ABSTRACT
Internet communications about crimes and punishments performatively construct new collectivities, in a process which begins to reconfigure the modern outlines of penality. This chapter explores internet communications around several notorious murder cases, with an eye to their invocations of group membership and exclusion. A century ago, Emile Durkheim argued that through outraged talk about scandals and crimes, members of a community are bonded together. In his theory, the expression of angered feelings and hostile opinions formed a constitutive link between shared sentiments and group solidarity:
We have only to notice what happens, particularly in a small town, when some moral scandal has just occurred. Men stop each other on the street, they visit each other, they seek to come together to talk of the event and to wax indignant in common. From all the similar impressions which are exchanged, and the anger that is expressed, there emerges a unique emotion, more or less determinate according to the circumstances, which emanates from no specific person, but from everyone. This is the public wrath.
