The Media, Risk Perception and Fear of Cybercrime

• Author: Lloyd G. Waller/Corin Bailey/Stephen Johnson
• Profession: Senior Lecturer in Methodology and Political Sociology and Head/Chair of the Department of Government at the University of the West Indies, Mona, and Director of the Centre for Leadership and Governance, a research and policy unit within the Department of Government, UWI/Fellow at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, ...
• Pages: 70-77

The Media, Risk Perception

and Fear of Cybercrime

MEDIA SENSATIONALISM OF CYBERCRIME

The media has been recognised globally as an agent of

socialisation (Clausen 1968; Hurrelmann 2009; McQuail

2005). The media, whether television, radio, print media, or



ideologies, views of the world, attitudes, expectations

and truths of a society (Gerbner and Gross 1976). Its ever

increasing presence and multiplicity of forms explains the

pervasiveness of this agent of socialisation. The media, and

in particular television, readily sensationalises the online

space, providing a distorted hyper-reality about cybercrime,

which easily affects the viewer’s fear of cybercrime in the

same way it has affected general fear of crime. Similarly,

heavy exposure to the media, especially crime-saturated

news, has fuelled widespread fear of crime in many parts of

the world. It is arguable that this fear of cybercrime observed

in the data collected, is as a result of the way in which cyber-

related activities associated with electronic banking have

been represented in Hollywood since the 1980s. In 1983,

 The War Games introduced the

   

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databases. The War Games paved the way for a number of

       The Net

(1995), Hackers (1995), Swordish (2001), and Antitrust (2001),

all of which portrayed computer hackers as super humans

capable of shutting down the universe. Added to this, the