Expanding upon Web Sleuths: The new wave of true crime media and its citizen detectives

The project will contribute to the expanding area of cultural and critical criminology through a theoretical and empirical exploration of the modern phenomenon of web sleuths. Web sleuths, citizen detectives or armchair detectives, are little researched by criminologists, as the occurrence has only been recently composed amongst academia (Yardley et al, 2018). Websleuths are highly debated within society, as an increasing number of individuals engage in low-level detective work, feeding their need for True-crime infotainment (Seltzer, 2008). Marked by a technological shift, these citizens spend their free time focusing on detecting unidentified bodies and missing persons, amongst publicly available information (Stokes, 2018). Their intelligence includes 'searching for information, uploading documents, images, and videos, commenting, debating, theorising, analysing, identifying suspects, and attempting to engage with law enforcement and other organisations and individuals connected to the cases' (Yardley et al, 2018:82). The fascination with true crime dates to the seventeenth century when public executions began to feature as entertainment (Turnbull, 2010). Victorians were also fascinated with identifying deviants and distinguishing their criminal abnormalities (Jermyn, 2012). However today, neoliberal social change has trigged a particular development, in what appears otherwise, a century-old tradition (Yardley et al, 2018). As fascination now includes pro-active detection by audiences, completed in a digital world under a different social-political context, which is what the project tends to investigate.