In August 2011, thousands took to the streets of towns and cities in England. British media referred to the events as riots; where looting and arson occurred and caused the mass deployment of police. The unrest started when a protest in Tottenham began after the death of a local who was shot dead by police. Subsequent days witnessed similar scenes emerging across England, with cases of ‘copycat violence’. It is believed that social media played a key role in organising the riots, becoming known in UK media as ‘The Blackberry Riots’ (Economist, 2011). Sites like twitter, Facebook and online messenger servers became places for sharing and providing updates of the riots and social media was blamed for the cause of the violence. But, can social media be the only cause, when such networking sites are now increasingly embedded in everyday life?
Perhaps the unrest was further enhanced by the emergence of social media, contributing to the speed and scope of unrest (Baker, 2011). But as Shaw (2011, p.2) claims, it is almost impossible to treat ‘virtual information landscapes’ and ‘physical activity landscapes’ as two spaces. Thus, the riots were characterised by hybrid space (Samara et al, 2012), which emerged due to the production and consumption of new social media, impacting upon the ‘physical’ world. New social media was used to track and find locations of emerging violence as well as rioters themselves posting updates and images of the unrest. Compared to traditional forms of rioting and protest, new dimensions of hybridity were created: blurring the binary between physical and virtual, where communication and performances occurred in and between both spaces.
This is important for geographers as it saw the creation of new ‘public spaces of representation’, in terms of public space on the street and virtually. Police used twitter to track where the riots were spreading (Crump, 2011) occupying the traditional public space of the street as well as virtual space. Were the power relations and identities between police and public performed and understood in the same way in both spaces? Or is a virtual screen facilitating the performance of a different identity and producing a different conceptualisation of power in the virtual space compared to physical spaces?
Malone (2002) draws upon how the street can be considered a stage for performance for young people, where actions contribute to the construction of ones social identity in relation to others in society. This can also be understood in terms of virtual space and how one may represent ones self online in times like protest and rioting, yet, may actually perform a very different identity in real public space when confronted with reality, like the police. This raises the question of whether the production, consumption and representation of such identities are the same in physical and virtual spaces. Both spaces are necessarily public but in what ways are the identity representations similar or different, when having access to technologies. Do young people feel that online they have ‘the power to disorder’?
Hannah Smith
- Baker, S, A. (2011) The Mediated Crowd: New Social Media and New Forms of Rioting. Sociological Research Online, Vol. 16 (4), p.21.
- Crump, J. (2011) What Are the Police Doing on Twitter? Social Media, the Police and the Public. Policy & Internet, Vol. 3 (4), pp. 1-27.
- Malone, K. (2002) Street life: youth, culture and competing uses of public space. Environment & Urbanization, Vol. 14 (2), pp. 157-168.
- Samara, R, T., Shenjing, H., Chen, G. (2012) Locating Right to the City in the Global South. Oxon: Routledge.
- Shaw, S. (2011) Space, Time and Human Activities in Virtual and Physical Spaces. [pdf] University of Tennessee. Available at: <http://mappingideas.sdsu.edu/SummerWorkshop/2011/Papers/Shaw_Position.pdf> [Accessed 10 April 2013]. p.2.
- The Economist. (2013) The Blackberry Riots, The Economist, [online] Available at: <http://www.economist.com/node/21525976> [Accessed 10 April 2013].
- Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aa_flyingwedge_plain.jpg Source: Wikimedia commons.
