Published Online: Jun 06, 2014
Page range: 3 - 16
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2014-0001
© by Liv Hausken
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This essay investigates forensic fiction as a trend in televised crime fiction and argues that this trend or subgenre is particularly interesting if we are to understand how surveillance is portrayed in contemporary society. The essay looks particularly into an extremely popular example of forensic fiction, namely CSI and its two spin-offs CSI: NY and CSI: Miami. Through a discussion of the conceptions of knowledge, crime and power, which seem to come forth in the three CSI series, the present article argues that the particular blend of technological optimism, positivism and moralism that can be witnessed in forensic fiction in general, and in CSI in particular, is important to understanding how popular culture lends a certain normalization of surveillance to everyday life