NCJ Number
158302
Journal
Crime, Law and Social Challenge Volume: 23 Issue: 2 Dated: (1995) Pages: 91-119
Date Published
1995
Length
29 pages
Annotation
This article uses contemporary social and cultural theory to analyze the ideological construction of activities nominated as social problems; the specific focus is on computer hacking, joyriding, and raving, activities prevalent in the youth culture.
Abstract
Certain youth activities have been subjected to criminal sanction and regulation, even though the activities may not be within the paradigms of criminology and deviance. Such activities may be viewed as examples of an affirmative cultural politics operative through inversion and appropriation technologies. These subcultural events assume the status of resistant practices, not in terms of ideology but rather in terms of dissensus. The discussion of dissensus illustrates the limitations of official methods for describing social problems and the importance of a particular series of social problems in terms of resistance. The events of computer hacking, joyriding, and raving demonstrate a transition in the nature of the boundary between fixed conceptions of right and wrong, good and bad, and order and disorder. These events may be consequences of excess within the existing system of social and economic relations. 37 notes