Welcome to Fear City - Psycho Geography

The work "Psycho Geography" came Highly Commended in the Canon/Epson Tuscana Foto Festival, Tuscany, Italy 2005.
The Mass Media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda. (Herman/Chomsky-Manufacturing Consent, PG 1)
We live in a ‘Fear Culture’: on a daily basis the tabloids report stories of murder, shootings, street attack, gang rape, and paedophilia. Our television sets disturb our evening meals with images of battered pensioners and snatched children, provoking calls for the return of Capital Punishment from the ‘armchair critics’. The Government talks about being ‘hard on crime’ then releases statistics showing a national rise- currently at 14%. Meanwhile, we are told, our prisons are overflowing.
In reaction to this, people all over the country are purchasing CCTV to protect themselves from the ‘unseen’; they have bars fitted to their properties to repel would- be intruders, and fences get higher with razor wire coils.
In the psychology of fear culture, public spaces that are happily occupied in the daytime morph into menacing arenas by night. The streetlights create alien atmospheres and take on a sinister aspect. The short walk to the car or to the home is fraught with anxiety from an invisible, lurking threat.
But are our urban spaces really as dangerous as the media portrays, are they more dangerous than say, twenty years ago, or is this bombardment of nightmare images simply another propagandist tool of control designed to aid consumerism and separatism?
Slave-unit © 2004