Scandal in a Digital Age

This book explores the way today’s interconnected and digitized world--marked by social media, over-sharing, and blurred lines between public and private spheres--shapes the nature and fallout of scandal in a frenzied media environment. Today’s digitized world has erased the former distinction between the public and private self in the social sphere. Scandal in a Digital Age marries scholarly research on scandal with journalistic critique to explore how our Internet culture driven by (over)sharing and viral, visual content impacts the occurrence of scandal and its rapid spread online through retweets and reposts. No longer are examples of scandalous behavior “merely” reported in the news. Today, news consumers can see the visual evidence of salacious behavior whether through an illicit tweet or video with a simple click. And we can’t help but click.

Hinda Mandell is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Rochester Institute of Technology, USA. She researches news coverage of scandal, and her essays on the topic have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Boston Herald, Palm Beach Post, Politico, and in academic journals, including Women’s Studies in Communication, Visual Communication Quarterly, and Explorations in Media Ecology.Gina Masullo Chen is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism at The University of Texas at Austin, USA. She spent twenty years as a newspaper journalist and her research focuses on the influence of digital media on civic, political, and social engagement. Her work has been published in academic journals, including Communication Research, New Media & Society, and Computers in Human Behavior.>