Blackberry Riots

Posted by Nancy Van House on September 02nd 2011 to UK Riots,Uncategorized

These are notes I made, cutting and pasting from news reports.  Long but still worth skimming, I think, in the light of our discussion.

 

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Technology, Shared Understandings, and the UK Riots?

Posted by Nancy Van House on August 11th 2011 to about the course,UK Riots

We may use the current UK riots as a recurring case study this semester.  They raise several topics relevant to this course, and give us a concrete, real-world case to interpret through our more theoretical readings.

  • These riots are surfacing sociotechnical networks — what are we seeing?  How does an event like this make apparent what’s otherwise invisible?
  • What’s the role of technology?  Twitter, Facebook, and especially Blackberries?  Why is Blackberry suddenly at the center of these discussions:  Blackberries and the Blackberry Messenger service.
  • The UK government is talking about cutting off Twitter and Blackberry Messenger as a way of preventing riots.  Technological determinism run amuck, or a wise crowd control strategy?
  • Everyone is debating why these riots are happening. For our purposes, a key question is how the rioters have come to the shared understanding to take action, including by not exclusively via social networking.  If enough people are doing the same thing at the same time, they can overwhelm the police.  But how does this shared understanding come about?
As I write this, these are questions in progress in the UK as well as elsewhere — people are trying to explain events from many different points of view. And the events themselves continue to unfold.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2023667/London-riots-Looter-posts-photo-booty-Facebook.html

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