The Digital Hood of Urban Violence: Exploring Functionalities of Social Media and Music Among Gangs

• Published date: 01 November 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/1043986218787735
• Date: 01 November 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1043986218787735

Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

2018, Vol. 34(4) 442 –459

© The Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1177/1043986218787735

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Article

The Digital Hood of

Urban Violence: Exploring

Functionalities of Social

Media and Music Among

Gangs

Janina Pawelz1 and Paul Elvers1

Abstract

Social media and music are fundamental components of everyday life for today’s

youth. The uses and functions of social media and music provide valuable insights

for a better understanding of marginalized groups, subcultures, and gangs. Data are

based on in-depth, semistructured interviews with gang members and gang affiliates

in Trinidad and Tobago and combined with an analysis of social media content.

The findings reveal that street gangs use music and social media to glorify gang life,

to display power and send threats, to generate motivational support for criminal

activities, and to bond socially and mourn collectively. In our analysis, social media,

music, and music videos appear to be intimately interconnected phenomena; we thus

call for a broader focus on gangs’ online behavior.

Keywords

online behavior, music, social media, gangs, violence, security, youth

Music and social media are fundamental components of everyday life for today’s

youth. This trend also applies to young people actively engaged in crime and gangs.

As such, scholars have begun to also examine the digital space of gang life in their

studies (see, for instance, Décary-Hétu & Morselli, 2011; Johnson & Schell-Busey,

2016; Patton, Eschmann, & Butler, 2013; Patton, Eschmann, Elsaesser, & Bocanegra,

1University of Hamburg, Germany

Corresponding Author:

Janina Pawelz, Institute for Peace Research and Security Studies, University of Hamburg, Beim Schlump

83, 20144 Hamburg, Germany.

Email: pawelz@ifsh.de

787735CCJXXX10.1177/1043986218787735Journal of Contemporary Criminal JusticePawelz and Elvers

research-article2018

Pawelz and Elvers 443

2016; Pyrooz, Decker, & Moule, 2013; Sela-Shayovitz, 2012; Storrod & Densley,

2017; Wijeratne, Doran, Sheth, & Dustin, 2015). Social media platforms such as

Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are accessible and versatile enough to “allow tens of

thousands of gang members to easily communicate, recruit, and form new gang alli-

ances nationwide and worldwide” (National Gang Intelligence Center, 2011, p. 41).

Activity on the Internet can be understood as “an extension of gang behavior on the

street, but with a much wider audience” (Pyrooz et al., 2013, p. 23). The online pres-

ence of gangs offers us a deeper understanding of their social structures and new

insights into the everyday world of those who usually operate in the underground. The

digital sphere opens a way to follow and interact with those who usually shield them-

selves from public awareness and live in areas avoided by regular citizens, such as

favelas, slums, and other “no-go” zones.

Urban violence is prevalent in Trinidad and Tobago, and gang war contributed to

the country having the sixth highest national homicide rate in the world in 2015 (The

World Bank, 2017). Several areas in Trinidad and Tobago are home to criminal gangs

and have become notorious for their high levels of violence and crime. Two major

gangs, namely, “Rasta City” and their rivals the “Muslims,” split up vast gang territory

among themselves, engaging in a bloody gang war.

Despite this, research on gangs’ online activities is absent. To address this short-

coming and extend current knowledge about the uses and functions of music and

social media among gangs, this article employs a qualitative, explorative case study

(Seawright & Gerring, 2008) and a grounded theory approach (Corbin & Strauss,

2008). This article draws on several months of fieldwork in the violent outskirts of

the capital city Port of Spain, which consisted of in-depth, semistructured interviews

with active gang members and affiliates, among others. Given the lack of access and

security considerations, interview partners were reached by the successive approach

(Pawelz, 2018). We combined the qualitative findings from interviews with an inter-

pretative analysis (Carragee, 1990) of media content from Facebook and music,

music videos, and other videos posted on YouTube. Snowball sampling was used to

identify and gather relevant Facebook and YouTube data for the interpretative

analysis.

The uses and functions of social media and the specific content that is distributed

offer valuable insights into social and psychological phenomena that are associated

with gang-related behavior (e.g., social hierarchies, group dynamics, and psychologi-

cal needs) and otherwise inaccessible to individuals outside gangs’ structures.

Researchers have emphasized that gang members’ online habits are generally similar

to that of nongang members (Storrod & Densley, 2017)—for instance, in terms of

online delinquency (Sela-Shayovitz, 2012) and average time spent online (Patton et

al., 2014). Importantly, however, gang members more frequently engage in the view-

ing and dissemination of content depicting crime and violence in their social media

activity. Gangsta rap (Hagedorn, 2008) or trap rap (Storrod & Densley, 2017) is argu-

ably one of the most important forms of social media content for gang members. To

examine this, we employ an integrative approach that encompasses perspectives from

human–computer interaction, criminology, and music psychology.