Social media: Twitter, Blackberry role in London riots and Arab Spring | Excerpt from Crikey.com
London riots: the (social) media is to blame, apparently
by Bernard Keane
Wednesday, 10 August 2011
"...But as became apparent very quickly, Twitter had nothing to do with the riots. Instead, the Blackberry Messenger network was being used by rioters (it’s also used in the Middle East). While most of us thought Blackberries were last cool in about 2003, they’re cheaper than many smartphones and BBM provides a free, private internet/3G communications network accessible by swapping PINs (or, now, barcodes) and joining distribution lists. The Guardian reported an Ofcom study finding that Blackberrys are used by 37% of British teens. There’s also the continuing issue that Twitter seems to be used more by older people.
This probably explains why there was minimal warning on Twitter of the riots breaking out, even if social media was used to disseminate photos of what was going on, and even by looters cheerfully posing with their haul for Facebook photos. And it’s now being used to co-ordinate a riot clean-up campaign.
Focusing on the technology and individual applications used by rioters, or revolutionaries, is wood-for-the-trees stuff. Social technologies and platforms facilitate, rather than cause. They facilitate the logistics of organising unrest — whether it’s looting in London or peaceful protests in Cairo, because they enable communication. The platform might be public ones such as Twitter or Facebook, which are easily monitored by authorities, or they might be more private, or coded — BBM, or the dating sites that protesters in Tunisia used to organise the protests that drove out Ben Ali.
Social technologies also facilitate communities — that is, they enable people to connect up who might not otherwise have connected. This has been the important contribution of social media to the Arab Spring — as the best sociologist of social media, Zeynep Tufekci has noted “social media is best at solving a societal-level prisoner’s dilemma in which there is lack of knowledge about the depth and breadth of the dissent due to censorship and repression and a collective-action barrier due to suppression of political organisation”. It also allows the formation of strong social bonds; how strong they are compared to real-life communities remains debated, but in the Middle East they have been strong enough to inspire people to risk their lives together...."