London's Calling

I haven't written anything about the London riots this week, largely because the subject is being covered in such intense and obsessive detail elsewhere and frankly I have nothing new or interesting to add, although I followed the coverage closely and will jabber about it a bit anyway. It was pretty surreal to hear about and see pictures of rioting in places I actually know - my family come from Lewisham and Catford in south-east London. On Tuesday night there was even a police helicopter over my house as some 'youths' in my town attempted a 'riot' (I believe they kicked over a couple of bins). It was all over in five minutes bar the cleaning-up, though, a very poor attempt at civil disobedience - it didn't even make it onto The Guardian's map of riot-stricken areas (interesting when compared to this map of child poverty in the UK, especially if you zoom in on London).

Given my recent fun with e-petitions, I was intrigued to note that the new top e-petition on the government website calls for people convicted of rioting to lose their benefits. I haven't been able to have a look at it, sadly, because the e-petitions website is continually crashing (they really need to sort that out, it hasn't been able to cope with the traffic at all).

There's also rumblings from David Cameron of a social media crackdown - he's said the government will be looking at whether it would be possible to ban people from social networking sites if they are thought to be plotting criminal activity. The government really does have a bee in its bonnet about social media - despite the fact that most of the riots seem to have been organised more through the heavily encrypted BBM (rioters are getting smarter! It warms the cockles of my heart).

It's true that they've played their role in the riots, but the same services also played a key part in organising the clean-up efforts afterwards, carried out by a demographic not so dissimilar to that of the rioters themselves. I'm pretty sure riots occurred before the invention of Twitter, and if many commentators insist that consumerism and greed (or even gangsta rap) was the sole motivation of the rioters, then it should be remembered that there are worse reasons to go on the rampage. Yes, these social media networks were used by the rioters to their advantage, but so were the good weather and the long summertime days, and no-one's suggesting that we create permanent artificial rain clouds over the houses of anyone who looks like a troublemaker. Anyone following Twitter on the nights of the riots would see that most of the relevant tweets consisted of shocked commentary, people reporting on events where they were, discussion of the media coverage, and later, talk of a clean-up. The vast majority of tweets on there were in no way a call to public disorder, at odds with their (mis)representation in a lot of the media. Hopefully Cameron's comments are just empty posturing to satisfy a public that wants to know What He's Going To Do About It.