The Destructive Frames of Social Behavior: Anthropological Analysis of the Columbine Ideology

Abstract

The results of a complex research on the Columbine phenomenon, which was conducted by the authors in 2020-2021 in Tatarstan, became the basis for the writing of the article. Adolescents and young people aged 13 to 23, who share the values of the Columbine subculture, became the object of the research. The study was carried out in a concept of interpretive sociology and the theory of frames, with the use of qualitative methods such as frame analysis to monitor the open groups in social networks and select the informants, as well as the method of focused interview. The total number of theme groups, in social networks such as VKontakte and Telegram, that were included in the monitoring was not less than 50. Furthermore, 25 interviews were conducted with members of Internet groups in Kazan and Naberezhnye Chelny. The aim of the research was to analyze the impact of framing narratives of the subculture on the personal and group attitudes of the participants in the general context of conflict risks of social interaction. In this article, the authors tried to analyze the nature of the relationship between the virtual environment and the real social space on the example of a well-known destructive subculture, which received the official status of a terrorist movement in Russia in 2022. The causal and latent motives for adolescents, as well as youth representatives getting involved in Columbine communities, were considered. Situations and factors that form misanthropic imperatives were typologized. It was suggested that there are successive stages of indoctrination that cause psychological and social transformations of the individual. A method for identifying participants in the subculture with a high degree of involvement to prevent possible destructive acts was proposed. The presented research contributes to modern socio-anthropological knowledge in terms of critical analysis of existing subcultural practices aimed at de-humanizing social space and manifests the value of protecting human-centric values and dignity of the individual.