Moral panics and digital-media logic: Notes on a changing research agenda

Abstract

This research note critically comments on the lack of attention that moral panic scholars are devoting to the ways in which changing digital media formats are reshaping the dynamics of interaction involved in public claims-making, modes of audience engagement, and techniques of regulation and control. Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton’s seminal deconstruction of conventional moral panic studies is used as a point of departure to supplement the logic of mass mediation with insights into some of the structuring principles that ground the logic of digital mediation.