Abstract
Drawing on a survey of 205 fight page users, this chapter examines why, how and to what end individuals view footage of bare-knuckle street violence. As I will illustrate, participants’ reasons for viewing fight videos were many and varied: entertainment, amusement, intrigue, righteous justice, boredom alleviation, self-validation, self-defence learning and risk awareness. Through analysing these different modes of spectating bare-knuckle violence on fight pages, I show that, in order to understand why individuals use these pages, we must examine how they read, and affectively respond to viewing specific forms of bare-knuckle street violence.
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Notes
- 1.
Two participants listed ‘hood’ fights as their preferred form of fight video. As discussed in the previous chapter, the terms ‘hood’ fight or ‘ghetto’ fight are racially loaded terms primarily used by fight page viewers to refer to violent altercations between poor African Americans.
- 2.
Of the participants who indicated that they preferred to view fight videos featuring female participants, three labelled such altercations ‘girl fights,’ and one labelled them ‘women fights.’ As discussed in the previous chapter, this term is used by fight page viewers to refer to fights between (typically young) women, rather than to fights between female children. Notably, of these two respondents who designated ‘girl’ fights as their preferred content, one was one the few female participants in this study’s survey.
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Wood, M.A. (2018). Unpacking a Punch. In: Antisocial Media. Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63985-7_3
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