Hashtag trouble
Panic on the streets of London, panic on the streets of Birmingham, I wonder to myself, could life ever be the same again?
Well it sure as hell wasn’t the same as it was before. In a week where civil unrest came to the shittier boroughs of our cities, the media and other commentators were left flummoxed by an apparent paradigm shift in civil disorder away from people being violent in order to make a point towards people being violent in order to make off with a new 42 inch plasma telly.
The one thing that stayed the same was that people chose to riot on their own doorsteps. Bloody hell, where do these people think they are going to be able to hang about if they torch the Tennessee Fried Chicken shop?
While the media took a few days to start using the term ‘underclass’, in a concerned tone, others were ready to tag the looters as ‘chav scum’ and move on. Were it not for the fact that they started looting in the daylight hours, I’d have just tagged them as ‘Morlocks’.
The politicians took a surprisingly long time to realise that it does not look great to be on holiday at your luxury villa in Tuscany while people are rioting every night. So they came home and everyone told them they were a complete waste of space and largely responsible for all this. You could see certain politicians standing there thinking ‘yesterday I was lolling by the pool, drinking wine that cost three euros a bottle and tasted great and working on my tan. Today I am in a neighbourhood with a post code I can’t pronounce and some woman is shouting at me while a bloody news team film the whole thing.’
While everyone was looking for The Cause Of All This Unrest (probably a complicated mix of a material society, people being told they should have certain things, unreasonable aspirations driven by television talent shows, a lack of realistic aspirations, a lack of education and a lack of enough coppers to administer a bloody good beating on the first night), it was interesting to monitor the social networks, Twitter in particular.
I’ve never really looked at it before, but Twitter is a microcosm of the internet, it informs and disinforms, because tweets appear as print they have the appearance of authority but can be unsupported by any evidence, there’s a lot of good stuff on there, there’s a lot of bad stuff on there and there is a hell of a lot of dull stuff on there, but there’s also the irreverent humour that the internet does so well. How long is the appropriate delay between an event and the first jokes about that event? With Twitter, that no longer applies because the jokes are being made while the event is still happening. Best example – ‘Greggs torched, hot pies in ten minutes’.
It was also the case that rolling news couldn’t really keep up with events, they were moving so quickly. Not as quickly as the police though, who by by Thursday were moving very quickly indeed to kick chav arse.
In the end, as with so much civil unrest, it was the rain, and a few thousand extra police, that sorted the problem. Good job the chavs were too busy looting trainers to bother with the umbrella shops.
Well it sure as hell wasn’t the same as it was before. In a week where civil unrest came to the shittier boroughs of our cities, the media and other commentators were left flummoxed by an apparent paradigm shift in civil disorder away from people being violent in order to make a point towards people being violent in order to make off with a new 42 inch plasma telly.
The one thing that stayed the same was that people chose to riot on their own doorsteps. Bloody hell, where do these people think they are going to be able to hang about if they torch the Tennessee Fried Chicken shop?
While the media took a few days to start using the term ‘underclass’, in a concerned tone, others were ready to tag the looters as ‘chav scum’ and move on. Were it not for the fact that they started looting in the daylight hours, I’d have just tagged them as ‘Morlocks’.
The politicians took a surprisingly long time to realise that it does not look great to be on holiday at your luxury villa in Tuscany while people are rioting every night. So they came home and everyone told them they were a complete waste of space and largely responsible for all this. You could see certain politicians standing there thinking ‘yesterday I was lolling by the pool, drinking wine that cost three euros a bottle and tasted great and working on my tan. Today I am in a neighbourhood with a post code I can’t pronounce and some woman is shouting at me while a bloody news team film the whole thing.’
While everyone was looking for The Cause Of All This Unrest (probably a complicated mix of a material society, people being told they should have certain things, unreasonable aspirations driven by television talent shows, a lack of realistic aspirations, a lack of education and a lack of enough coppers to administer a bloody good beating on the first night), it was interesting to monitor the social networks, Twitter in particular.
I’ve never really looked at it before, but Twitter is a microcosm of the internet, it informs and disinforms, because tweets appear as print they have the appearance of authority but can be unsupported by any evidence, there’s a lot of good stuff on there, there’s a lot of bad stuff on there and there is a hell of a lot of dull stuff on there, but there’s also the irreverent humour that the internet does so well. How long is the appropriate delay between an event and the first jokes about that event? With Twitter, that no longer applies because the jokes are being made while the event is still happening. Best example – ‘Greggs torched, hot pies in ten minutes’.
It was also the case that rolling news couldn’t really keep up with events, they were moving so quickly. Not as quickly as the police though, who by by Thursday were moving very quickly indeed to kick chav arse.
In the end, as with so much civil unrest, it was the rain, and a few thousand extra police, that sorted the problem. Good job the chavs were too busy looting trainers to bother with the umbrella shops.
Labels: Crime, Social networking sites, Society
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