This dissertation examines the performative uses of media in violent actions like school shootings throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As mass mediated space has become increasingly participatory - with the advent of social media and consumer technologies that support such social uses - American and global cultures have shifted to increasingly allow for "authenticity" and experience to be validated through their mediation. In the literature on school shootings there has been a missing "X factor" that points to the rise of electrified celebrity culture as a factor in the shape that school shootings have taken. This dissertation works to explain that nexus and relies heavily on performance studies, media studies, disaster studies, and studies of popular culture to explain the relationship between cultural and media shifts throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and the earliest decade of the twenty-first century. School shooters are early adapters of social media and the notion of "mashup," where the border between producers and consumers is highly permeable in mass mediated space. As a result, school shootings in American and European contexts are been examined here through a lens in which they are constituent of an assumed social agency and efficacy derived from the emphasis placed on media presence and its role in validating individual and collective experience in mediated societies.
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