The crime-as-communication approach: Challenging the idea of online routine activities by taking communication seriously

Abstract

In mediated environments, a simple but important understanding holds true: there is plenty of communication without crime, yet no crime without communication. Put differently, the criminal act in technology-mediated environments is always concurrently a communicative act. Nevertheless, descriptions of online activities and their role in studies of cybercrime often only amount to what can be considered lazy signifiers: online banking is not a single activity, but a series of requests for information made to, and responses received from, servers through the use of one’s networked device. The user’s interpretations of the content form the basis for deciding on the next action(-as-communication). Available theoretical approaches, notably the routine activities approach, lack this type of specificity in considering as a meaningful whole something that is better understood as its constitutive elements – messages in communicative exchanges. Hence, the current theoretical status quo hinders rather than contributes to cybercrime-related thought and research. Rather than fitting a ‘terrestrial’ understanding of action onto acts of cybercrime, the crime-as-communication approach instead builds a communication-based foundation for understanding action in technology-mediated environments. By making explicit the communication processes that constitute cybercrime, crime-as-communication offers a principled way of analysing mediated crime specifically, and action in mediated environments more broadly. This approach has practical implications for research and policy-making concerning economic crimes like fraud and intellectual property violations, interpersonal crimes such as harassing pursuit and criminal threats, computer offences like unauthorised access and offences against peace and public order, including incitement to hatred and disinformation or propaganda for war.