What’s the deal with ‘websleuthing’? News media representations of amateur detectives in networked spaces

Paper:

Yardley, E., Lynes, A. G. T., Wilson, D., & Kelly, E. (2016). What’s the deal with ‘websleuthing’? News media representations of amateur detectives in networked spaces. Crime, Media, Culture, 1741659016674045. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659016674045

Discussion leader: Kurt Luther

Summary:

This article explores media representations (i.e. news coverage) of online amateur sleuths or websleuths. The article is written by criminologists and published in the Crime Media Culture journal, and its focus is specifically on websleuths seeking to solve crimes, as opposed to other types of investigations. The authors assert that this type of online activity is important but has seen insufficient research attention from the criminology research community.

The authors review related work in two main areas. First they review studies of amateur sleuths with respect to concepts like vigilantism and “digilantism” (online vigilantes). They acknowledge this research is fairly sparse. The second body of literature the authors review focuses on a perspective from cultural criminology. This work considers how websleuth activities intersect with broader notions of infotainment and participatory culture, and the authors make connections to popular crime television shows and radio programs.

The bulk of the article focuses on a content analysis of news articles on websleuthing. The authors employ a method called Ethnographic Content Analysis (ECA). They begin by gathering a corpus of 97 articles by searching keywords like “web sleuths” and “cyber detectives.” They read through the articles to identify key phrases regarding content and context, cluster them, and then finally perform quantitative analysis to illustrate frequency and proportion.

In the results, the authors provide a big-picture view of media coverage of websleuthing. They describe how coverage has increased over time and how most publications are non-US but cover activities that occur in the US. They characterize 17 types of crimes investigated by websleuths (homicide, property offences, and terrorism most common). They note a wide variety of 44 online spaces where websleuthing happens, with the popular social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit foremost. They describe a rich variety of websleuthing practices and differentiate group and solo sleuths, as well as organized vs. spontaneous. They also discuss some motivations for websleuthing and some drawbacks, and note that little data was available on sleuth identities, though their professions seem to be diverse. Finally, they characterize websleuth interactions with law enforcement, noting that professional investigators often hesitate to acknowledge sleuth contributions.

In the discussion and conclusion, the authors note the tension between amateur and professional detectives despite increasing interaction between them. They also note that technology has broken down traditional boundaries allowing the public to more actively participate and crime solving. Finally, they note a similar blurring of boundaries between crime and entertainment enabled by popular media that increasingly invites its audience to participate actively in the experience.

Reflections:

This article had some nice strengths. It provides a nice overview of web sleuthing that’s focused on the domain of crime solving. As the authors note, this was a broader area than I expected. The authors provided many good examples, both during the literature review and in reporting results, of web sleuthing events and communities that I wasn’t previously familiar with.

Not being very familiar with criminology research, I thought it was interesting that the authors found this topic had not yet received enough research attention in that community. Although my own interest in web sleuthing is broader than crime, I appreciated the clear focus of this article. The choice to focus the analysis on news coverage provided a convenient way to give the reader a sense of how this phenomenon has impacted broader society and what about it is considered newsworthy. This was a helpful perspective for me, as I am approaching this phenomenon as a crowdsourcing researcher so my interests may be different from what others (i.e. the public) care about.

I admired the methods the authors used to conduct their analysis. I wasn’t previously familiar with ECA, though I’ve employed similar methods like grounded theory analysis and trace ethnography. ECA seems to offer a nice mixed-methods balance, providing flexibility to present both qualitative and quantitative results, which gives the reader a sense of overall patterns and trends as well as rich details.

I found many of the results interesting, but a few stood out. First, I thought the distinctions between organized and spontaneous web sleuthing, as well as solo vs. group investigations, were quite helpful in broadly differentiating lots of different examples. At least in terms of news coverage, I was surprised how common the solo investigations were compared to group ones. Second, I was fascinated by the variety of sleuthing activities identified by the authors. The large number and variety were interesting per se, but I also saw these as promising stepping stones for potential technological support. For almost all of these activities, I could imagine ways that we might design technology to help.

The article provided some tantalizing details here and there, but overall it provided more of a bird’s eye view of websleuthing. I would have appreciated a few more examples for many of the analyses performed by the authors. For example, I’d like to know more about exactly how websleuths interacted with law enforcement, and examples of each of the sleuthing activities.

I also wondered about how often websleuths’ activities met with success. The authors discuss positive and negative portrayals of websleuthing in the media, but this seems different from whether or not sleuths appeared to have made a valuable contribution to an investigation. From this data is seems possible to give the reader a sense for how often this phenomenon achieves its goals, at least from the perspective of the sleuths themselves.

Questions:

• What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of linking websleuthing to infotainment?
• What websleuthing activities do you think are best suited for amateurs? Which do you think they might have the most trouble with?
• Why do you think professional investigators like law enforcement might minimize or avoid referring to contributions made by websleuths?
• Why do you think media portrayals of websleuthing were more positive with respect to property crimes than homicide?
• The article notes a huge variety of online platforms that support websleuthing. What do you think are some essential features of these platforms that enable it?