Exploring the True Crime Genre: Mainstream Media vs. Internet | Study notes Statistics

I have been procrastinating. It’s the

tenth episode, which is obviously very

exciting for me. We made it to ten! I

wasn’t sure I was gonna get past three,

to be honest. Anyway. This excitement

hasn’t translated into me actually doing

anything to make the episode. I did start

off with a topic but I got side-tracked by

the fact that I couldn’t find the film I was

looking for online. Which set me off on a

YouTube rabbit hole, and long story short

– I’ve permanently ruined my algorithm.

I was looking at my recommended

videos, and I can’t even remember what

I clicked or why I clicked it, but I started

watching a channel called Nexpo – which

is short for Nightmare Expo. Nexpo has

1.5 million followers, and essentially, he

salvages odd pieces of digital ephemera

from around the internet, usually horror

adjacent, and makes videos that explore

their meaning, potential explanations

and personal theories. It’s a little bit like

sitting around a campfire listening to

ghost stories, except the person telling

them has their phone out and is asking if

you want to see crime scene photos.

What I’m trying to tell you is that a) I

don’t know why I clicked it, or why I

kept watching, and b) now my YouTube

recommendations are all like “HAUNTED

MORGUE!” in all caps with 6 exclamation

points. But the good news is, I can

actually classify all this as ‘research’

now, because while I was watching this

content, a lot of which draws from actual

Epsiode10: True Crime and YouTube

Deep Dives

crimes, I started thinking about the boom

period prestige crime documentaries are

experiencing at the moment and what

that says about us as an audience. So,

without further ado…

I’m Alex. This is Pop Culture Boner – the

podcast edition – and today, I’m thinking

about the true crime genre.

I should probably preface this by saying

that I am a person who enjoys true crime.

I remember when I was younger…

maybe around 10… mum had one of

those very cheap reads – the sort of book

that you only buy when you’re trying to

like actively carve out time for yourself

as a parent, but also you haven’t slept

for years, so you don’t want to actually

use your brain. Anyway, it was about the

Moors murders, which for the uninitiated,

involved the murder of 5 children aged

between 10 and 17 in Britain in the mid-

60s. Their bodies were hidden on the

Moors, and more than one was never

recovered. I wasn’t allowed to read it per

se, but I remember being fascinated by

the mug shots on the cover and sneaking

chapters when mum wasn’t looking. It

really cemented a sense of dread in me,

given that the victims were my age and

lost forever, but I couldn’t stop reading.

Which would become something of a

theme when the internet made grim

treasure troves of stories more readily

available. I was a delightful child; in case

you were wondering. All this is to say that

this podcast is not coming from a place

Partial preview of the text

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I have been procrastinating. It’s the tenth episode, which is obviously very exciting for me. We made it to ten! I wasn’t sure I was gonna get past three, to be honest. Anyway. This excitement hasn’t translated into me actually doing anything to make the episode. I did start off with a topic but I got side-tracked by the fact that I couldn’t find the film I was looking for online. Which set me off on a YouTube rabbit hole, and long story short

I’ve permanently ruined my algorithm. I was looking at my recommended videos, and I can’t even remember what I clicked or why I clicked it, but I started watching a channel called Nexpo – which is short for Nightmare Expo. Nexpo has 1.5 million followers, and essentially, he salvages odd pieces of digital ephemera from around the internet, usually horror adjacent, and makes videos that explore their meaning, potential explanations and personal theories. It’s a little bit like sitting around a campfire listening to ghost stories, except the person telling them has their phone out and is asking if you want to see crime scene photos. What I’m trying to tell you is that a) I don’t know why I clicked it, or why I kept watching, and b) now my YouTube recommendations are all like “HAUNTED MORGUE!” in all caps with 6 exclamation points. But the good news is, I can actually classify all this as ‘research’ now, because while I was watching this content, a lot of which draws from actual

Epsiode10: True Crime and YouTube

Deep Dives

crimes, I started thinking about the boom period prestige crime documentaries are experiencing at the moment and what that says about us as an audience. So, without further ado… I’m Alex. This is Pop Culture Boner – the podcast edition – and today, I’m thinking about the true crime genre. I should probably preface this by saying that I am a person who enjoys true crime. I remember when I was younger… maybe around 10… mum had one of those very cheap reads – the sort of book that you only buy when you’re trying to like actively carve out time for yourself as a parent, but also you haven’t slept for years, so you don’t want to actually use your brain. Anyway, it was about the Moors murders, which for the uninitiated, involved the murder of 5 children aged between 10 and 17 in Britain in the mid- 60s. Their bodies were hidden on the Moors, and more than one was never recovered. I wasn’t allowed to read it per se, but I remember being fascinated by the mug shots on the cover and sneaking chapters when mum wasn’t looking. It really cemented a sense of dread in me, given that the victims were my age and lost forever, but I couldn’t stop reading. Which would become something of a theme when the internet made grim treasure troves of stories more readily available. I was a delightful child; in case you were wondering. All this is to say that this podcast is not coming from a place

of judgment necessarily. Or at least, any judgemental tone is very evenly applied to myself. True crime as a genre isn’t new, and neither are the wildly different ways of reporting on it. Compare Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood to a show like Forensic Files, for example. Two very different pieces of media that ostensibly sit under the true crime umbrella. But despite existing as a genre forever, there’s definitely some sort of evolutionary boom happening now. There’s been a huge increase in prestige TV programming in the genre

true crime is no longer the pulpy read I picked up as a 10-year-old. It’s not necessarily shameful to admit that you spent 5 hours of your life watching content about a murder from every angle because it’s kind of in vogue. It’s won awards. People are talking about it at work. Then at the same time, there are strange little pockets of the internet dedicated to crime in much different ways. They fluctuate between devotional, investigative and morbidly curious; all of which have their own degrees of insidious undertone, depending on who’s doing what and where. So, I thought we could take a look at true crime in mainstream media, vs. true crime on the internet. What’s different and what stays the same? One of the things that hangs over the genre of true crime in the black and white land of social media discourse is a question of ethics – how ethical is it to consume the worst moments of someone’s life as a form of entertainment? Even more dubious, how ethical is it to focus on the perpetrators of these crimes themselves? And look, when you lay it out like that in 140 characters or less on Twitter, the answer seems pretty cut and dry – it’s a fucked-up thing to use as a form of entertainment. But like I said, I’m not here to paint with a judgemental brush, at least not completely. Generally, I think human beings have an interest in the grim because we use it as a comparison point for our own lives – a sort of proof that we’re going OK, and a note for what to avoid. If you’re listening to this and going “But Alex, I hate true crime and horror and gore! This definitely isn’t me!”, ask yourself when the last time you dragged yourself away from the 24-hour news cycle was. What’s that? Never? You’ve never successfully dragged yourself away from the 24-hour news cycle? Congratulations. You’re just as morbid as the rest of us. It’s kind of tempting to get into a discussion on audiences when trying to think through true crime. Because when you look at the audience statistics, it’s a genre that is overwhelmingly popular with women. There’s a 2010 study by staff at the University of Illinois which indicates that some 70% of reviews left on true crime books on Amazon are left by women. Given that women are often more likely to be the victims or survivors of violent crime, it feels like there’s a line to draw there. Like maybe women want to know what’s possible in the world so that they have a better chance of surviving it. Or something. But human motivations are complicated, and like I said, the genre is old. Like one of the interesting things I learned while researching this episode was that way back in 1897, William Randolph Hearst, in a bid to sell more newspapers than Joseph Pulitzer, formed something called

world consequences is something that’s really interesting to me, particularly in the aftermath of my deep YouTube rabbit hole. Beyond impacting the legal proceedings for those already in jail, shows like Serial, which feature a particularly intimate tone, also had the consequence of turning some audience members into amateur sleuths. They viewed the ambiguous nature of the crime as laid out by the show as somewhat of a challenge – they could investigate along with the show, develop their own theories, and do their own research. This is, of course, not necessarily the intention of the show – Serial presented itself as a serious, in depth look at a crime and its consequences. But the ambiguity served not only to make the show incredibly addictive, it also served to generate a type of fandom. And that fandom operated in the way that most do – they examined and re-examined the content, put forward their own ideas, argued and participated. It seems weird use a word like fandom in this context. Online fandoms for TV are normally discussing fictional characters

making corrections, projecting their feelings. The source material becomes like a puzzle that fandoms are trying to solve. They pull it apart over and over again to find new angles and eventually make their own version of perfect. This kind of intense online fandom applied to true crime has the same effect – people dissect the evidence presented to them over and over to try and reach a conclusion. Except instead of writing Sex and the City fan fiction where they’re a group of lesbians trying to not sleep with each other’s exes or whatever, people are driving the route the killer took on the morning of the murder to try and prove that it can’t be done. That’s not to say that there haven’t been online fandoms for true crime prior to this, though I doubt they would characterise themselves that way and honestly, I don’t know if it’s really fair for me to do so either. True crime communities can be generally divided into two categories
- those concerned with the victims and those concerned with the perpetrators. The first category are the type of puzzle solvers I mentioned earlier – they seem to be motivated largely by a sense of justice, they want to right a wrong or reach a conclusion. I think the most famous example of this type of person is Michelle McNamara. Michelle ran the blog True Crime Diary for many years. True Crime Diary’s mission according to its website was: “…to find the angle others have overlooked… True Crime Diary is not interested in looking back at notorious criminals and saying, wow. We’re interested in looking at unfolding cases and asking, who?” If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Michelle McNamara was responsible for several major breaks in the Golden State Killer case. Joseph James DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer, was a former police officer responsible for over 100 burglaries, at least 50 known rapes and 13 murders in California from 1973 to 1986. McNamara was fixated on his crimes because there was such an overwhelming amount of evidence, including DNA, fingerprints and voice recordings, but no conviction. Before her death in 2016, she was working on a

book, which would eventually be released in 2018 as I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. I’ve obviously read the book – I wasn’t lying about being into true crime – and in it she references the hundreds of internet sleuths who helped her cause. People whose motivations were simultaneously a sense of justice and a burning need to get to put all the pieces together to reach a conclusion. In fact, part of her book was finished posthumously by one of these self-styled digital detectives. Though this is a famous case with a very public outcome, it’s not an isolated online community. It’s an example of something that is surprisingly widespread. But when public interest in tweaked by something that has become as much of a cultural phenomenon as Serial did, the amateur sleuthing has less desirable consequences, with people reaching out to witnesses and family members who initially refused to participate in the series, and harassing public officials to follow up their own leads. Then there’s the flip side – people who are primarily concerned with the perpetrators. The people who look back at the notorious criminals and say wow, as True Crime Diary puts it. Although often its less of a wow, and more of the kind of adoration typically reserved for attractive A-List celebrities. Ryan Broll calls this phenomenon ‘Dark Fandom’ – that is “communities of fans who identify with or otherwise celebrate those who have committed heinous acts, such as mass or serial murderers”. Broll’s work is specifically examining self- identified ‘Columbiners’ - that’s people who are obsessed or enamoured with the Columbine school shooting of 1999. Broll notes that members of this online community participated in it in ways that mirrored more traditional fandoms, where they divided out the two shooters into character archetypes and developed theories in relation to the massacre. They had developed a whole community on Reddit around their idolisation of this specific school shooting. Now, I realise that to those of you who are not Extremely Online, the idea of that kind of community existing on a fairly popular social media network is probably so abhorrent that it borders on incomprehensible. I want to assure you that you’re probably never actually that far away from it. I did some accidental clicking on Tumblr once and about three steps from the completely innocuous place I started, I ended up on a blog that had Dylan Roof, the Nazi piece of shit who killed 9 people at a bible study in one of the oldest black churches in Charleston, in one of those flower crown edits people usually do for boy bands with the caption “baby boy”. These people just exist, and are happily publicly posting on the internet. What I thought was particularly interesting about Broll’s study was that many of the people involved in the community seemed to be people who were coming to terms with the consequences of Columbine – they were American school students who had learned about the event in school and were fascinated by its impact on their daily lives; or they were people who were young at the time of the crime and who had been deeply impacted by seeing the waves of reporting. It may not be the case for every so-called dark fandom, but there definitely appears to be an element of trying to make it make sense. I can’t tell whether I remember

This episode premiered on 12th August

Episode written by Alex Johnson and produced by Wes Fahey. Theme tune by Wes Fahey. (Soundcloud: lee snipes) Visit us: Web: www.popcultureboner.com Twitter: @popcultureboner Instagram: @popcultureboner

Exploring the True Crime Genre: Mainstream Media vs. Internet, Study notes of Statistics

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