Book Review: Introducing vigilant audiences. Open Book Publishers by D. Trottier, R. Gabdulhakov and Q. Huang

Abstract

The use of the internet as a medium for public discourse is a well-covered subject, including the role social media platforms play in facilitating and shaping that discourse. More generally, the proliferation of communication technologies in postindustrial society has functioned to blur the boundaries between the physical and online worlds. Like politicians such as former President Donald Trump, several precipitating factors have played an instrumental role in legitimizing social media as a platform for “robust” discourse. However, this type of discourse is not limited to the political sphere, with the internet serving as a place where—under the guise of accountability—a collective (often anonymous) engages in digital vigilantism or digilantism. It is this digilantism that is the central focus of Daniel Trottier, Rashid Gabdulhakov, and Qian Huang’s Introducing Vigilant Audiences (2020), an edited collection that examines the current state of research on digital vigilantism. Trottier et al. assembled a diverse cross-section of contributors in Introducing Vigilant Audiences, allowing for a truly holistic and interdisciplinary approach to a subject matter that demands it. The collection is generally divided into two sets of chapters: first, examining the nexus between entertainment and digilantism and, later, a subsequent set of chapters looking at issues such as citizenship, nationalism, and far-right populism. This second category of chapters covers, in part, terrain that has been extensively covered in existing research on the faror alt-right. However, in the context of Introducing Vigilant Audiences, the chapters from authors like Tanner, Crosset and Campana (pp. 129–160) and Milbrandt (pp. 215–258) take on new dimensions, understood in the context and from the perspective of vigilantism more broadly and reflecting enduring patterns of behavior that have been transformed by the internet but—importantly—not invented on the Internet. The contributors in Introducing Vigilant Audiences focus on examples of digilantism from various parts of the world, reflecting the geographically diverse nature of contributors. Furthermore, this collection goes beyond locale, as the contributors come from varying academic disciplines like computer ethics (Douglas) and media and communication (Driessen) to sociology (Milbrandt) and criminology (Plesnicar). The interdisciplinary tenor of the contributors shines through, making Introducing Vigilant Audiences a book that is not constrained by intradisciplinary myopia. This seems to have been a purposeful decision on Trottier et al.’s part, noting early in their introduction, “vigilant audiences entail a range of phenomena, span geographic area and vary in their motivations as well as their affiliations” (p. 1). From a criminal justice perspective, there are a number of valuable contributions in Introducing Vigilant Audiences, particularly toward the end of the collection. Early chapters, like Driessen’s work on digilantism in online pop-culture fandoms (pp. 25–48) and Linton’s timely research on the contested nature of “comedy” on the internet (pp. 77–106), have perhaps more tenuous resonance for Book Reviews