Abstract
When “Shooting Season” began on April 20, 1999, Columbine High School was the first school shooting to contribute to widespread discourses of fear, domestic terror, and the protection of children in American schools. Subsequent mass-media coverage of school shootings rarely linked one shooting to another, and frequently failed to link the events at Columbine to other school shootings over a twenty-year “School Shooter Era.” American mass-media institutions were also criticized by shooting victims and others for failing to put pressure on stakeholders including politicians, school boards, and the National Rifle Association to take action to prevent future mass school shootings, instead favouring to pursue script-like coverage and “media spectacle.” Almost twenty years after the Columbine shootings, the Parkland, Florida shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, sparked the #NeverAgain movement on Twitter, and March For Our Lives marches across the world. These online and offline movements, and the protests against gun violence that followed, can be seen as marking the intersection of developments in three distinct fields. These fields include the historical and theoretical study of social media platforms such as Twitter; the political, social, cultural, and critical theorization of online and offline social movements; and, investigation of a shift in contemporary coverage by North American media institutions of mass violence and school shootings. The fields will then be analyzed individually and in concert with one another, using the Twitter movement #NeverAgain and March For Our Lives as a case study demonstrating the combination and intersection of all three.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Columbine, School, Shooting, Media, Coverage, Spectacle, Movement, Twitter, March
