Perhaps the single most compelling reason for this focus is that the riots were clearly a complex phenomenon and yet the government strove to frame the rioters as criminals, “pure and simple”. This account – this public narrative – was fraught with contradictions. The rioters had to be hedonistic, wanton criminals, both driven by material greed and yet, somehow, operating wholly outside the social norms and structures that inculcated them. It was a position that had to be, at the same time, reductive and exceptional – these were ordinary acts (“criminality pure and simple”) but these were extraordinary circumstances. The judiciary, sitting through the night in specially convened court sessions, handed down extraordinary custodial sentences, as if to emphasise that there was nothing pure, simple or reductive about the behaviour (“collective insanity”). It was, in short, an ideological position to externalise the rioters, and to absolve the “societal structures that frame and condition social action” (Fuchs 2012, 388).
There is an important distinction to make here. The ideological struggle surrounding the riots is not the central concern of this thesis: it does not seek to elucidate causes, apportion blame or impose a cultural or critical reading on to the riots or the rioters. Rather, the central concern is the way that digital technology (Twitter) enabled the production and exchange of these ideological struggles – it does not examine Twitter itself as a central player within these language wars. In order to explain this position, and to outline why the UK riots are particularly important in terms of digitally-enabled meaning-making, first it is necessary to outline the key ideological arguments that the riots prompted.
Any discussion of riot-related meaning-making will have to engage with these ideological arguments, because they were so central to the mediated discourse.
According to Fuchs (2012, 386), during and after the riots, technology played a central role in this course: “Focusing on technology (as a cause or a solution for riots) is the ideological search for control, simplicity and predictability in a situation of high complexity, unpredictability and uncertainty”. Certainly, there was a close association between ideology and technology during the riots, though to suggest a mono-directional logic is possibly a misrepresentation: within David Cameron’s statements alone it is possible to distinguish between technologies of control (water cannons, CCTV cameras) and technologies of disorder (social media).
This thesis seeks to address questions about technology and public discourse during the riots. It is concerned with the functioning of Twitter – the potential for that technology to support constructive, productive meaning-making – but it is also concerned with socio-political processes and with democratic legitimacy. This second focus is important, partly because draconian punishments seemed to be levied with something approaching retributive glee, but mainly because the punishments raise vital questions about collective meaning-making during periods of acute social upheaval. It must be recalled that 2011 was a year of global mediated protest. A year that began with the politicians, academics and journalists commending protesters for using social media to challenge authoritarianism in the Arab Spring, ended with the Occupy movement, and included the UK Prime Minister proposing mass media shutdowns and
That proposition, first raised in parliament on 11 August, was founded on a false premise – that rioters were using social media tools to coordinate their looting and to evade police (P Lewis et al. 2011) – but the role of social media in the riots is still worthy of study. As demonstrated already, in large part, the established media (the newspapers and news broadcasters) performed to their traditional ideological roles (Kelsey 2012). These newspaper tropes only provide half the picture, however, because for almost the first time in the UK, the riots represented a national, social upheaval that was extensively mediated via digital communication tools.
The temporality of the riots is particularly significant in this respect. As noted earlier, Mark Duggan was shot on 4 August. On 16 August two young men were sentenced to lengthy jail terms for online riot organisation that conspicuously failed to organise any riots. It took less than a week for the first penal sentences to be handed down, often to young perpetrators and often for offences that would normally not attract any such punishment (Bridges 2012). How could it be that society at large – the citizenry, the media and the political class – was quite so prepared, quite so quickly, to condemn so many young people to jail in such extraordinary circumstances?
MEDIATED MAYHEM: THE RIOTS AS AN ACUTE EVENT
Katz (1980) defined a set of circumstances under which, he believed, audiences engaged in an intense, communal consumption of media. He called it the media event – an event that sustains the mass attention of the audience, thus replicating
the sort of collected experience that models of media fragmentation and segregation would seem to argue against (Dayan and Katz 1992, Katz 1980). There were crucial elements or conditions necessary to sustain a media event. These were: 1. live transmission; 2. preplanning; 3. framing in time and space; 4. the appearance of a heroic personality or group (i.e. there must be a central personality or group of personalities, around which a narrative can be constructed); 5. drama or ritual significance; 6. "the force of a social norm which makes viewing mandatory" (Katz 1980, 4). For Dayan and Katz (1992) these events were integrative, a co-production of broadcasters and establishments, bringing the audience together in shared meaning-making practices.
The media event was very much a genre-construction of a particular age of broadcasting – one in which technology, production values and social mores combined to generate normative viewing practices. By the early twenty-first century that age had passed and Katz and Liebes (2007) updated the genre- typology to recognise the ever greater role that disruption played in collectivised meaning-making: “media events of the ceremonial kind seem to be receding in importance, maybe even in frequency, while the live broadcasting of disruptive events such as Disaster, Terror and War are taking center stage.” (ibid 158).
The significant difference between the ceremonial (media) event and the emergent disruptive event is the absence of pre-planning – or, at least, collaborative pre-planning between broadcasters and actors. This is not to suggest that media and disruptive actors do not collaborate in the production of disruptive events, but emphasises the ‘real time’ evolution of such events –
are obvious threats to establishments, in which the organizers – the perpetrators – are an invasive force, far out of the reach of establishment control.” (ibid, 164).
Such a framing emphasises the acutely political nature of disruptive events. In an analysis that covers the September 11 terrorist attacks and US military campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Kellner (2004, 41) argues that “both Islamic Jihadists and two Bush administrations have deployed spectacles of terror to promote their political agendas”. If the live broadcasting of the September 11 attacks can be read as a new type of media event, then Kellner argues that the “media spectacle” served to “to whip up war hysteria, while failing to provide a coherent account of what happened, why it happened, and what would count as responsible responses.” (ibid 44).
According to this account, the hyper-politicisation of media coverage of the War on Terror was very much a collaboration between the media networks and different political actors promoting Manichean discourse. Under such circumstances, Kellner argued that it was better to turn to the Internet for “alternative information”: “It offers a wealth of opinion and debate, and a variety of sites… it also provides users with the potential to become literate and informed on a variety of important topics.” (ibid 59).
Kellner’s claim that the Internet can support discourse in addition (if not necessarily independent) from broadcast media during disruptive events, is surely significant. If Katz and Liebes (2007) could argue that more mobile television cameras were a significant influence in reshaping the archetypal media event, what might be the implications of a hyper-mobile media system, in
This is a dramatic reconfiguring of the mediasphere (Hartley 1996). The mediasphere is a “smaller sphere” within the semiosphereiii – it is all the “output
of the published media, both fictional and factual, on all platforms” and thus “encloses” the public sphere. “The idea is that the public sphere is not separate from but enclosed within a wider sphere of cultural meaning” (Hartley 2011, 169). Not only does the emergence of digital media add to the number and variety of platforms for publishing, it transforms access to those platforms as well (Coleman and Freelon 2015).
In a further update to the original media event concept, Burgess and Crawford (2011) defined the acute event, emphasising the increasingly participatory audience and the co-production of significant real-world events. These events, they argued, are highly mediated and frequently controversial – which drives “adjunctive conversations”, typified by “sharp peaks” in Internet discourse.
The UK riots clearly fit this genre: they were disruptive, highly politicised and extensively mediated. There was an obvious threat to the establishment, in response to which there was a “media spectacle” that favoured ideological interpretation above “coherent” and “responsible” interpretations. They also fuelled intensive Internet activity, both during the rioting itself and in the intermediate aftermath. What was the effect, though, of this emergent media type? Was the Internet any better than the national broadcast and print media at making citizens “literate and informed”? Ultimately, this is a question about discourse and democracy. Implicit in Kellner’s reading of disruptive media events is that certain types of mediation produce outcomes that are less
regression, to simplification and stereotyping. It has been shown, already, that even lengthy investigations failed to produce political consensus. Newspaper reporting was ideological and political. Is there any evidence that Internet discourse was any more productive?