Collective Identity

A moral panic is the intensity of feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order. According to Stanley Cohen, author of Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) and credited as creator of the term, a moral panic occurs when "condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests." Those who start the panic when they fear a threat to prevailing social or cultural values are known by researchers as "moral entrepreneurs," while people who supposedly threaten the social order have been described as "folk devils".

Moral panics are in essence controversies that involve arguments and social tension and in which disagreement is difficult because the matter at its center is taboo. The media have long operated as agents of moral indignation, even when they are not self-consciously engaged in crusading or muckraking. Simply reporting the facts can be enough to generate concern, anxiety or panic.

Cohen’s research was a departure from traditional subcultural theory – his emphasis was on the reaction to the disturbances which took place in Clacton, Easter 1964. Cohen’s work deployed a synthesis of structural and labelling theories.

• The amount of serious violence had been minimal.

• Most young people who had gone to the seaside did not identify with either Mods or Rockers.
• In short, the mass media had painted a distorted picture of events.
• This set in process a ‘deviancy amplification spiral.’ As public concern was ratcheted up, the police became sensitised to the phenomena.

The police made more arrests, the media reported more deviance, more young people readily identified with the Mods and Rockers…the initial disproportionate response of various state and media control agencies generated more, not less ‘deviance.’

• Cohen went further to say that; the media had created a moral panic; ‘a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined  as a threat to societal values and interests.’ These ‘folk devils’ constituted a threat to the prevailing social order. 

David Gauntlett - "Identity is complicated - everybody thinks they've got one"

David Buckingham - "A focus on identity requires us to pay closer attention to the ways in which and technologies are used in everyday life and their consequences for social use"