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‘I just wanna see someone get knocked the fuck out’: Spectating affray on Facebook fight pages

Mark A. WoodUniversity of Melbourne, Australia

AbstractSpurred by the advent of the Internet and the camera phone, in the early 21st century street fighting met the information superhighway. Today, one of the key vehicles accelerating this turn are Facebook fight pages: user-generated content aggregation pages that publicly host footage of street fights, and other forms of bare-knuckle violence on the popular social networking site. Drawing on observational data collected from five popular fight pages, and survey data from 205 fight page users, this article explores the different forms of bare-knuckle violence hosted on these online domains and their users’ motivations for viewing it. Through doing so, it examines eleven distinct modes of spectating bare-knuckle violence on fight pages: entertainment, consumptive deviance, righteous justice, amusement, self-affirmation, nostalgia, boredom alleviation, intrigue, self-defence training and risk awareness. Additionally, I argue that to understand these modes of spectating bare-knuckle violence, we have to address the codes of masculinity that underlie not only much of the violence hosted on fight pages, but also spectators’ readings of these events.

KeywordsAntisocial media, Facebook, fight videos, online violence, masculinity, modes of spectatorship, reception studies

IntroductionSince rising to become one of the world’s most popular social media sites, Facebook has received considerable criticism for its permissive stance towards violent content (Satter, 2013). Whilst much of this criticism has concerned the presence of extremely graphic violent material on the site, such as footage of beheadings (Oreskovic, 2013; Sanghani, 2013), Facebook’s permissive stance on violent material has also seen the growth of user-generated pages dedicated to curating more quotidian forms of violence. Among these are fight pages: user-generated Facebook pages dedicated to hosting recordings of street fights and other forms of public violence. Such pages

Corresponding author:Mark A. Wood, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville VI 3010, Australia. Email: woo@student.unimelb.edu.au

667437 CMC0010.1177/1741659016667437Crime, Media, CultureWoodresearch-article2016

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represent an example of what I have elsewhere termed antisocial media: participatory social media domains dedicated to aggregating and sympathetically curating footage of criminalised acts (Wood, 2016). Through these pages, videos of street fights poached by page administrators are narrowcast directly into the News Feeds of subscribers and archived for future access, offering users unparalleled opportunities for viewing raw, uncensored footage of bare-knuckle public violence.

Whilst the consumption of violent media content has received considerable attention from researchers – particularly from the various media effects traditions (see Anderson et al., 2003) – the consumption of street fight videos via fight pages represents an under-researched and under-theorised form of violent media consumption. Moreover, the majority of studies into violent media consumption have focused exclusively on the issue of effects, and have neglected questions sur-rounding why individuals view specific forms of violent content, and how they interpret it (see Goldstein, 1998). All three of these issues are the province of media and visual criminology (Brown, 2014; Carrabine, 2012; Greer, 2010; Hayward, 2009), and are central to understanding the power images hold to shape individuals’ attitudes towards criminalised acts. Drawing on observational data collected from five popular fight pages over eight months, and the largest sample of fight page users surveyed to date, this article addresses one central question relating to the use of this new social media phenomenon: why do fight page users regularly view the footage of street fights and public violence hosted on these online domains?

This article is therefore concerned with different modes of spectating public violence on fight pages. Similar to the uses and gratifications perspective, it inverts the question posed by media effects research (what does media content do to individuals?), to instead ask ‘what do people do with the media?’ (Katz, 1959). Unlike the limited notion of uses employed within the uses and gratifications perspective (see Jewkes, 2002) though, modes of spectatorship denote particular configurations of viewing, experiencing, responding and relating to content (Higson, 2002).1 In the most rudimentary terms, to identify a mode of spectatorship, one has to answer the who, what, when, where, why and how of spectatorship: Who is the spectator? What is being watched? When does the spectator watch? Where does the spectatorship occur? Why is the spectator watching? And how is the spectator viewing, interpreting, responding to, and being affected by the content? Ultimately then, this study aligns less with the quantitatively-driven uses and gratifi-cations perspective than the broad perspective of audience reception studies (see Jensen and Rosengren, 1990), an approach that has generated some of the most nuanced findings on the consumption of violent media content to date (see Schlesinger et al., 1992, 1998).

Much of the criminological research into individuals’ motivations for consuming violent or transgressive media content has focused on the sensual attractions or gratifications of such con-tent (see Presdee, 2002; Young, 2009, 2010). Whilst this study found much to support this focus on the affective dimension of spectating violence and transgression, it also identified another motivation for viewing such content that has not been documented previously in criminological research: to learn from the actions of those filmed. For many of this study’s participants, fight videos represented not a source of entertainment, but a resource for honing martial arts tech-niques, learning about the ‘nature’ of unregulated street combat, and consequently, improving the odds of emerging victorious from a violent attack. As this article will argue, viewing fight clips for the affective states they produce – whatever they may be – represents just one set of modes of spectating this form of mediated violence, and it is important that researchers do not neglect modes of spectatorship underpinned by information-seeking motivations.

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This article proceeds in two parts. In the first part, I examine the video content posted on five popular fight pages – Crazy Street Fights, The Craziest Fights Ever, Just Fights Videos, Real Crazy Fights and Only Street Fighting – to establish the different forms of violent event aggregated by these domains. Whilst the violent content hosted on each of these pages was heterogeneous, the overwhelming majority of clips were placed by users and administrators into one of three categories: the good clean fight, the brawl and the beating/attack. Having analysed these dif-ferent forms of fight video, the second part of this article turns to their viewers, and examines the eleven modes of spectating bare-knuckle violence on fight pages that this study’s survey participants engaged in: entertainment, consumptive deviance, righteous justice, amusement, self-affirmation, nostalgia, boredom alleviation, intrigue, self-defence training and risk awareness. Finally, I argue that to understand many of these modes of spectating bare-knuckle violence, we have to address the codes of masculinity that underlie not only much of the violence hosted on fight pages, but also spectators’ readings of these events.

Methods and data sourcesThe research reported here is part of the author’s doctoral research on fight pages, which employed a qualitatively-driven mixed methods methodology2 combining self-report surveys of fight page users with the naturalistic observation of five popular fight pages. In using survey and observa-tional methods in tandem, this study represents somewhat of a rarity within research into the media/violence nexus, namely, a study that is built upon both elicited and naturalistic data (see Potter, 1999). The five pages followed in this study were purposively sampled for observation on the basis of both their popularity, and the eclectic nature of their content. Unlike other specialised fight pages that host only fights occurring within a particular area, or featuring a particular type of participant or exchange, the five pages followed in this study hosted any footage of bare-knuckle violence their administrators could locate. Each page was observed daily for a period of eight months, during which archived and newly posted videos, iconography and comments by page administrators and users were submitted to extensive visual and/or thematic analysis.

Though the participatory affordances of these pages provided the opportunity for a similarly participatory approach to observation – in line with the principles of digital ethnography (see Hine, 2008; Pink et al., 2015) – an unobtrusive approach to observation was ultimately favoured on account of the fleeting nature of users’ participation on these pages, and the difficulties this pre-sented for engaging with page users. Owing to the high number of page subscribers on popular fight pages, participating users are too numerous and their engagements with the pages too fleeting to build rapport with them. Moreover, in unobtrusively viewing the content of these pages, I mirrored the behaviour of the majority of fight page users, who similarly avoid overt participation.

Survey participants were non-randomly recruited using Facebook advertisements served on the News Feeds of individuals who had listed ‘street fighting’ as an interest on the site. Advertisements were authored via a project Facebook page established specifically for the study. A total of 205 individuals were recruited and undertook this survey. Participants were overwhelmingly male (n = 195; 94%), but varied significantly in age and country of origin.3 As Salter and Tomsen (2012) convincingly argue in their study of the related Felony Fights YouTube channel, the viewing of bare-knuckle violence is a highly gendered behaviour. This study found much evidence to support

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Salter and Tomsen’s contention: though the above figure does not reflect the actual gender ratio of fight pages, the high percentage of male viewers in this study’s sample is consistent with the figures provided by the public analytics of many fight pages, which reveal that their largest audi-ences were men between the age of 18 and 32. Indeed, men between the age of 18 and 32 constituted the largest user demographic on all five of the pages followed in this study, and a further 67 fight pages that provided public data on their user demographics.

A short 17-question survey was designed for use in this study, using Survey Monkey. The survey, which was designed to take 5–10 minutes to complete, was comprised of nine multiple-choice questions and eight qualitative short response questions. The short response questions concerned, inter alia, participants’ reasons for viewing the content hosted fight pages, their viewing practices, how they felt when they viewed different forms of recorded street violence and their attitudes towards street fighting and violence more broadly. To maintain a fidelity to participants’ responses, I have refrained from altering them and have reprinted them as they were originally submitted.

‘We’re showing street fight videos from all over the world’: The bare-knuckle violence of fight pagesIn trying to ascertain the intended uses of fight pages, one may turn to their respective ‘About’ sections, which provide short page descriptions authored by administrators. Only Street Fighting’s About section describes it as a ‘Facebook page about the self-defence, street fighting and martial arts’ whilst its long description (partially quoted in this section’s subtitle) elaborates that, ‘We’re showing street fight videos from all over the world, We also upload MMA videos for people to see the difference between street fighting and real trained athletes with self-dis-cipline’. Crazy Street Fights offers more of a disclaimer than a description, declaring that ‘we don’t promote self-harm, fights, or suicide; this page is for educational and sole entertainment … Please keep the Facebook comments clean’. Just Fights Videos’ and Real Crazy Fights’ About sections offer less, with the former’s stating simply that the page offers the ‘Best Fights ON net’ (sic), and the latter’s stating that ‘Here you can find the newest fights ever!’. Though these short descriptions offer little in the way of a mission statement, they do elaborate two goals that are repeatedly articulated in the page descriptions of many fight pages: to entertain and/or to edu-cate. Whilst they differ in their self-descriptions and purported goals, these five pages, and hundreds of others like them, nonetheless feature a set of strong family resemblances, in both the content they host and their curatorship of this content, which often elides the illegality of street fighting in many jurisdictions.

Though in certain ways comparable, the pages I followed can be differentiated from the array of user-generated pages dedicated to martial arts and combat sports. The latter differ from fight pages both in the type of violence they primarily host – organised bouts in a controlled environ-ment as opposed to unbounded street fights – and the quality of the footage itself, which is typi-cally shot professionally for mainstream broadcast. This marks the second characteristic of fight pages: the amateur nature of the footage. Clips hosted on fight pages are generally filmed using smartphones by bystanders to the event, in events that are occasionally performed for the camera (see Yar, 2012).4 Yet, in contradistinction to the broadcasting of professional fights – where poor production values would garner criticism from viewers – fight page users place a premium on the authenticity of clips. Indeed, the realness of this footage, in relation to both the event it depicts

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and its amateur and often-incidental production, are frequently evoked in the promotion of these pages. The raw footage hosted on the five fight pages I followed therefore differed considerably from the heavily edited clips examined by Salter and Tomsen (2012) in their research into Felony Fights. There is an expectation among users that fight page recordings will bear the hallmarks of their amateur production, and footage that exhibits overly professional production values is liable to be viewed as fake or staged. An amateur aesthetic is at work in the enjoyment of fight page videos: film the fight poorly and the recording’s shaky camerawork will negate any enjoyment coming from it, film the fight too well and its status as authentic will be compromised.5

Amateur aesthetic aside however, the violent recordings hosted on each of the five pages fol-lowed in this study were decidedly eclectic. Each page posted footage featuring a diverse range of non-combat sports-related bare-knuckle violence, and events that varied greatly in their set-ting, participant demographics, interactional dynamics, outcome and legality. Nonetheless, page administrators and users frequently placed these variegated clips of bare-knuckle violence within one of three categories: ‘clean’ fights, brawls and beatings/attacks.

A ‘clean fight’ or a ‘good clean fight’ is typically a one-on-one fistfight in which both parties refrain from using ‘dirty’ underhanded moves, and show restraint in the violence they inflict on their opponent. They may take the form of either amateur bare-knuckle contests where there is no antagonism between the two opponents, or as a method of ‘settling’ a quarrel or grievances, in the tradition of duels and mutual combat. In both forms however, the vast majority of these fights were not spontaneous altercations, but rather pre-arranged events, and in many videos the size of the crowds who arrive to spectate the fight indicated that there had been a significant build up to the event. Notably, good clean fights are as much about demonstrating self-control as they are about demonstrating technical effectiveness. Such self-control may include refraining from striking an opponent who has been knocked to the ground, and instead allowing them to regain their feet before resuming blows. When an individual is knocked unconscious, the combat immediately concludes, and occasionally the victor will see to the wellbeing of their opponent. In setting limits on force, clean fights more closely resemble adjudicated combat sports matches or what Brent and Kraska (2013) term ‘sport fighting’ than they do anarchic street violence. Often they are comparable to sport fighting in two further ways: the planned and consensual nature of the fight, and the crowd of onlookers that are frequently present to be entertained by it. Invariably, the participants in a good clean fight are acquainted with one another and with members of the crowd, who often fulfil a duel role of both encouraging participants and ensuring that they do not overstep the mark in their violence.

Though entered into consensually, when undertaken in public space participants of such arranged fights are still liable in many jurisdictions to be charged with disturbing the public peace and affray offences, which do not require an individual physically harmed in the event to lay a complaint. Many arranged fights therefore occur either on private property (most commonly in an individual’s backyard), or in secluded areas, such as uninhabited car parks, sequestered forest clearings and school ground heterotopias. Nevertheless, other clean fights are intensely public events in their visibility, and occur in urban and suburban streets, and well populated and surveil-led schoolyards. Undoubtedly, a small number of these fights are not illicit as they occur in jurisdic-tions, such as Washington State, that feature mutual combat laws: legal provisions that permit fights that both parties enter into willingly as long as they do not pose a risk to other individuals, or the property of others. The majority of fights, however, are unlikely to be protected by such

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legal measures. In such bouts, the risk of detection, reprimand and even prosecution that leads others to seek secluded settings for their confrontations is disregarded in favour of attracting as large an audience as possible.

Unlike ‘clean’ fights, brawls or no-holds-barred street fights are often spontaneous, impromptu affairs that predominately erupt immediately following a perceived or actual slight. Occasionally, the opening act of violence in such altercations is entirely unprovoked and unexpected, but more frequently it follows a verbal exchange between two individuals or groups. In the first scenario, the reciprocation of unbridled violence is a product of self-defence, as an individual uses any means possible to fend off their attacker, whereas in the second more common scenario, mutual combats take a similar form to what Polk (1999) terms honour contests. As Polk theorises them, honour contests have a distinct interactional dynamic comprising three phases: (1) an opening move in which a real or perceived challenge is issued in the form of an insult, extended eye con-tact or jostle; (2) a countermove whereby the targeted individual interprets this behaviour as a challenge and issues a retaliatory face saving act that escalates the conflict; and (3) a mutual agreement to aggression in which both parties in the dispute become committed to engaging in a violent exchange. In addition to following this interactional dynamic, many of the brawls uploaded to these pages also conform to Polk’s notion of honour contests in another way: their leisure scene settings. Many fights occur outside of nightclubs, restaurants and other night-time economy domains, and, in a further commonality with Polk’s analysis, between individuals who appear to be intoxicated.

A large number of brawls featured on these pages, however, depart from Polk’s image of honour contests in both their setting and in the presence of alcohol. Many instead take place in work or residential environments between individuals who do not appear to be under the influ-ence of alcohol. Such residential street-corner fights also differ from the textbook exchange pre-sented by Polk’s analysis in that they appear to show altercations between individuals or groups who are well acquainted as opposed to strangers. Whereas ‘clean’ fights temper force with

Figure 1. A ‘good clean fight’: A still taken from ‘that was a good fight finally’, a video posted by Crazy Street Fights that shows a fair fight between two evenly matched opponents. During the two-and-a-half-minute clip, the fight stops briefly so that one of the participants can regain their feet after falling to the ground.

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self-control, the violence of brawls is completely unrestrained, and channelled into inflicting the most harm possible on an opponent. Often, participants are knocked unconscious, beaten when they’re down and subjected to a barrage of blows after conceding defeat and attempting to exit the conflict. For several participants (n = 13), the brutal nature of these brawls was central to the appeal of fight pages, with one participant (participant 154) responding that he primarily visited these domains to ‘see someone get knocked the fuck out’.

Moreover, whilst ‘clean’ fights are strictly one-on-one contests, brawls can be one-on-one, one vs many or group against group. Further, the dynamics of brawls may change quickly; fights between individuals may progress into ‘all in brawls’ as friends of both parties become involved, and individual fighters may become quickly outnumbered and overwhelmed as their opponent’s friends intervene and lend their support.

In addition to these contests, the fight pages I followed also featured footage of events that were not fights as such, but rather one-sided attacks or beatings. In such beatings, a clear and unproblematic perpetrator/victim binary applies which is either inapplicable to or problematised in the clean fights and no brawls featured on these pages. Occasionally, recordings of beatings on the pages I followed took the form of CCTV footage of random assaults and muggings. More commonly though, the footage of beatings hosted on these pages took the form of smartphone-recorded revenge beat-downs, and featured either one party seeking out and assailing another in retribution for past wrongs, or parties to a verbal dispute ‘sucker punching’ the other, who was neither expecting, nor willing to use violence in the exchange (see Flynn et al., 2016). Like brawl clips, the footage of beatings hosted on the pages I examined had varying dynamics, and featured single attackers assaulting a single victim, single attackers assaulting multiple victims, multiple attackers assaulting a single victim and multiple attackers assaulting several victims (though recordings of groups attacking other groups were exceedingly rare on the five fight pages this study followed).6 Yet unlike the more popular recordings of brawls, footage of beatings was favoured by few of this study’s participants, with only three indicating a preference for them.

Figure 2. A prototypical brawl: A still image taken from the video ‘Huge brawl outside nightclub’ hosted on Only Street Fighting. In the 2 minutes and 41 second clip, six men and two women exchange blows until a car arrives and one party to the altercation is able to make their escape.

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‘Fighting is the oldest and one of the most popular sports ever’: Street fighting and public violence as mediated entertainmentsWhen asked why they regularly view fight videos, a large number (n = 43) of participants responded simply that they offered entertainment. Under this umbrella of entertainment, how-ever, were several distinct modes of spectatorship that differed in the content they concerned, the spectator’s orientation towards this content and the affective response they received upon view-ing it. For the majority of these participants who viewed fight videos for entertainment, the enjoy-ment sought from viewing fights took the form of a positive affective state of excitement. Participants reported feeling ‘pumped’ (n = 3), ‘hyped’ (n = 2) or otherwise stimulated whilst viewing fights they found particularly affecting.

In their foregrounding of the sensuous experience of viewing street fights, these replies reso-nate with many of the studies undertaken by cultural criminologists, who make a compelling argument for examining the affective dimension of doing and/or viewing crime (see Ferrell et al., 2012; Young, 2010). In particular, one participant’s response that they view fight videos as a form of ‘ghetto tourism’ echoes Presdee’s (2000) pronouncements on the carnivalesque attractions of transgression.7 Originally proposed by Stephens (2005), ghetto tourism refers to the practice of experiencing urban ghetto life through consuming various forms of entertain-ment, including television, gangsta rap and video games such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. As a new avenue for ghetto tourism, fight pages enable law-abiding, often middle-class indi-viduals to vicariously experience the excitement of engaging in transgressive violence without the legal and physical risks associated with such acts. Here, ghetto tourism resembles a racial-ised form of what Blackshaw and Crabbe (2004) have termed consumptive deviance: vicariously experiencing deviance ‘by proxy’ through consuming media content. Yet whilst several partici-pants either explicitly or implicitly asserted the transgressive nature and appeal of street fight-ing, most did not. Often, participants viewed street fighting not as an illicit act, but rather as an unsanctioned combat sport:

Because it’s almost like a sport. (Participant 54)

Fighting is the oldest and one of the most popular sports ever. (Participant 91)

Its like amateur versions of boxing and mma that I also enjoy. (Participant 2)

This conflation of street fighting and controlled combat sports matches illustrates what Bowman (2015: 104) terms the ‘Fight-Club-isation’ of Western martial arts discourse: conceptu-alising hand-to-hand combat as a primal, ‘state of nature’ enterprise, repressed by rules and martial arts codes which are viewed as cultural baggage that impinge upon the ‘true’ unadulter-ated ‘nature’ of combat. Other participants, however, opposed conceptualising street fighting as a sport, as their enjoyment was derived specifically from the rulelessness and unregulated nature of the bouts they viewed:

I like to watch the fight, no rules, no reffs, just a straight brawl. (Participant 154)

Entertainment, no rules just fight. (Participant 161)

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Additionally, few participants who viewed fight videos for entertainment expressed attitudes towards violence that could reasonably be considered transgressive. Most (n = 43), for example, stated that interpersonal violence should only be used defensively or in a controlled environment between two consenting individuals (n = 7). Though it might be said that these participants engage in a new form of deviant leisure when they view fight videos (see Franklin-Rose, 2006; Williams and Walker, 2006), their behaviour hardly represents the consumptive deviance or vicari-ous transgression of other fight page spectators.

Nonetheless, vicarious transgression is frequently evoked within mainstream media reports on fight pages, where viewing footage of street fights for entertainment is almost invariably framed as a deviant or criminogenic behaviour. Media reports on these pages commonly fea-ture familiar motifs on the potential for mediated violence to normalise or promote violent behaviour, and fears about young peoples’ use of new technologies (Bennett, 2014; Dean, 2015; Entwistle, 2014; Hallman, 2013; Harvy, 2015; MacNiven, 2014; Poulsen, 2015; Young, 2015).

Not all participants, however, were attracted to fight pages for their footage of combat sports styled voluntary contests or no-holds-barred brawls. For six participants, the enjoyment they obtained from viewing fight videos was, to a degree, contingent not only upon the excitement of the violence itself, but also on its perceived righteousness. Where for other viewers the ethical status of violence can be largely eschewed in favour of enjoying it on a purely visceral level for the excitement the fighters’ actions provide, for these viewers, violence could not be divorced from its ethical dimension. Violence, in other words, can only be enjoyed by these viewers if it is perceived to be righteous or legitimate violence that is enacted in response to perceived wrongs (see Young, 2010).

In their responses these users often transposed a hero/villain redemption narrative onto their preferred footage, and several (n = 3) explicitly stated that they preferred videos that showed a bully being defeated. For these participants, watching a bully being violently defeated by their former victim elicited positive affects derived from a belief that they were witnessing justice being served and restored. This gratification, then, resembles a form of schadenfreude, whereby viewers take delight in the misfortune of individuals who engage in ignominious behaviours. Additionally, two participants derived pleasure from a less retributive form of schadenfreude when watching fight videos. For these participants, fight videos represented a source of amuse-ment, and the actions of fighters were perceived as comical, with participant 166 stating that ‘they’re hilarious’ and participant 152 remarking that his ‘ribs hurt from laughing’ when he viewed them.8

Whilst most participants who viewed fight videos as a source of entertainment did so to obtain strong emotional gratifications, a small number (n = 4) viewed fight videos as a means of passing time and did not obtain a strong emotional response to them. For these individuals, watching fights on Facebook represented nothing more than a means of attempting to alleviate boredom and fill in time. Rather than being viewed as a distinct practice by these individuals, their use of fight pages can more accurately be situated within their broader use of Facebook as a platform for passing the time (see Giannakos et al., 2013). Relatedly, another 14 participants indicated that they viewed fight videos out of intrigue. For these spectators, caught-on-camera fights have a voyeuristic appeal and their goal in viewing them is to sate curiosity rather than merely pass the time.

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Because it has more than a 1000 likes, shares etc and I want to see what the fuss is about. (Participant 20)

Such individuals, in Young’s (2010) terms, are to varying degrees fascinated by the footage of often-unbridled violence that fight pages provide; their relationship to the footage they view is marked by oscillating feelings of desire and censure. To put it differently, they are caught between two conflicting desires: the voyeuristic desire to experience something novel, risky and transgres-sive, and the desire to condemn and position themselves away from these acts that they nonethe-less gain enjoyment from viewing. This viewing motivation, then, is perfused with ambivalence – an ambivalence that was sometimes subtly captured in participants’ statements suggesting that their desire to view fight videos was founded on their unfamiliarity with, or aversion to using vio-lence. Five participants, for example, characterised fight videos as ‘interesting’. In labelling the contents of these videos interesting, these participants were, in effect, disassociating themselves from the violence they view, as they were identifying it as something that is unfamiliar or to vary-ing degrees incomprehensible to them. This disassociation with the acts depicted in fight videos is made even more explicitly by another participant (participant 173), who explained that he viewed fight videos in order to ‘to observe people acting in a way I find strange and that I struggle to understand’.

‘Talk shit, get hit’: Fight videos as a resource for affirmation and nostalgiaFifteen survey participants explicitly tied their enjoyment of fight videos to their own identity as fighters, and the self-affirmation they obtained from viewing them. This feeling of affirmation arose either from identifying with recorded fighters, or, as the following comment illustrates, dis-identifying with them:

Seeing how amateurish people who think they can fight are. makes me feel better knowing iv a massive advantage in skill when it comes to fighting. (Participant 91)

For this participant, self-affirmation was derived through comparing himself favourably to the fighters, who he viewed as lacking in technical martial arts proficiency. Viewing fight videos, then, validated his identity as a fighter, and provided him with feelings of security. For others though, self-validation was derived from the very process of viewing events that resembled those from their past:

Used to do some street fighting. (Participant 69)

I used to fight a lot. It reminds me of my formative years. (Participant 138)

It reminds me of who i am. (Participant 31)

As individuals who had themselves participated in street fights or other acts of transgressive violence, viewing footage of such events held not only something of a nostalgic appeal, but also affirmed either the value or commonplaceness of violence. Even when participants did

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not currently condone street fighting, viewing fight videos still affirmed violent former identities through supporting a belief that engaging in violent youthful transgressions is a common and even normative behaviour. That is, viewing fight videos provided evidence for these participants of either the normality or acceptability of their past or present actions. Notably, participants who viewed fight videos for affirmation held more punitive attitudes towards violence than other participants, with four stating that they viewed revenge as an acceptable use of violence. Occasionally, participants articulated this sentiment in the form of a saying frequently repeated in the comments threads of the five fight pages I followed – ‘talk shit, get hit’:

Talk shit, get hit. This contry has turned pussy. A man can’t fight another man without being criminally charged. Back in the day two kicks at school fight and thats it. No they get in so much trouble they bottle it all in until they bring a gun to school. (Participant 154)

Crucially however, in most instances commenting users did not specify whether for them ‘talk shit, get hit’ represents an axiom or a maxim; that is whether as a rule people who ‘talk shit’ do get hit or should get hit. Here and elsewhere, it is difficult to discern whether commenters are offering lay explanations of violence – and therefore are engaging in what Rafter (2007) has termed popular criminology – or making normative statements.

‘Its dangerous out there and the more one knows the better’: Fight pages as a symptom of responsibilisationWhilst most participants primarily viewed fight pages for entertainment, 25 stated that they viewed fight pages to gain knowledge on how to respond self-defensively in a violent confron-tation. To use their words, they used fight pages as a ‘learning tool’ (participant 78) or for ‘research purposes’ (participant 43). For these individuals, fight videos represented a source of ‘self protection knowledge’ (participant 124), and an individual recording would be viewed in order ‘to learn self defence’ (participant 128). As the following participants explained, fight videos provided them a tool for preparing them for street violence:

I like to prepare myself in the event I am attacked. I watch the fighters technique. (Participant 128)

Its just information that one must know because, it’s dangerous out there and the more one knows the better. (Participant 104)

So I can study what sort of techniques are used and how often are the trained in order have a better understanding if I was ever stuck in a life or death situation. I can also work out what I would have done and use my training. (Participant 70)

This focus upon the techniques employed by fighters indicates that the majority of these par-ticipants held at least some martial arts knowledge or were practicing martial artists. Indeed,

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several of this group of participants who viewed fight videos for self-defence training purposes openly identified themselves as self-defence and martial arts instructors:

I also work as an self-defence instructor and need to have a realistic view on what I am trying to teach my students to avoid/counter. And most of the videos makes me sick; but they do help in assessing a lot of situations and also going through them together with my students. (Participant 122)

Significantly, many of these participants were emphatic in stating that the only circumstance in which they would put this knowledge into practice was if they were physically attacked or threatened. Indeed, most specified that they watched fight clips to learn how to effectively respond with reactive, self-defensive violence when attacked, rather than to learn when to use violence pro-actively or how to become a more effective fighter in general. One individual’s response, however, contradicted this theme of endorsing only reactive violence, and in doing so indicated that viewing footage of street fights may contribute to inciting the pre-emptive or proactive use of violence:

To constantly remind myself were just animals and the strongest usually wins. Also looking at the psychology of a fight. Theres people who get knocked the fuck out, beaten and robbed nearly killed all because they didnt throw the first punch, learn to know when you should or have to throw first punch. (Participant 35)

Though the hypothetical scenario this participant raises can still be read as a situation requiring ‘self protection’, it nonetheless relies upon a subjectively perceived threat of violence rather than a demonstrated threat of violence.

Given the emphasis these participants placed on self-dependence in avoiding victimisation, viewing fight videos for educational purposes may be read as a symptom of what Garland (2001) has termed the responsibilisation strategy of crime control. As Garland explains, responsibilisation is a strategy of crime control whereby the state fosters informal agents of crime control by making individuals and organisations feel partially responsible for the task of crime control and preven-tion. In actively seeking information to avoid victimisation, these participants can be read as thor-oughly responsibilised citizens. Notably, this use of fight pages indicates that Only Street Fights and Crazy Street Fights’ respective claims that their content is for educational purposes do not ring entirely untrue: certain individuals do view fight pages to learn what to expect and how to respond to a threat ‘on the street’.

In addition to these participants who viewed fight videos to gain self-defence knowledge, five participants reported viewing fight page content for a wholly different form of knowledge: that of the ‘reality’ of public violence. For this small number of participants, fight videos represented a form of crime news that informed them of the reality of street violence and the risk of victimisation:

To know what is going on around me and the world. (Participant 199)

I watch them to remind myself there are some sick people out there. (Participant 83)

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On one level, this use of fight videos is reminiscent of Katz’s (1987: 70) observation that crime news may provide a ‘daily moral workout’ that enables consumers to work through the moral issues they face in their lives. On another level though, these individuals can be seen to view foot-age of street violence to cultivate risk awareness: to increase their knowledge of the risks associ-ated with public violence. However, in line with other findings on the media’s role in risk perception (see Wåhlberg and Sjöberg, 2000), it is likely that fight pages contribute to a skewed impression of the actual risks and prevalence of violence. That is, viewing street fights fosters subjective risk perceptions rather than objective risk knowledge concerning the actual rates and dynamics of violence and victimisation in society. Indeed, in altering their perceptions of the risk of victimisa-tion from violence by a typically unknown offender, fight pages may, like other forms of media, over time lead to users significantly overestimating the level of violent crime in their society (see Gerbner, 1998).

Though none of these participants outwardly stated that viewing fight videos had increased their fear of crime, all participants in this category reported feeling negative affec-tive states of disgust, sadness and general apprehension during and after the viewing of such content. Whereas viewing fight pages to increase self-defence proficiency was per-ceived by participants as ultimately empowering – as doing so gave them greater confidence that they could effectively respond to and neutralise threats of violence – viewing fight pages to become informed about the risks of everyday violence left individuals with no such confidence.

‘Real men fight on their feet’: Masculinity on fight pagesFor the participants in this study, fight clips variously represented a source of entertainment, amusement or fascination, a diversion from the boredom of everyday life, a resource for self-affirmation and nostalgia, a tool for honing self-defence skills and a means for remaining aware of the risks of public space. Underlying each of these modes of spectating bare-knuckle violence, though, are numerous intersecting identity markers and subject positions. Whilst spectators’ responses to footage of bare-knuckle violence are the product of multiple intersecting identity markers (see Schlesinger et al., 1998), on the fight pages I examined, gender was the most sali-ent identity marker in users’ comments. Though not quite as salient in participants’ remarks, discourses of masculinity were prevalent in users’ comments on all five of the pages I examined, with users often vaunting particular fighters who demonstrated great skill or tenacity as para-gons of masculinity. To unpack the punches hosted on fight pages, we therefore have to unpack the codes of masculinity that often underlie both their aetiology and their interpretation by spectators. In judging the participants of a fight, commenters frequently placed fighters’ mas-culinity on trial, and used their actions to infer their worth as a man. On the pages I followed, fighting fairly and engaging in a good clean fight was strongly associated with respectable masculinity:

JLH: That’s how man fight one on one toe to toe with respect. (Crazy Street Fights)TA: Gr8 fight to me…..this are real men……..my respect 4 both. (Crazy Street Fights)

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Conversely, fighting dishonourably, such as striking an unconscious opponent or attacking an individual who refuses to fight back, was viewed as unmanly behaviour, or, in the parlance of many fight page commenters, a ‘bitch’ or ‘pussy’ move. This is well exemplified in the top com-ments of several Only Street Fighting videos where fighters continued to attack their unconscious, cowering or unwilling opponents:

JE: Fuckin pussy don’t hit a knocked out dude, your a pussy! (234 likes)MY: Idiots!! Real men fight on their feet… (109 likes)CP: … Beating the crap out of somebody in the fetal position is such a bitch thing to do.

Honor is earned through being a man in the most difficult situations not like this. This was a bitch move sorry. (261 likes)

MD: Real men don’t pick on the weak. (690 likes)

In posting such comments, many fight page commenters strove to limit the forms of violence that could be considered signifiers of masculinity. Almost invariably, normative acts of violence were construed as masculine, whilst ‘deviant’ acts of violence were construed as feminine or failed masculinity. However, there was far from a consensus as to what constituted normative and devi-ant violence among participants; for participants who preferred viewing footage of bullies being vanquished by their would-be victims, normative violence was constrained to defensive acts used to ward off an attacker, whilst for participants who viewed particularly brutal brawls for entertain-ment, normative violence encompassed any act – no matter how brutal – that incapacitated a threat. Ultimately, though, through providing footage of honour contests, clean fights and other scenes of violence enacted through masculine scripts, fights pages offer resources and counter-publics for individuals to affirm, contest, debate, police and collectively reimagine the interface between violence and masculinity.

ConclusionAs noted earlier, news reports often frame fight page users as violent individuals who readily engage in the same acts of bare-knuckle brawling that they view online. Though such users exist, they were far from the norm among this study’s participants. Indeed, several of the modes of spectating bare-knuckle violence participants described were largely innocuous: individuals who, for example, view footage of street fights out of intrigue and morbid curiosity are far from the sadistic spectators represented in mainstream media reports on fight pages. Despite reports to the contrary, it would be unwise to consider fight pages as criminogenic media: like all media forms, they represent just one thread of the cultural fabric their users are enveloped in, and are more the symptom than the cause of violent codes of masculinity. Consequently, whilst they enable modes of spectating criminalised acts of violence that are rooted in self-affirmation or a voyeuristic fascination with transgression, it is important to avoid giving reductive readings of fight pages that understand them solely as platforms for consumptive deviance. This research has demonstrated that fight page users view footage of clean fights, brawls and beatings for many and varied reasons. Moreover, it has demonstrated that the nature of fight page specta-torship itself is complex and multidimensional – a concatenation of identities, identifications, affects and beliefs.

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Given that page users selectively expose themselves to fight videos for a variety of reasons, and interpret these scenes of violence through the lens of their individual experiences and beliefs, it is important not to overstate the role of fight pages in forming or altering users’ attitudes, beliefs and behaviours. Fight pages do, however, undefinably provide a resource for certain users to legitimate their attitudes towards violence; attitudes which, as I have explored, are often founded in harmful codes of masculinity. They do so not only through providing exemplars of honour con-tests and scripts for male violence, but also through providing counterpublics for expressing and affirming the codes of masculinity underpinning these scripts. Yet whilst fight page users may view footage of public violence for a variety of reasons, seek out profoundly different forms of content and hold a variety of attitudes towards violence, one thing does unify these individuals: they are all drawn to raw footage of real, and often criminalised, public violence. What fight pages and other forms of antisocial media have generated, then, is a new era of crime-watching: an era where aggregated footage of criminalised acts has been opened up to participatory modes of consumption and spectatorship that are as much a product of Facebook’s distinct media ecol-ogy as they are of the content itself.

AcknowledgementsI would like to thank Alison Young, Natalia Hanley, and Chrissy Thompson for their helpful and insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article. I am particularly grateful to Chrissy Thompson for sharing her extensive knowledge of martial arts and its relationship to responsibilisation, which greatly contributed to this article.

FundingThe author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or pub-lication of this article: This research was conducted in the scope of a PhD project supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award scholarship.

Notes1. This study also eschewed the much-criticized functionalist presuppositions associated with (classic)

uses and gratifications theory. Classic iterations of the uses and gratifications perspective have been criticized for their assumption of an audience ‘activeness’, and their functionalism (Ruggiero, 2000). Early models of the perspective understood motivations for using media purely as functional psy-chological needs (see Katz et  al., 1974). More recent approaches eschew this early individualistic approach, and understand an individual’s motivations for using media content to be derived from not only psychological needs, but also socially bestowed interests, and restraints which are imposed exter-nally (Windahl, 1981). Additionally, the perspective’s central concept of the ‘active audience’, that is, understanding audience members to intentionally select media content, has been refined over the years. Where the activeness of the audience was assumed within early uses and gratifications theory (see Katz et al., 1974), contemporary variants do not take it as a definite, but rather as a variable in itself, and acknowledge that different audiences are marked by different degrees of activity (Levy and Windahl, 1984). Nevertheless, despite these theoretical advancements, the approach’s inability to adequately account for the concatenation of dispositional and sociocultural factors underpinning media use limits its utility.

2. See Mason (2006) for a discussion of the nature, value and challenges of qualitatively-driven mixed methods research.

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3. Eighty-eight (43%) participants were aged between 18 and 24 years old, 58 (28%) were aged between 25 and 34 years old, 25 (12%) were aged between 35 and 44, 10 (5%) were aged between 45 and 54 years old and 2 (1%) were aged between 55 and 64. The majority of participants listed their country of origin as either the United States (n = 29; 38%) or the United Kingdom (n = 23; 30%), with a smaller number listing their country of origin as Ireland (n = 14; 7%), Canada (n = 5; 2%), Sweden (n = 3; 1%) and Australia (n = 3; 1%). A further 42 participants did not specify their country of origin.

4. The violent content aggregated and publically hosted on the pages I followed can also be differentiated from footage of ‘happy slapping’: unsuspecting individuals being assaulted for the purpose of filming the event (Saunders, 2005). Further, fight pages must be distinguished from websites dedicated to orchestrating and/or celebrating football hooliganism that are created by and for members of a particu-lar football club (see Fafinski, 2006; Zaitch and de Leeuw, 2010). Moreover, fight pages must also be distinguished from pages dedicated to a separate phenomenon that occasionally host footage of fights. Therefore, whilst the WorldstarHipHop brand has undisputedly had a massive influence on the populari-sation of spectating public violence, its official Facebook page cannot be considered a fight page as it is primarily dedicated to hip hop related content.

5. This is not to say that there isn’t a significant online market for professionally shot (and typically arranged) no-holds-barred street fights, as the popularity of both Kimbo Slice and Felony Fights attests. Moreover, footage taken from these professional productions is frequently uploaded on the amateur fight pages this project is concerned with.

6. As noted before, this is not an unproblematic typology of the violence hosted on fight pages. Though the majority of events depicted in the videos uploaded to fight pages can be designated as clean fights, brawls or beatings, some fights traverse and destabilise these categories. Fights may begin as planned ‘clean’ bouts with pre-agreed upon rules and restrictions, but descend into no-holds-barred violence when a participant transgresses one of these agreed upon rules. Further, participants in a clean or no-holds-barred fight may walk away victorious only to be randomly attacked and overwhelmed by friends of their defeated opponent. Finally, verbal disputes where both individuals express their willingness to come to blows may culminate in an individual being knocked unconscious before being able to retaliate.

7. Presdee’s (2000) theory is consonant with the ‘forbidden fruit’ thesis advanced by Bushman and Stack (1996), which asserts that part of the attraction of impermissible media content is the actual stigma that is attached to it.

8. Such responses were common on the comments threads of the five pages I followed, particularly in videos where fighters were perceived as being particularly inept or ineffectual.

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Author biographyMark A. Wood is a PhD candidate at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia. His doctoral research concerns antisocial media: participatory websites dedicated to aggregating, hosting and sympathetically curating footage of criminalised acts.

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