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Constructing crime: Culture, stalking, celebrity and cyber

Centre for Criminological Research, University of Sheffield, UK, m.wykes{at}shef.ac.uk

The impetus for this article came, in part, from press reports that the Internet played a role in the case of the murder of British television presenter, Jill Dando, in 1999 by someone who, it was alleged, had `stalked' her, and further from the recognition that, in recent years, `crime' and `stalking' and `cyber' have come to be seen together in western culture, often in the company of someone `famous'. To explore the significance of the discourses emerging from these relationships, this article moves beyond criminology, or at least extends its very elastic boundaries. Although many online behaviours currently causing concern will cease to be popular or will be controlled by advances in new communications technology,1 nonetheless `we shall be left with a series of new types of criminal behaviour which in some cases will cause us to rethink and augment our existing understandings of crimes and deviant behaviours' (Wall, 1999: 133). The exploration in this article stemmed from a curiosity about cyber-stalking as a new crime but evolved as a theoretical connection that illuminates a contemporary celebritification and commodification of aesthetics, crime and culture.

Key Words: celebritification • celebrity • constructionism • culture • cyber • stalking

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