10 challenging perspectives on social media & the Vancouver riots

A number of psychological factors are working together that turn good ole “Johnny” into out-of-control trouble-maker. Most importantly are a trio of concepts.

Emotion contagion: This is known as the emotion that gets triggered in a crowd and spreads like wildfire…During the Vancouver Olympics, the nationalistic euphoria seen among the people in the streets was the good side of the coin.  Last night, we saw the bad.  Once the first match was lit, the mob mentality was set in motion.

Deindividuation: This happens at almost every sporting event.  When you dress up in team gear, wear face paint, and so on, you lose your sense of self and become part of a greater identity….The role of anonymity in crowd behavior cannot be underestimated.  Self-awareness and personal identity get lost and get replaced with identification with the goals and actions of the group.

Bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility: It might sound counter-intuitive, but the larger the crowd, the less of a chance that someone will intervene.  People think to themselves “someone else will step in” and, ironically, this leads to everybody doing nothing to stop whatever social norms/laws are being broken.

— Bobby Brooks, Vancouver Riot: Psychology (not Hooligans) Responsible for the Chaos

People keep saying that the people responsible for the destruction and violence do not represent Vancouver. Well, guess what? They do now. Next time someone wants to hold a big outdoor celebration–they’ll represent us. Next time someone applies for a liquor license–they’ll represent us. Next time those of us who have viable ideas about how to make this No Fun City a city to be proud of–the jerks taking pictures of themselves in front of burning cars and looting stores will be speaking for us. And I for one really, really resent that.

— Morgan Brayton, Dear Hooligans

The more powerful camp is the positive social movement that formed, almost immediately, towards healing the city. By midnight on the night of the riot citizens had self-organized to commit to clean up downtown….I believe this is the most powerful group because these actions were:

• spontaneous: happened instantly without any leader
• networked: the response arose from multiple places at once
• non-rational: cleaning a city isn’t my job; what good will art do
• and ultimately they served a unifying purpose that brought us closer together

This response sprung naturally from people transmuting the anger we felt into love and action, using art and social media as the expression engine. This is the signature of a social movement.

— Jason Mogus,Social media builds or diminishes community, our choice

Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act forbids the mainstream media from printing any image or information that might serve to identify an alleged – or convicted – young offender. But the courts have never had much luck applying those laws to the Web, or to citizen vigilantes. What are the odds, and the dangers, that youths who are entitled to protection under Canada’s law could lose that right in these circumstances? Or that they already have? …

But there’s another, subtler, point here. We are already under surveillance much of the time in this country, from private and police security cameras. Since 9/11, many of our traditional attitudes towards that culture of surveillance have shifted, so that we positively seem to welcome being under Orwellian observation. But now, is that surveillance culture going to permeate our social media networks as well?

— Paula Simons, Who Will Watch the Watchers?

I see nothing to suggest that mutual surveillance will erode community, indeed, I think it already has demonstrated that it does the opposite. Mutual surveillance fosters lots of communities – from communities that track human rights abuses, to communities that track abortion providers to communities that track disabled parking violators. Surveillance builds communities, it may be that, in many cases, those communities pursue the marginalization of another community or termination of a specific behaviour, but that does not make them any less a part of our society’s fabric. It may not create communities everyone likes, but it can create community. What matters here is not if we can monitor one another, but what ends up happening with the information we generate, and why I think we’ll want to think hard about what we allow the state to do and to permit others to do, more and more carefully.

— David Eaves, Social media and rioters

At the conventional level of moral development, there is a reliance on the State to take care of all law and order and other human welfare concerns.  Equally, nonaction is explained by it “not being my responsibility”, and action explained by “my ‘boss’ told me to do it.”  Only in post-conventional moral development do we see individuals, like Romeo Dallaire, seeking to act independently.  When asked, they almost always respond that they felt they had no choice because it is the right thing to do.  These are the heros that stop bullies and massacres and are whistleblowers and hide Jews and do all manner of independent action.

— Laura Mogus, commenting On the dangers of crowdsourced surveillance

There are dangerous social consequences that we cannot yet imagine when we shamelessly take justice into our own hands. Scarier still, is the ferocity with which seemingly rational and intelligent individuals will bare their teeth upon another in an open digital forum – and this is not some  online platform of yesteryear where angryman2011 and lonelygirl666 are having it out amidst the comfort of anonymity- this is fucking FACEBOOK. Our grandparents are on Facebook and so is our little cousin.

— Scott Valentine, The Vancouver Riots & Social Media: When The Cart Gets Put Ahead Of The Horse

Social media is about relationships, and for better or worse it leads inevitably toward an accelerated imposition of the (connected) crowd’s “will” onto a situation. In this case, the “connected crowd’s” favored punishment for those causing damage to other persons and property. Unsurprisingly, there is little latent support for such irresponsible behavior given the absurdity of the conditions under which it arose, hence people were especially quick to react in opposition to it.

The dynamic we are observing is predictable and perhaps it’s more interesting to view it in the broader context of what social media is doing to individuality, etc. Does the raw speed at which things happen in social media make people react differently than they would in similar contexts but with classic channels of communication?

– Julio Rodriguez, commenting on
After a Loss in Vancouver, Troubling Signals of Citizen Surveillance

Offering legal consideration, however, is what marks us as a civilized society. Even where the evidence is overwhelming, we don’t rush to judgment. We take our time. We make sure we have as much of the evidence as possible before charges are laid and we give the accused every chance to get legal representation. Journalists working in the traditional media are trained to take all this into account in preparing their stories for public consumption….In the social media, where everyone is a publisher, the rules can break down.

— Daniel Henry, Is it illegal to name and shame rioters online?

While the reaction of social media users to identify and shame alleged rioters is unsurprising this doesn’t mean that the practices should go unchallenged or left free of critique. The actions taken to identify, name, and shame alleged rioters is the beginning of a slide towards a state of mind and looseness of ethics that have been proven to cause harm abroad: I see no reason, based on those experiences, why we should import known, failed, modes of citizen surveillance and investigation into the Canadian experience.

— Christopher Parsons, Vancouver’s Human Flesh Search Engine