The London riots fed by a social media monster

You would need to have lived in a cave somewhere in Wales for the riots and social media storm to have passed you by this week. With the trouble starting in Tottenham and quickly being spread across social media channels resulting in a mushroom of violence and chaos spreading across the capital and to the other major UK cities.

There is a fair debate as to what role channels such as Twitter and Facebook have played in this, and there is a large amount of scrutiny on how these media giants are treating the data they hold about the riots. A key player in this is RIM known for their Blackberry devices which provide BBM (Blackberry Messenger) and allow a would be rioter to find out about the latest riot for free.

Like a lot of the problems that we face in the UK, we are on the look out for someone, somehting, anything to blame. In truth the riots will be as multi-faceted as London already is, but there must be a sense that this lies at greed and a lack of ownership.

Instead of the adult population who do not understand social media channels and see it as evil riot inducing technology, we should start to embrace our youth through all the channels we can. If we employed some basic social media know how and scanned the groundswell for what the problems are with UK youth we might actually find out some of the answers. It is about time that we as media professionals started to take a responsible role and use tools and technology to inform our peers of what the youth are thinking and start to open lines of communication across all the channels.

The local youth centre might be shut but there is nothing stopping us inventing the virtual youth centre and rejuvenating our communities. Let’s try to use technology for social good, not eco-backslapping and profiteering.