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Politics/Science article by Shuvra Mahmud.
Some four days after the initial riots in London in early August 2011, around 10,000 additional police officers have been deployed across the city, while trouble has been flaring in other cities across the country. UK Prime Minister David Cameron on 10 August 2011 warned that sustained police measures (including water cannons) would be deployed to curb rioters, looters, and arsonists alike.
The August 2011 riots in England can be seen through many lenses and be explained by theories from several disciplines. Some politicians and experts have argued in varying measures that socio-political disenfranchisement from free market, conservative social and economic politics; bereavement at the current state of the domestic economy; anarchism/hooliganism/criminality; and a host of other factors contributed to the spreading riots. However, these sociological, political, and economic factors are not enough to explain the phenomenon that has been dubbed the UK's first 'networked riots'.
Our Information Society is characterised by the normalisation of communications technologies (such as the ones used to propagate messages and 'organise' rioters) like mobile phones, Blackberry Messenger software, micro-blogs (Twitter), social networking wesbites (Facebook), games networks (Sony's PlayStation network), into our daily lives. So it is no surprise that the youth of Britain, weaned on increasingly ubiquitous technology and communications networks, have used what they know best and use the most to communicate with their social networks. This is 'modernisation' and a trend that is unlikely to alter direction as hardware and software converge with social acceptance and our fundamental human desire to keep in touch. The very means by which we are able to keep in touch with our friends, relatives and colleagues, we can deploy to organise protests, riots, and even clean-up operations.
Aside from the underlying social grievances, political disenfranchisement, and economic deprivation and beyond the use of ubiquitous communications technologies, are psychological factors that help individuals to create and identify with new norms to justify their actions. Shared perception of inequality and injustice is a major factor during the preliminary stages of any collective action. The mass media and communications technologies enable mass and targeted propagation of messages that resonate with people's perceptions of equality and justice.
It has been argued by some, including prominent British politicians, that the medium term economic decline and attempts by a largely conservative, free market driven coalition government to tackle this has led to an increase in the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Some thinkers have argued that distinctions between class and social status have been made ever more apparent by the economic crisis of late. On 10 August 2011, the governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King announced that the country's central bank will cut its UK growth forecast for 2011 from 1.8 per cent to about 1.5 per cent, warning that the "headwinds are growing stronger by the day". King warned that we may have to cope with this dire situation for "a number of years", given that "the imbalances in the world economy are still not being properly tackled and the burden of debt is still there".
For the individual's perception of inequality to develop into actual empathetic feelings, these feelings need to be validated by those of other people - enabling a shared sense of social identity. Similarly, there needs to be a degree of confidence amongst the group that collective action will deliver changes (efficacy).
News reports have shown that a vast majority of rioters, particularly in the capital London, were aged between 15-25 years - commonly referred to as 'the youth'. Although economic indicators show that many young people in Britain are set to be in a worse economic position than their parents, it is unlikely that poor socio-economic conditions played a significant role in the social identity formed by initial rioters in London in August.
The rioters did not act as a cohesive collective, but rather as individuals driven by rational choice for personal gain or credibility. In fact, 'Western' 21st-Century society is built largely around consumerism (to drive economies that provide social services) and is characterised largely by individualism and meritocracy, rather than romantic notions of 'Eastern' collectivism and social responsibility.
Instead, anthropological terminology is perhaps more appropriate for explaining the wider rioter behaviour, particularly that of youth groups, or tribes. The use of closed Blackberry Messenger networks and gamer networks indicate that individuals were already a part of non-kin groups with their own shared social identities, collective history, and future expectations. But while traditional tribes, composed largely of kins, compete for limited resources either against or in cooperation with other tribes in a largely limited communication environment, today's youth tribes are embedded within a networked society that enable individuals to maintain their own sense of individuality (and in fact encourage it), while remaining connected to the wider network. Individuals have the freedom of choice over whether to and how to participate in social activities, and for what gain - which, in the case of rioters in England was not for more democratic political representation, such as that called for by participants of recent protests in the Middle East, but for consumer goods.
Assuming that an individual's identity is dynamic and contingent on the wider environmental and social context. It is possible to argue that networked individualism and a shared social identity were the mechanisms behind the unrest in England. It would help explain to some extent the use of closed social networks and the looting (as opposed to calls for social justice). Therefore, it is unlikely that rioters were deliberately targeting 'the Middle Class', as one academic put it, "It's like a kind of class warfare on the streets of Britain" (New Scientist, 10 August 2011). This view is perhaps a reflection of middle class perceptions of the youth in Britain. In November 2008, a survey by UK-based YouGov, commissioned by children's charity Bernardo's, found that half of the 2,021 adults interviewed felt children were increasingly a danger to others and "behave like animals".
In 2007, a year before the YouGov survey, a UNICEF survey of 21 nations found that despite living in the fifth richest country, the youth of UK experience some of the worst levels of poverty, regard themselves as less happy, and drank more alcohol, took more drugs, and had more underage sex than their comparative demographic overseas.
Meanwhile, other observers have argued that the deterioration of relations between communities and the police have played a significant role in the recent unrest, which the police have labelled the worst disorder in living memory. In fact, the riots first flared on 7 August 2011 after a peaceful protest in Tottenham, north London over the fatal shooting of 29-year-old Mark Duggan by police. It may or may not be the case that the relationship between the police and minority communities have deteriorated, but given recent government announcements of job cuts of around 12,000 in the police force, reporting indicates that the relationship between the police and the government are at an all time low. However, although this may be a wider underlying factor, the relationship between the police and the UK's youth have not been reported to be in any crisis.
Lecturer in Forensic Psychology at the University of Kent, Eduardo Vasquez, told New Scientist on 10 August that the alienation the participants feel from their families, from local communities, and from society in general, prevents them from caring about the harm they cause others. Vasquez told the UK-based science magazine that combating this will require us to target negative influencers and to challenge collective perceptions of social injustice. But the problem is in identifying influencers, let alone the so-called negative influencers, and in propagating a message of empowerment and hope in light of an socio-economic crisis that is expected to last a number of years yet. In fact, Vasquez warns that austerity measures, such as budget cuts, will impact negatively on initiatives focused on the youth, and lead to more social issues.
Although the very nature of modern society's interconnectedness will enable it to absorb much of any social discontent. In what form that dissatisfaction is manifest remains to be seen, but one thing is almost certain: the force behind any calls for change will be the British youth.
Some four days after the initial riots in London in early August 2011, around 10,000 additional police officers have been deployed across the city, while trouble has been flaring in other cities across the country. UK Prime Minister David Cameron on 10 August 2011 warned that sustained police measures (including water cannons) would be deployed to curb rioters, looters, and arsonists alike.
The August 2011 riots in England can be seen through many lenses and be explained by theories from several disciplines. Some politicians and experts have argued in varying measures that socio-political disenfranchisement from free market, conservative social and economic politics; bereavement at the current state of the domestic economy; anarchism/hooliganism/criminality; and a host of other factors contributed to the spreading riots. However, these sociological, political, and economic factors are not enough to explain the phenomenon that has been dubbed the UK's first 'networked riots'.
Our Information Society is characterised by the normalisation of communications technologies (such as the ones used to propagate messages and 'organise' rioters) like mobile phones, Blackberry Messenger software, micro-blogs (Twitter), social networking wesbites (Facebook), games networks (Sony's PlayStation network), into our daily lives. So it is no surprise that the youth of Britain, weaned on increasingly ubiquitous technology and communications networks, have used what they know best and use the most to communicate with their social networks. This is 'modernisation' and a trend that is unlikely to alter direction as hardware and software converge with social acceptance and our fundamental human desire to keep in touch. The very means by which we are able to keep in touch with our friends, relatives and colleagues, we can deploy to organise protests, riots, and even clean-up operations.
Aside from the underlying social grievances, political disenfranchisement, and economic deprivation and beyond the use of ubiquitous communications technologies, are psychological factors that help individuals to create and identify with new norms to justify their actions. Shared perception of inequality and injustice is a major factor during the preliminary stages of any collective action. The mass media and communications technologies enable mass and targeted propagation of messages that resonate with people's perceptions of equality and justice.
It has been argued by some, including prominent British politicians, that the medium term economic decline and attempts by a largely conservative, free market driven coalition government to tackle this has led to an increase in the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Some thinkers have argued that distinctions between class and social status have been made ever more apparent by the economic crisis of late. On 10 August 2011, the governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King announced that the country's central bank will cut its UK growth forecast for 2011 from 1.8 per cent to about 1.5 per cent, warning that the "headwinds are growing stronger by the day". King warned that we may have to cope with this dire situation for "a number of years", given that "the imbalances in the world economy are still not being properly tackled and the burden of debt is still there".
For the individual's perception of inequality to develop into actual empathetic feelings, these feelings need to be validated by those of other people - enabling a shared sense of social identity. Similarly, there needs to be a degree of confidence amongst the group that collective action will deliver changes (efficacy).
News reports have shown that a vast majority of rioters, particularly in the capital London, were aged between 15-25 years - commonly referred to as 'the youth'. Although economic indicators show that many young people in Britain are set to be in a worse economic position than their parents, it is unlikely that poor socio-economic conditions played a significant role in the social identity formed by initial rioters in London in August.
The rioters did not act as a cohesive collective, but rather as individuals driven by rational choice for personal gain or credibility. In fact, 'Western' 21st-Century society is built largely around consumerism (to drive economies that provide social services) and is characterised largely by individualism and meritocracy, rather than romantic notions of 'Eastern' collectivism and social responsibility.
Instead, anthropological terminology is perhaps more appropriate for explaining the wider rioter behaviour, particularly that of youth groups, or tribes. The use of closed Blackberry Messenger networks and gamer networks indicate that individuals were already a part of non-kin groups with their own shared social identities, collective history, and future expectations. But while traditional tribes, composed largely of kins, compete for limited resources either against or in cooperation with other tribes in a largely limited communication environment, today's youth tribes are embedded within a networked society that enable individuals to maintain their own sense of individuality (and in fact encourage it), while remaining connected to the wider network. Individuals have the freedom of choice over whether to and how to participate in social activities, and for what gain - which, in the case of rioters in England was not for more democratic political representation, such as that called for by participants of recent protests in the Middle East, but for consumer goods.
Assuming that an individual's identity is dynamic and contingent on the wider environmental and social context. It is possible to argue that networked individualism and a shared social identity were the mechanisms behind the unrest in England. It would help explain to some extent the use of closed social networks and the looting (as opposed to calls for social justice). Therefore, it is unlikely that rioters were deliberately targeting 'the Middle Class', as one academic put it, "It's like a kind of class warfare on the streets of Britain" (New Scientist, 10 August 2011). This view is perhaps a reflection of middle class perceptions of the youth in Britain. In November 2008, a survey by UK-based YouGov, commissioned by children's charity Bernardo's, found that half of the 2,021 adults interviewed felt children were increasingly a danger to others and "behave like animals".
In 2007, a year before the YouGov survey, a UNICEF survey of 21 nations found that despite living in the fifth richest country, the youth of UK experience some of the worst levels of poverty, regard themselves as less happy, and drank more alcohol, took more drugs, and had more underage sex than their comparative demographic overseas.
Meanwhile, other observers have argued that the deterioration of relations between communities and the police have played a significant role in the recent unrest, which the police have labelled the worst disorder in living memory. In fact, the riots first flared on 7 August 2011 after a peaceful protest in Tottenham, north London over the fatal shooting of 29-year-old Mark Duggan by police. It may or may not be the case that the relationship between the police and minority communities have deteriorated, but given recent government announcements of job cuts of around 12,000 in the police force, reporting indicates that the relationship between the police and the government are at an all time low. However, although this may be a wider underlying factor, the relationship between the police and the UK's youth have not been reported to be in any crisis.
Lecturer in Forensic Psychology at the University of Kent, Eduardo Vasquez, told New Scientist on 10 August that the alienation the participants feel from their families, from local communities, and from society in general, prevents them from caring about the harm they cause others. Vasquez told the UK-based science magazine that combating this will require us to target negative influencers and to challenge collective perceptions of social injustice. But the problem is in identifying influencers, let alone the so-called negative influencers, and in propagating a message of empowerment and hope in light of an socio-economic crisis that is expected to last a number of years yet. In fact, Vasquez warns that austerity measures, such as budget cuts, will impact negatively on initiatives focused on the youth, and lead to more social issues.
Although the very nature of modern society's interconnectedness will enable it to absorb much of any social discontent. In what form that dissatisfaction is manifest remains to be seen, but one thing is almost certain: the force behind any calls for change will be the British youth.
