Karen G. Weiss is Professor of Criminology in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at West Virginia University. She is the author of Party School: Crime, Campus and Community.
""Crime Gone Viral provides a much-needed framework for evaluating how digital technologies impact victims, offenders, and witnesses. Karen Weiss navigates this landscape through a brilliant typology of digital witnesses: the Samaritan, the Voyeur, and the Vigilante. This triad encourages us to critique digital responses to crime and to recognize that we are all witnesses to, and responsible for, the behaviors we encounter in digital spaces. When interwoven with case studies of violence and trauma, grief and justice, Weiss encourages the reader to confront the guardianship of witnessing crime in our contemporary media environment. For anyone interested in the intersection of technology, justice, and the changing nature of the public sphere, Crime Gone Viral is an essential map of our shared roles as witnesses and the need for robust responses in the digital world. This is essential reading for anyone wanting to ensure that digital spaces become a forum for authentic justice rather than viral trauma. In an era where witnessing is immediate, networked, and permanent, Weiss challenges us to rethink what it means to see, and to respond, in a digital society."" - Gregory Stratton, co-author of Digital Criminology: Crime and Justice in Digital Society