The revolution of 'word of mouth': the role of social media in the UK riots

On Monday evening I went for a stroll in South London. I saw a group of around 40 to 50 teenagers hanging around my local shopping centre.

I watched as several teenagers began pelting a police van protecting a block of flats above some shops. Other teenagers joined in and cars began mounting the pavement to get out of the way of young people throwing objects in the street.

I began my retreat. I'm not qualified to address the deeper underlying social, cultural and economic forces at the heart of the discontent being criminally expressed by young people in the capital and other cities in the UK.

But I would like to comment on the much discussed role of BlackBerry Messenger, Twitter, Facebook and 'social networking sites' in the riots and the aftermath. Recently lauded for aiding political change in the Middle East and North Africa, these communication tools have been demonised for their role in the riots in the UK.

BlackBerry, which has received most attention, felt it was necessary to issue a statement in response to claims that its Messenger service was fuelling the looting. The company also said it would help the police with their (no doubt numerous) enquiries.

It is interesting that Twitter users have been trying to reclaim these communication tools as a benevolent force in society by encouraging people to help clear up the mess. A Twitter feed called @riotcleanup was started and #riotcleanup began trending as the campaign gained interest and volunteers.

Of course, these communication tools are neither inherently good nor bad, but they do make a difference.

The riots and the attempts to galvanise a positive response are the two faces of the fundamental changes in the ease of group communication and coordination.

As Clay Shirky notes in his book Here Comes Everybody:

"It used to be hard to get people to assemble and easy for existing groups to fall apart. Now assembling latent groups is simple, and the groups, once assembled, can be quite robust in the face of indifference of even direct opposition from the larger society.

"When it's hard to form groups, both potentially good and bad groups are prevented from forming; when it becomes simple to form groups, we get both the good and the bad ones."

Twitter, Facebook, BlackBerry Messenger enable individuals to send one-to-many messages in real-time from their mobile phone, meaning it is not only easier to form a group, it is easier to form 'a group of groups' which is necessary for large protests and riots.

The ability to communicate to groups of people easily and on a regular basis is more powerful than previous incarnations of 'word of mouth' technologies. Prior to a revolution in communication technology, word of mouth usually involved one-to-one communication (telling a friend, telephone).

Even when word of mouth was one-to-many (lecture, talk, megaphone at rally) people still had to be physically close to you to listen to you. So people had to have already organised themselves through another act of communication to be near you to hear the message.

That's a far less efficient way to communicate and to form groups than the 'word of mouth' tools we have today which allow us to talk to groups of people who are not physically present.

This phenomenon goes some way to explaining the ease with which groups of young people can emerge, disperse and re-organise in various areas of London and cities around the UK in such large numbers.

It also means that, rather than paying more attention to the role of communication tools in the riots, we should probably be paying far less.

If the barriers to forming a group, in terms of communication, are so low and uncontrollable, then we will see more groups of people and more fluid groups of people than before.

In turn, more focus will have to be paid both to the causes of a group's formation and effective responses to the activities of a group which has already been formed.

So it's time for me to stop writing on a subject which is more important than it should be. I'm going to try to find out why a group of teenagers are burning down buildings and looting shops around the corner from me, and ways in which the problem can be tackled. Perhaps you'd like to join me.