The Audience Effect: Social Networking, Media Coverage & Perpetuation of The UK Riots

By Simon Gallagher / August 10, 2011

It no longer feels particularly appropriate to refer to the events of the past few days as the London Riots, since they have spread into other cities as opportunism and criminality meets genuine disenfranchisement in a way that will in no uncertain terms muddy or even entirely nullify the message of what was originally a movement of insurrection - so I won't. Besides, that ship has sailed, for what is now happening is nothing short of terrorism - the unjust terrorism of the larger populus by a motivated, mobile minority who have little to lose, thanks to disenfranchisement or basic malevolence, define it whatever way you will. But I'm not here to explore the whys and wherefores, I will leave that for now to other arenas. But what I will say is that the rioters are now being enabled and entitled to commit whatever lawless act they like by those who continually refer to them as protesters, or say they have motivation other than the wanton destruction of property and eventually life. What needs to be remembered is that as soon as a so-called "activist" turns his or her attention on their fellow man, under the flimsy guise that they somehow represent the imagined "institution", they abandon their right to be called anything other than criminal. But again, I'm not here to go into who the insurgents are. What bothers me most at this point is the willingness of the majority of commenters and by-standers to tolerate the actions of the minority rather than making a stand and helping to stop what is happening. That does not mean necessarily physical confrontation, as that can only lead to further escalation, but rather a more uniformed show of solidarity, an active rather than passive outrage to say that we will no longer tolerate what the unruly minority are forcing us to endure. And if we look at the mass responses to the riots, we can begin to suggest why this hasn't yet been the case across most of the areas that have been affected, other than in a minority of cases. If you look at Twitter, and the major news networks since the events of Thursday and the spiral of self-sustaining violent behaviour that followed, the major response has been one of passive disgust - a majority of voices proclaiming the events to be heinous who are largely unwilling to do anything about it. Like the politicians and political commentators who are currently being berated for appearing on TV in order to state that they don't condone the violence (making them effectively personified tautologies), we Twitterers and the media are quick to use the vocabulary of the outraged and oppressed, but thanks to the nature of both as predominantly entertainment platforms, they are effectively empty sentiments. So far, the media response to the events of the past few days has been that of an eager scavenger suddenly introduced to a predator who is leaving them the juiciest of scraps to feed off. As long as the BBC and Sky News continue to stand to the side, filming and clucking their disgust and moral outrage while still offering the sensationalist footage, the situation will continue. Sensationalism is of course a difficult thing to swerve, because it is what drives all information industries to a certain extent - in fact I have agonised far longer over the inclusion of photos in this article than I took writing it (and we have already published articles that trade off the current climate) - but moral commitment and community service must trump it in these situations. Which is why I hope the images I chose have no glorification element. Here is a case in point. On the BBC's own News pages, there is a featured interview with two young-sounding female rioters who offer their thoughts on the actions, and what they hope to achieve personally. Needless to say, they do not come across in a particularly good light - they are the carelessly chosen mouth-pieces of a movement that has nothing to do with them - and what is worse is the BBC's willingness to be complicit in their agenda by giving it the validation of an on-air interview. The tone of that interview is also woefully skewed towards entertainment, and it is not only the self-confessed looters who come off badly, but also the news reporter and her agency who seem to value the exchange in purely entertainment terms. We as the audience are not necessarily complicit in their actions, but our inaction and our willingness to accept the victims of their crimes as somehow different to us (a safety net it would be hard to shake in any situation thanks to the intricacies and contradictions of human nature) is just as damning. Because we are perfectly willing to digest these interviews, and push them to the top of the Most Listened chart on the BBC website, our relationship with them is primarily as an entertained audience, rather than a victimised wider community. And while it is fully understandable that there is some perverse voyeuristic appeal to viewing that sort of material, it is still hugely irresponsible journalism to present it as part and parcel of the appropriate, intellectual response to lawless "insurrection". Surely the BBC, who have now featured multiple interviews with rioters across their many platforms should be held accountable for giving them an arena to show off? Such coverage is the extrapolation of the modern disease of total, supposedly unbiased news coverage and of news as entertainment to a dangerous extent. And unless we are all willing to turn off that coverage or seek a better alternative (a surely impossible agenda as long as that type of coverage still remains), our complicity to being only the audience will supersede the correct response of feeling victimised. The unfortunately negative role of social networking (which is probably the more appropriate terminology here than social media) cannot be underestimated here either. What appears at first to be an opportunity for community and collective response - which in itself would be an appropriate response - is undermined by the majority of responses who are instead more interested in either positioning themselves once more as a passive audience, or perpetuating wayward opinions that eventually accomplish the same thing. As long as there are a number of tweeters who insist that the riots of other areas are a continued response to the trigger event and the underlying social tensions that sparked the original, justified insurrection, we cannot hope to move away from passive reaction. Whether we agree with the trigger or not, to idly sit back and agree with such false philosophy is the same as holding a microphone under the masked face of a looter - both actions inherently accept that the criminal has some legitimate agenda. Not only that, but we are currently in a very specific historical moment, an information revolution where social media, smart phones and mass access to information streams of every sort converge to mean that the Exclusive has become currency in a way that was never before available to the audiences who devour that information. Everything worth seeing these days is done so through the screen of an iPhone, to share with friends and wider online communities (which I personally think pollutes the magic of the moment), so capturing footage of criminality to share is a far more rewarding exchange than refusing to accept what is happening and making even a moral stand against it. Eventually all of that captured information will be used to seek and capture some of the looters and those behind the other criminal activity, but that doesn't hide the fact that it was primarily captured to satiate both the voyeuristic intrigue of the film-maker and also the hunger for Exclusive, outrageous new material of the implied audience who it will inevitably be shared with. Together, and with the added effect of bystanders merely watching criminal activity unfold beside them without ever looking like they'd prefer it didn't happen we are stuck in the position of all-too-willing audience. This is the audience effect, and the most damaging ripple effect of that is that we do not feel part of the victimised community who are suffering at the hands of the looters and rioters. We look at their broken businesses, burned livelihoods and mournful faces in pictures online, in newspapers and in footage designed to morbidly entertain us on the news, and we are encouraged to empathise without recognising that we are in fact in the same position as they are. While their suffering is more explicit, and their loss more calculable, we should feel just as broken because an attack on one is an attack on all - that is the appropriate response of a community. But because we are an audience first, and a community second, that reaction does not immediately occur. Obviously that distinction carries a lot of significance, given the circumstances of the trigger events that caused the original "uprising" on Thursday and I am fully aware of the irony of suggesting that the audience effect implicitly suggests the dilution of the standards of community that are fundamental in the preservation of the cornerstones of society. But it is one thing for those community values to be destroyed by poverty, perceived governmental oppression or disenfranchisement, and another entirely for them to come as a result of willingness to be audience above victim. The most dangerous result of the audience effect is that the rioters are propelled into a position of misplaced power - their actions are implicitly designed to draw attention (notice they keep mentioning showing the police, or the government what they can do) and the act of providing them an audience vindicates, at least for them, their attention-seeking. Unfortunately an audience is exactly what a proportion of the rioters are seeking: and the fact that the mainstream media are interviewing them, as if they have something important to say is futile and increasingly ridiculous. No matter how idiotic their responses, or how badly they show themselves up to the huge viewing figures, it is the exchange between them and their audience that matters most to them. Just as justified protesters seek an audience because it validates their quest to move from powerlessness to power, so too the rogue, criminal rioter seeks an audience to validate their own action. And the longer we allow them to crow on television the longer they will feel perversely jusitifed in seeking that attention. So as long as we all sit around, outraged and continue to feed our despicable collective voyeuristic needs, through social media commentary and the inappropriate media coverage, we cannot in any way hope to end the situation. Stop accepting that these atrocities are happening to someone else, because we are all within the wider community that is being terrorised - all we achieve through categorising the victims as somehow different to us is to inherently explicate our own willingness to be victimised. Do not get me wrong, I am not suggesting for one minute that the appropriate action is civil war. But as long as we continue to establish a passive community audience we are merely fuelling the fires. If we refuse to be victims, we cannot be made to be. It is in that context that I read yesterday morning of the #riotcleanup hashtag on Twitter - an attempt to swerve the grimness of the #LondonRiots lead to the discovery - and therein lies the hint of a saviour, and also the other result of the unification that social networking inherently encourages. Those who took to the streets yesterday and will today, and who set up the entire community response are to be heartily commended - in their hands and their actions, and most importantly in their refusal to be victims, we see the spirit of community that might be lacking elsewhere. That is the flip-side to the community effect of Twitter, and as long as we engage with those sorts of movements, social networking can still have a positive place in event response. It is a shame however, that these riots will likely be historically remembered as perpetuated by social networking as opportunists used BBM and Twitter to arrange meet-ups and looting runs, when frankly that perpetuation was a far more communal activity. What can no longer be condoned at all though is the idea of news coverage as a passive platform for entertainment focused content, which has little value other than the disruptive influence of creating a removed voyeuristic dynamic in its audience.