Communication Visibility as a Framework for Sensitive Image Research in Criminology

This chapter offers a framework for criminologists to examine the social nature of image sensitivity relative to social media. We draw on the notion of affordances in communication-and-technology (CAT) research and specifically a theory of communication visibility (CV) by Treem and colleagues (2020). CV theory integrates three dimensions of communication visibility—the activities of actors, activities of observers, and the sociomaterial environment—to understand visibility as an emergent outcome of iterative processes of presenting and perceiving. This framework, we argue and demonstrate, can be used to explain the construction of sensitive images, and the evolving criminological outcomes of these images in settings that flow on/offline. We provide empirical examples of ways to conceptualize criminological studies of sensitive visual data with the framework of communication visibility.