Reicha, a friend and admirer of Beethoven.
While all of Beethoven’s nine symphonies are known and played
all over the world, César Franck is known by one which is played very
often and by all orchestras. Where Beethoven wrote many sonatas
both for piano alone and for piano and violin, when we hear the
name of César Franck, we immediately think of the one famous
sonata for violin and piano which was so popular that it was also
arranged for violoncello. This was written in very free and practically
new form.
César Franck has written a number of fine works for piano and for
orchestra, and for stringed instruments, but when it comes to organ
works, it would take a large volume to tell of them. Most pianists play
the Prelude, Aria and Finale, also the Prelude, Chorale and Fugue,
just as nearly all the violinists play the sonata, which are
masterpieces. Being deep in church music, and also a very religious
man it was perhaps natural that among his best known works should
be Les Béatitudes for orchestra, chorus and soloists, and
Redemption, a work sung frequently by the Oratorio Societies of
America and Europe. It was d’Indy who said: “In France, symphonic
music originated with the school of César Franck.” There were not,
however, many symphonies, but he was a master in the symphonic
poem. The best known among these are Les Éolides (The Æolides),
Les Djinns on Victor Hugo’s splendid poem of that name and Le
Chasseur Maudit (The Accursed Hunter). Also very well known is
the piano quintet, and we hear sometimes the Symphonic Variations
for piano and orchestra.
 Franck at the Paris Conservatory

César Franck was different from most composers, for his father,
like Father Mozart, was very determined that he should be a pianist
and took the boy on a concert tour when he was only ten years of age!
He gave concerts throughout Belgium, and at fourteen his father
took him with his brother Joseph to the Paris Conservatory, where
later he became a distinguished professor.
There are many examples in life where a talent runs away with its
possessor. So it was with young César, who, after only a year’s
schooling, entered the concours or competition. He covered himself
with glory in the piano piece he had to play, but when he was tested
for reading at sight, it flashed through his head how funny it would
be to transpose the piece three notes lower! And so he did, without a
mistake! But the judges were so horrified that he should dare do
anything different from what was expected that they decided not to
give him the prize because he had broken the rules! But, Cherubini,
our old acquaintance there was great enough to know what the boy
had done, and through his influence a special prize was created for
César Franck called the Grand Prix d’Honneur which has never,
since then, been conferred upon anyone!
César Franck was very mild and sweet in nature but when it came
to his music he was almost rebellious in his independence. To
understand the degree of his daring you must know what a concours
means.
The graduating classes of the Paris Conservatory are drawn up to
play their pieces and to receive the criticism of the judges, and the
prizes. They all play the same thing so the judges can tell exactly how
each compares with the other. Five of the most famous musicians of
the world are selected and they sit in judgment. Imagine this
terrifying ordeal! A couple of years after the first occurrence, César
Franck had to enter an organ competition, and again his genius got
away from his judgment. He was expected to improvise a sonata on
one subject given him by the judges and a fugue on another subject.
Franck passed in very orderly fashion through the first part, but
when it came to the fugue he thought how amusing it would be to
work the sonata subject into the fugue subject, a feat which startled
these wise judges by its colossal daring and the stupendous manner
in which he accomplished it. But did they give him the first prize?
Not they! Talk about “Red Tape”—he had not followed the rules and
all he received out of the brilliant feat was a second prize! But the
world got César Franck.
 Composer, Teacher, Organist

We little realize how a tiny deed may influence the world! We may
almost reckon that a kind-hearted priest was responsible for what
César Franck became as a composer! After he had had the wonderful
musical training at the Conservatory he refused to travel as a concert
artist, but wanted to remain at home and marry. This separated him
completely from his father. Besides wanting his son to play, he
objected to his marrying an actress when he was twenty-six. Here is
where the priest first befriended him, for he performed the ceremony
that made them man and wife.
But the days of revolution in Paris (1848) were upon them and
pupils did not come in great numbers. Poverty such as Franck had
never known faced him and his bride. But his good friend the priest
was called to a church and he immediately appointed César Franck
as organist. The instrument was very fine and his happiness was
complete for he loved church services above everything. This brought
him directly under the musical influence of Bach, which after all, was
the greatest in his life. Later he became organist of Saint Clothilde
where the organ was even finer and his composing hours were fairly
absorbed by writing for the organ.
The programs given by concert-organists are usually divided
between Bach and César Franck, with a few numbers by Alexandre
Guilmant, the great French organist, Charles Marie Widor, Theodore
Dubois and a few other Frenchmen.
With all the composition that this grand old man of musical France
left behind him, he left a still greater thing in the young men who
were his pupils, some of whom were among the most important
figures in the late 19th century.
It is a singular fact that César Franck died almost exactly as did
two of his most famous pupils, Ernest Chausson and Emmanuel
Chabrier. The former was killed in the Bois de Boulogne while riding
a bicycle and Chabrier was killed by a fall from a horse. Their beloved
professor was knocked down by an omnibus, and although he
seemed to recover and continue with his lessons and composing, he
became ill from the effects and died a few months later, in his 68th
year.
During this last illness he wanted to get out of bed to try three new
chorales for organ, which he read through day after day as the end
approached. This was the last music from his pen for the
manuscripts were lying beside him when the priest gave him the last
rites of the Catholic Church.
If one could sum up the outstanding features of César Franck’s
music, they would be nobility and lofty spirit, true reflections of his
unfaltering religious faith.
 Franck’s Pupils

César Franck did more than just devote teaching hours to his
pupils. He had them come to his home, and surrounded by youth and
enthusiasm, his own power grew greater. They played their new
works for each other and for the Master, and out of this was born the
Société Nationale (National Society). It swung both the public taste
and the composers out of the light, frivolous opera of the day into a
love for, and a support of French symphonic and chamber music.
The Society was founded in 1871, just following the Franco-Prussian
war and was a protest against the German musical domination in
France, in fact it was a direct aim against Wagner. In spite of the fact
that Franck was influenced by Bach, Beethoven and Wagner, he
worked sincerely to develop the classic French school outside of
opera form.
Another great national institution which grew out of the influence
of César Franck was the famous Schola Cantorum founded by
Vincent d’Indy and Charles Bordes, his pupils, and Alexandre
Guilmant.
Among the Franck pupils in addition to d’Indy and Bordes may be
mentioned, as a few of the foremost, Alexis de Castillon (1838–1873),
Emmanuel Chabrier (1842–1894), Henri Duparc (1848) famous for
some of the most beautiful songs in all French music, Ernest
Chausson (1855–1899), Guillaume Lekeu (1870–1894), of the
Netherlands, and composer of Hamlet, a tone poem and other
pieces, Pierre de Bréville (1861), Guy Ropartz (1864), Gabriel Pierné,
Paul Vidal, and Georges Marty.
But his influence did not stop here, for it touched many, including
such close friends as Alexandre Guilmant and Eugene Ysaye, the
renowned violinist, as well known in America as in Europe. He was a
countryman of César Franck and played for its first performance
anywhere, Franck’s violin sonata dedicated to him.
Alberic Magnard (1865–1914), was related musically to Franck
through d’Indy his chief teacher. Magnard met death by the enemy in
his own home during the war.
 We could fill a volume concerning these interesting men, but we
must continue our musical journey. From among them, however, we
must learn a little more about Vincent d’Indy, not only because he is
a great composer and teacher, but he has taught many Americans.
 Vincent d’Indy

Vincent d’Indy (1851) a musician of finest qualities and almost

countless achievements, is a cultured and educated gentleman. He
was brought up by his grandmother, a woman of education and
refinement, for his mother died when he was very young. He
therefore learned to love culture and elegance early in his life, but
this did not prevent him from doing the sort of work which make
men a benefit to art and to mankind. In addition to being a musician,
he is a skilled critic and writer, also a great teacher and organizer,
proof of which may be found in what he has done for France, indeed,
for the world, in the Schola Cantorum. He has written many books as
well as magazine and newspaper articles and an immense number of
musical compositions. He was born in Paris and was a member of the
Garde-Mobile during the Franco-Prussian war.
Until the time that he left home for military service he studied the
piano with Louis Dièmer, a noted pianist and teacher of Paris, and
harmony with Marmontel and Lavignac, both equally famous. Upon
his return from war service, his days with César Franck began, and
these were precious hours for both the pupil and the teacher who
recognized the young man’s power.
He made several trips to Germany, the first in 1873 when he
carried to Brahms the César Franck score of Redemption sent with
the composer’s compliments. At this time he also met Liszt and
Wagner, and later he attended the Bayreuth performances including
the world première (first performance) of Parsifal. His musical
activities led him from the organ loft to becoming tympani (kettle-
drums) player in the Colonne Orchestra, where he went, no doubt, to
learn the instruments of the orchestra and how to handle them. He
found out, because he is most skilled in writing for orchestra.
He has had many prominent pupils, and it is his pride and his
ambition to continue along the lines laid down by César Franck. He
has had more than ordinary success as a conductor going to many
countries to conduct his own compositions. He came twice to
America as guest conductor of the Boston Symphony appearing with
that organization in its home and also in New York.
 Vincent d’Indy, following the ideal of Franck is largely responsible
for the return of music in his country to symphony, from which it
had strayed far. In this period there was a general feeling to bring
music back to classical form. This young school was doing it in
France as Brahms had done it in Germany and the result was that
many composers wrote symphonies. If we look through musical
history since then, we will find that the revival of a feeling for the
classics has helped to make the latter part of the 19th century very
rich.
Although d’Indy has written several operas, there has been no
attempt to give them in this country, which is strange because it is
very difficult to get operas that are worth producing at the
Metropolitan Opera House or in Chicago, the only other city in
America that supports its own opera on a large scale.
D’Indy is living in Paris (1925), where the life around him bristles
with study, achievement and ambition. He is as much of an
inspiration to his pupils as was his own teacher, but this is the 20th
century, in which conditions, and men, are different from those of
the past! He has not stood still but has gone steadily ahead, although
his influence upon the very modern writers must have been healthy
and restraining, notwithstanding the fact that only a few years ago he
was regarded as a modern.
 Gabriel Fauré

In the musical history of France, the name of Gabriel Fauré (1845–

1924) looms high. He was born in Pamiers, and was taught by the
Dean of French musical folk, Camille Saint-Saëns. Like all the
musicians of France, no matter whether or not they planned to use it
as a profession, they devoted as much time to the organ as to the
piano, and most of them became famous organists even though they
had not planned to be organists. For this reason France has more
great organists and organ compositions to offer than any other
country of the world.
Gabriel Fauré became the organist of Rennes and later went to
Saint Sulpice and Saint Honoré, and finally he became organist of
the Madeleine in 1896. These churches are among the greatest in
France, and to be organist in any one of them means that he is a
great musician.
Fauré had honors showered upon him for he gave his country
some of the most brilliant works contributed by any of her sons. In
France the compositions of Gabriel Fauré are highly valued, but with
the exception of a few songs, are not known in America, the more the
pity. Fauré is better known here as the head of the Conservatory in
which his life was spent until his very recent death. He went there to
share the classes in composition, counterpoint and fugue with André
Gédalge, succeeding Jules Massenet, and in 1905 Fauré succeeded
Theodore Dubois as Director of the Conservatory. Still more honors
heaped upon him made him a member of the Académie, for which no
one can be named until there is a vacancy. He was therefore the
successor to Ernest Reyer.
In 1910 the world was much stirred when Gabriel Fauré was made
Commander of the Legion of Honor, a distinction given only when a
man has done something very great.
In addition to these tributes to his standing in the community and
his achievements as an artist, he took numerous prizes for his
compositions of which there were three operas, much incidental
music, symphonies, a well known violin and piano sonata, some fine
chamber music and much music for the organ and for choruses. But
beyond the appreciation always shown Fauré for his larger works, he
will always be loved in France because he was regarded as the French
Schubert, so lovely were his melodies and so lavishly did he write.
He kept pure and true the ideals and characteristics of French
music, more so, indeed, than did many who may be better known to
the concert-goers of this country.
 English Composers in Classical Forms

While the Germans, French and Austrians were writing, England

had composers, who although not so famous, nevertheless kept
music alive in England.
Sir William Sterndale Bennett (1816–1875) with his many
orchestral and choral works of which his cantata, The Woman of
Samaria, is best known; Sir George A. Macfarren (1813–1887) with
operas and oratorios, especially his cantata, Rebekah; his brother,
Walter Cecil Macfarren (1826–1905), conductor, and composer of
orchestral music; Sir John Stainer (1840–1901), organist, composer
of very lovely anthems, and much church music, and Professor of
Music at Oxford; Sir Frederick Bridge (1844–1924), organist of
Westminster Abbey, writer of text-books on music, and of anthems,
part songs and oratorios; Sir Arthur C. Mackenzie (1847), composer
of many works including two Scotch symphonies and a cantata, The
Cottar’s Saturday Night; Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry (1848–
1918), Professor of Music at Oxford after Stainer, and writer of many
important books on music and of compositions in many forms;
Arthur Goring Thomas (1851–1892), who wrote operas, cantatas,
and many songs; Sir Frederick Hymen Cowen (1852), with operas,
cantatas, symphonies and chamber music; Sir Charles Villiers
Stanford (1853–1924), born in Dublin, Ireland, Professor of Music at
Cambridge since 1887, student of Irish folk music, and writer of
chamber music and short pieces, also of valuable books on musical
history and other musical subjects; Edward German (1862), famous
for his Henry VIII Dances, much incidental theatre music, and an
operetta, The Moon Fairies, in which he used the last libretto written
by Sullivan’s inimitable partner, Sir W. S. Gilbert; and Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912), an Englishman of African descent,
whose music for chorus and for orchestra is based on American
Indian legend, and on Negro folk songs.
And living today is Edward William Elgar (1857), the dean of
English composers. While not adding to the new music, he is famous
for many pieces, among which are The Dream of Gerontius, The
Apostles, other oratorios, symphonies, and his march, Pomp and
Circumstance.
 Women Writers in England

Among the women in England, Dame Ethel Smyth (Dame is an

honorary title in England) (1858) is known for her opera The
Wreckers, and her comic opera The Boatswain’s Mate. Some of her
operas have been performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in
New York and at Covent Garden, London. Besides she has written
songs for the Suffrage Movement, incidental music, and music in
large forms.
Liza Lehman (1862–1918), wrote In a Persian Garden, Nonsense
Songs, and The Daisy Chain, which made her famous.
“Poldowski,” Lady Dean Paul, daughter of Wieniawski, the Polish
composer and violinist, has written piano pieces and lovely songs in
Debussy style. She has had considerable influence in getting the work
of the younger British composers and her countryman,
Szymanowski, heard in London.
Rebecca Clarke, a young Englishwoman, has written several
chamber music works which place her in the foremost rank of
women composers. On two occasions she received “honorable
mention” in the Berkshire chamber music prize competition offered
by Mrs. F. S. Coolidge, at Pittsfield, Massachusetts.