ABSTRACT

Retail crimes in post-apartheid South Africa have transformed consumer views about malls from safe, pleasurable havens into dangerous spaces embedded with varying degrees of fear and anxiety. Malls are marketed as gated microcosms implementing constant surveillance and security measures, which are aimed at keeping shoppers safe and criminals at bay. When crime intersects this space, it drives a variety feelings and sentiments about what malls ought to represent as a secured territory. This article explores how anxious comments made about retail crimes by a public on social media (Twitter), tends to be less about how armed robberies threaten personal safety, and more about how criminality is implicated as an 'inconvenient' disrupter towards daily shopping rituals. These public concerns are only the tip of the iceberg and an entry point into a broader discourse suggesting that anxiety is ideological: it has political functions. By publicly tweeting about mall robberies, these shoppers lean in towards sentiments associated with apartheid's segregating policies, which symbolically appropriates mall security as a necessitated rite towards maintaining malls as spaces of exclusivity in a country attempting to foster equality.

摘要

种族隔离后的南非的零售犯罪已将消费者对购物中心的看法从安全，愉悦的避风港转变为充满不同程度的恐惧和焦虑的危险场所。商场作为封闭的缩影进行营销，这些缩影实施了持续的监视和安全措施，旨在使购物者的安全和犯罪分子保持隔离。当犯罪与这个空间相交时，它会引起人们对购物中心应作为安全区域代表的各种感觉和观点。本文探讨了公众在社交媒体（Twitter）上对零售犯罪的焦虑评论，倾向于较少涉及武装抢劫如何威胁人身安全，而更多地涉及犯罪如何牵涉到日常购物习惯的“不便”破坏者。是意识形态的：具有政治功能。通过公开发布关于购物中心抢劫的信息，这些购物者倾向于与种族隔离政策相关的情绪，这象征性地将购物中心安全视为在试图促进平等的国家中将购物中心维持为排他性空间的必要仪式。