If you haven't heard about the UK "riots" by now you must be living under a rock in the sea or something. I say "riots" rather than riots because the majority of criminal behaviour taking place is just looting and not rioting. The majority of rioters are in their teens, some still at school, what do they really have to riot about? I find that this question is being circled around the internet but nobody has a clear answer but there are educated theories, sociological guesses and complete mindless explanations. As usual I have my own opinion of why such things are going on. I'll warn you now that this is only an opinion and I'm not discrediting anyones opinion as such. It's a theory that can be constructively criticised, the reason being that nobody has actually asked the rioters WHY they went looting.
Taking a bit of a detour here, but yesterday morning I foolishly travelled into Birmingham to go shopping for a friend's birthday, I agreed to the trip on the say so of the news, apparently town was open up for business and everything was safe. Shops were open alright, but police were just everywhere and the town seemed pretty dead. Shops started closing up at around 2:30pm so we started to head back home so that we were safe. On the bus home I started to think about WHY the riots were taking place, this was just something to take my mind off what my friends were saying and other bad news. I soon saw a possible relationship with the media and also moral disengagement.
There are many theories stating that the riots happened because job centres closed or a Marxist explanation can be given, i.e. political battle of the social classes. I kind of discredit this as the majority of the looters have been described as being in their teens, young teens at that, even children have been looting in their own towns this week. We also know that the majority of looters were also from working and lower class backgrounds, meaning that they're likely to have low IQ scores (this might sound harsh of me, but would someone with a decent IQ go out looting? probably not). Taking this into consideration to what extent do these people have political knowledge? and do politics really matter to them? Also, most of the looters are school age, so why loot / riot because of the closure of job centres? This makes no clear sense.
Back to my media-based theory! I think that the riots in London were real riots for real reasons (but with that said I've still heard no explanations as to why the first riot took place). I think that once the first few riots hit the news, that was it, World War III. The media portrayed the riots in the light that the police's behaviour was wrong and there wasn't much that police could do, not many arrests were made. The media also gave a host of uninformed explanations as to why the riots happened in the first place, and made these reasons seem very rational (to teenagers at least). This is where moral disengagement pops into my explanation: because the media portrayed rioting and looting as an acceptable thing to do youngsters took advantage of this and decided that it was morally justifiable to go out and cause trouble on the streets. They could easily shift the blame and also blame the victims (the victims being business owners, home owners and the police .... they get the blame because they're middle / upper class and most probably tory [which is an ill informed opinion held by teenagers by the way]). The act could be seen as dehumanised as everyone was doing the same, dressed in similar clothes, they're no longer individuals when they're in the large mob. I suppose taking each mechanism in term and even applying group theory I could go on forever with my explanation, but this is just the theory that popped to my head during in the thinking time I had yesterday. But what I'm trying to say is that teenagers heard about the trouble happening elsewhere and decided to take advantage and take the opportunity to cause trouble while it seems morally acceptable and justifiable.
A lot of people are saying that social media is to blame for these riots. As a cyberpsychologist you would probably expect me to have an opinion on this ... and I do. I'm probably saying this for the 1,000th time but you can't blame social networking websites for bad things that go on. Take for example, teenagers self-harming or even committing suicide because of cyberbullying. You can't blame the particular social networking site being use here for the suicide attempt. The social networking website is just being used as a platform for communication, hence the teenager could have been bullied via text message or in a face-to-face situation with the same psychological effect. What I'm trying to say here is that social networking websites are nothing but platforms for communication, riots could have been organised through other means of communication such as text messaging, phone calls and even email if you want to add an online platform to this. I suppose one advantage of informing people about planned riots in a public domain is that there is increased anonymity online, but even then you could stick posters around wearing a hood and a face mask, or even do a bit a graffiti, hence you could do that using an offline platform too. The majority of the riots were planned using Blackberry Messenger, which is private and pretty much like texting using an internet connection rather than a mobile phone signal. So, you can't really blame social media.
However, I'd argue that social media did help in enhancing public moral panic. The media alone wouldn't have caused so much moral panic, Facebook statuses and Tweets about the events possibly made people feel more worried than they would have been otherwise. Also, individuals circling rumours probably didn't help. This could have also happened via other communication channels but it's the fact that the internet connects the world!.
It's really bad what has happened in the UK over the past week and I have deep sympathy for those who have had their businesses or homes trashed. I advise you to "Keep Calm and Carry On", be careful but don't let the threat of violence ruin your plans.
Most of all: Stay Safe
- Jodie x
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