ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces some of the ways in which the meaning of crime circulates within the late modern mediascape. Modern society is saturated with collective meaning and suffused with symbolic uncertainty as media messages and cultural traces swirl, circulate, and vacillate. Criminals and the crimes they commit likewise seem always on the move, criss-crossing the contradictions of a globalized political economy, other times tangled up in their own mediated representations. As with Stan Cohen's mods and rockers, today's spirals of crime and culture continue to wind and unwind – only faster and more furiously. The phenomenon of unexpurgated war footage as internet entertainment illustrates an essential point for cultural criminologists: the way in which late-modern mediated violence contributes to the reconstitution of everyday reality itself. The terms of cultural and political engagement, the meaning of crime and resistance and control, remain endlessly unsettled.
